Karen Davis, PhD, President, UPC United Poultry Concerns
October 2018
If there is one trait above all that leaps to my mind in thinking about chickens and watching them in our sanctuary yard among the trees and bushes, or sitting quietly together on the porch, it is cheerfulness. Chickens are cheerful birds, and when they are dispirited and oppressed, their entire being expresses their despondency. The fact that chickens become lethargic or “hysterical” in barren environments, instead of proving that they are stupid or impassive by nature, shows how sensitive they are to their surroundings, deprivations, and prospects. Likewise, when chickens are happy, their sense of well-being resonates unmistakably.
Chickens in a battery cage, Esbenshade Farms, Mount Joy, Pennsylvania.
Photo by: Zoe Weil.
From Forest to Farmyard to Factory Farm
In the eighteenth century, the New Jersey Quaker John Woolman noted the
despondency of chickens on a boat going from America to England and the
poignancy of their hopeful response when they came close to land. Behind
them lay centuries of domestication, preceded and paralleled by an
autonomous life in the tropical forests of Southeast Asia and the rugged
foothills of the Himalayan Mountains. Descendants of the ancestors of
domesticated chickens, known as jungle fowl, continue to occupy their
forests homes, even as the forests are being eroded, in part to grow crops
for chickens on factory farms.
Chickens are creatures of the earth who no longer live on the land in
numbers anywhere near the countless billions of chickens locked in factory
farm buildings virtually everywhere on earth. If there is such a thing as
“earthrights,” the right of a creature to experience directly the earth from
which it derived and on which its happiness depends, then chickens have been
stripped of theirs. They have not changed, but the world in which they
evolved to live has been violated for human convenience against their will.
Chickens were the first farmed animals to be permanently confined indoors in
large numbers in automated systems based on genetic manipulation for
food-production traits and reliance on antibiotics and drugs. In the
twentieth century, the poultry industry in the United States became the
model for animal agriculture throughout the world.
Broiler Industry magazine noted in July 1976, “Nearly every
boatload of settlers that came to the New World in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries brought with it at least a few chickens.” Chickens and
other farm birds were raised in towns and villages as well as on farms, and
many city people kept them in back lots. In 1930 the average number of
chickens for the three million reporting farms in the United States was
twenty-three. Before World War II, women were the primary caretakers of
poultry in the United States. Early poultry extension programs aimed at
appealing to farm women, but as poultry-keeping changed from a small farm
project to a major business enterprise, it wasn’t long until, as one woman
put it, “my” flock became “our” flock and ultimately “his” flock.
Since the 1950s, factory-farmed chickens have been divided into two distinct
genetic types – “broiler” chickens for meat production and laying hens for
egg production. Battery cages for laying hens – identical units of
confinement arranged in rows and tiers – and massive confinement sheds for
“broiler” chickens came into standard commercial use in the 1940s and 1950s.
By 1950, most cities and many villages had zoning laws restricting or
banning the keeping of poultry, a pattern that facilitated the decline of
breeding “fancy” fowl for exhibition in favor of breeding “utility” fowl for
commercial food production. Poultry diseases proliferated with the growing
concentration of the confined utility flocks that kept getting bigger. As a
result, traditional poultry-keeping and poultry shows came to be viewed as
potential disease routes, similar to current claims that chickens kept
outdoors spread avian influenza viruses. Then, as now, under the direction
of the United States Department of Agriculture and its counterparts around
the world, an increasingly intricate system of voluntary “sanitation,”
medication, and mass-extermination practices was established to protect the
poultry industry from the problems the industry itself created.
Following World War II, the system known as vertical integration replaced
earlier methods of chicken production. Under this system, a single company
or producer, such as Tyson Foods, owns all production sectors, including the
birds, hatcheries, feed mills, transportation services, medications,
slaughter plants, further processing facilities, and delivery to buyers. The
producer engages small farmers known as “growers” to supply the land,
housing, and equipment, look after the chickens, and dispose of the waste:
the dead chickens and manure-soaked wood shavings known as litter. In this
way, a major capital investment along with the burden of land and water
pollution is shifted to the growers.
