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Chapter 6.4 Chickens
The Most Numerous Bird in the World People have made the chicken the most numerous bird in the world - for cheap human food (see the table below: Chicken Numbers Worldwide). The treatment of chickens is a staggering moral issue, a relative microcosm of inhumanity to animals, flying in the face of the Five Freedoms of Animal Welfare (see Chapter 6). A precise count of the number of chickens and eggs worldwide is impossible. Therefore figures on this page are rounded to avoid spurious accuracy and totals do not add up precisely. Furthermore, chicken and egg numbers generally increase annually and therefore these figures are minimum figures. However, they give an idea of the vast numbers of farmed chickens.
 Types of Chicken Almost all chickens in the world are factory farmed. The four categories of factory farmed chicken are:
Male and female chickens slaughtered to eat a few weeks after hatching. Hens made to lay up to 300 eggs in a year. After 12 months they are worn out and slaughtered. Normally a hen would lay only a few eggs per year.Breeders are mainly females and breed more broilers and egg-layers. They are slaughtered after about a year. A male chick hatches for every female chick. They are not wanted because they do not lay eggs, are killed soon after hatching and sold as fertiliser, pet food and cheap human food.
Numbers and Slaughter Worldwide There are over 50 billion farmed chickens worldwide: broilers, egg-layers, breeders and male chicks. All are killed shortly after hatching or after about one year. Thus people kill 50 billion chickens every year.
Chicken Background People bred the domesticated chicken from the red junglefowl (Gallus gallus) of south-east Asia (above graphic). Chickens are now one of the most numerous birds on Earth and one of the most popular, cheapest and widespread human meats.
Most farmed chickens before the 1940's scratched about outdoors in small free-ranging flocks and people ate them only on special occasions. Then the new invention of refrigeration emerged as a factor that changed poultry farming. Refrigeration prompted the mass raising of chickens to slaughter for the market. Just a few of the world's business companies produce most broilers.
Highly intensive industrial-scale farming (factory farming) developed as the most efficient means of producing maximum output of chickens for minimum cost.Egg production also transformed itself into a highly specialised industry. A red junglefowl lays 12 to 20 eggs a year. The chicken industry breeds domestic hens each to lay nearly 300 eggs a year. Broilers At least 40 billion broilers are alive in any one year. Three countries produce over half of them: US, China and Brazil. Worldwide the number of broilers increases by about a billion per year. Broiler Production Male and female broiler chicks hatch in massive automatically run hatcheries. They are then transferred to huge broiler sheds. Litter such as wood shavings or cu t up straw, cover the shed floors. Feeding, watering, lighting, temperature control and ventilation are automatic.
The broiler industry has a three-fold method of mass-producing chickens cheaply for the supermarkets: massing, growth and speed. "They cannot roost at night, dust-bathe to clean themselves, feel sunlight, breathe fresh air, build a nest, raise their young, or even freely stretch their wings, let alone exercise or roam." Miyun Park. In Defence of Animals - the second wave. Peter Singer (ed). 2006:176.Providing welfare is impossible with so many birds, so poultry workers kill sick chickens if they find them. But the dead and the dying birds easily go unnoticed and the living birds tread decomposing birds into the litter. No one cleans out the shed, so the litter turns increasingly foul by accumulating faeces and decomposing bodies. The end use of this broiler shed litter is fertiliser scattered on farmland or compressed into pellets and sold as garden fertiliser. Workers clear out the sheds for the next batch of chicks when broilers reach six to seven weeks of age. They may accomplish around six batches of broilers per year. Health Industrial conditions trouble broilers with many disorders and diseases. Among the health problems are that hearts and lungs suffer, unable to keep pace with rapid body growth, and leg bones growing more slowly cannot support their heavy body weight. Weakened chickens cannot reach food and water and die of starvation and thirst. Millions of broilers die every year before they reach their allotted six weeks of age. Broilers in these conditions also pose a threat to human health. For example, bacteria that cause food poisoning in humans, such as Salmonella, are common in broiler chickens. Transport Farm workers grab birds by a leg and, holding several per hand, cram them into cages. They load cages by the thousand onto lorries. For the chickens, broken bones, dislocations, bruises, pain and distress are common. They must endure considerable distances, exposure to extremes of heat, cold, thirst and suffocation. Many birds do not survive the journey.
Slaughter Workers at slaughterhouses spend all their time hanging chickens upside down on a moving chain that carries chickens to automated slaughter and packing. Hanging upside down is extra painful for birds with injuries from their housing or transport..
The chickens' heads pass into a tank of water that electrically stuns them. The moving chain carries them in turn to an automatic neck-slashing blade, a tank with scalding hot water to loosen feathers and a plucking machine to remove feathers. No other sentient species suffers tens of billions slaughtered every year
Some birds may squirm in pain, raise their heads, miss stunning and go consciousness to neck-cutting. Or they may recover consciousness while bleeding to death.Finally an automatic machine cuts off the chickens' heads and more machines slice their bodies open and remove their innards. Bodies go to refrigeration units for the supermarkets. Heads, organs and feathers are disposed of or turned into meal to feed other animals. Egg-laying Hens and Eggs Well over 6 billion egg-laying hens produce over a trillion eggs annually. China is the biggest producer and the US is the second largest producer. See the graphic at the top of the page.
The following table is a snapshot of the rough number of egg-laying hens in the top five egg producing countries for the 2010's. When added to the rest of the world the worldwide total comes to about five billion hens. Data are from a number of sources and rounded to avoid spurious accuracy. According to Poultry International, worldwide egg production increased by 24% between 2008 and 2018 (www.poultryinternational-digital.com).
Data from various sources.Breeders The job of breeding the vast numbers of broilers falls to the breeding birds. These are huge flocks. Annually 60 million breeders in the United States and six million breeding chickens in Britain, for example. The system does not allow breeding hens to mother chicks. They simply lay the eggs which are then transferred to incubators to hatch. The systems selectively breeds breeder chickens to pass on a rapid growth rate to their offspring. The breeders themselves grow rapidly so need a lot of food to keep them going. However, if breeders ate as they would like they would die from over eating. So they are fed an inadequate diet and live in a constant state of starvation. Breeders are usually housed in poor conditions, like their offspring, and suffer similar diseases and injuries. Their egg production declines after one year and they go for slaughter. They end up in low quality meat products, such as pies and soups. Male Chicks For every female chick in the egg-laying industry there is a male chick. But male chicks are unwanted and must be eliminated. So neck dislocation or decapitation follows for male chicks soon after hatching; or for very large numbers poisoning by carbon dioxide (CO2) gas or mashing alive in a mechanical mincer. Thus for every billion hens, a billion male chicks must die. They go into animal feed, pet food, cheap human food and fertiliser.
Sources Livestock and Poultry: World Markets and Trade. United States Department of Agriculture. The Statistical Reference for Poultry Executives, Watt Executive Guide to World Poultry Trends. www.WATTAgNet.net. ›› To Entries & Home |
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