The treatment of chickens in modern food production is surpassingly ugly
and cruel. The mechanized environment, beak mutilations, starvation versus
overfeeding procedures and methodologies for mass-murdering birds raise
profound and unsettling questions about our society and our species. An
argument that is used to silence opposition to the cruelty imposed on
factory-farmed chickens is that only “happy” chickens lay zillions of eggs
or put on a ton of breast muscle in their infancy. In fact, chickens do not
gain weight and lay eggs in inimical surroundings because they are
comfortable, content, or well-cared for, but because they are manipulated to
do these things through genetics and management techniques that have nothing
to do with happiness, except to destroy it. In addition, chickens in
production agriculture are slaughtered at extremely young ages – laying hens
at a year and a half old, “broiler” chicks at six-weeks old, and the parent
flocks under two years old – before diseases and death have decimated the
flocks as they would otherwise do, even with all the drugs.
Notwithstanding, millions of chickens die each year before going to
slaughter, but because the volume of birds is so big – over 40 billion
“broiler” chickens and 6 billion laying hens worldwide each year – the
losses are economically negligible. Productivity is an economic measure
referring to averages, not the well-being of individuals. Many more birds
suffer and die on factory farms than on traditional farms relative to their
numbers, but the amount of flesh and number of eggs is much greater on the
industrial scale.
Chickens are not suited to the captivity imposed on them to satisfy human
wants in the modern world. Michael W. Fox, a veterinary specialist in
farmed-animal welfare, states that while chickens and other factory-farmed
animals may sometimes appear to be adapted to the adverse conditions under
which they are kept, on the basis of their functional and structural
breakdowns in the form of multiple manmade diseases, “they are clearly not
adapted.”
“Broiler” Chickens
Already by the 1980s, “broiler” chickens (the large, rapidly-growing and
heavily muscled white chicks under 6 weeks old bred specifically for meat)
weighed four pounds at eight weeks old – more than 40 times their original
hatching weight. The U.S. Department of Agriculture bragged that if human
beings grew that fast, “an eight-week-old baby would weigh 349 pounds.” A
study published in 2008 said that the growth rate of these chickens had
increased “by over 300 percent” in the past fifty years, resulting in
“impaired locomotion and poor leg health.”
Modern chicken house in the United States (Delaware). Photo by: David
Hart.
It isn’t only their legs. Poultry scientists in the 1990s warned that
chickens “now grow so rapidly that the heart and lungs are not developed
well enough to support the remainder of the body, resulting in congestive
heart failure.” But uncaringly, the poultry industry continues to increase
the size and growth rate of these deeply troubled birds. At a meeting in
2014, a company executive raved that “average big bird weights have averaged
8.2 to 8.6 pounds, with nearly a dozen companies producing birds over 9
pounds.”
Chickens in nature weigh barely a pound in the first two months of life. The
effects of the “human controlled evolution” of chickens bred for the meat
industry are described in a 2013 article in International Hatchery Practice.
Andrew A. Olkowski, DVM and his colleagues state in “Trends in Developmental
Anomalies in Contemporary Broiler Chickens” that chickens with extra legs
and wings, missing eyes and beak deformities “can be found in practically
every broiler flock,” where “a variety of health problems involving
muscular, digestive, cardiovascular, integumentary, skeletal, and immune
systems” form a complex of debilitating diseases. Poultry personnel, they
say, provide “solid evidence that anatomical anomalies have become
deep-rooted in the phenotype of contemporary broiler chickens.”
An example is a breast muscle myopathy described in 2018 as a worldwide
phenomenon. Called “wooden breast,” this condition manifests a biological
impairment in “broiler” chickens so severe that the birds’ breasts develop a
hard wood-like texture involving necrosis, fibrosis, and macrophage
infiltration relating to the cardiopulmonary system’s inability to supply
capillary blood to the bird’s massively growing breast muscle, which, as a
result, hardens and dies.
Ulcerative and necrotic diseases in agribusiness chickens are endemic.
Femoral head necrosis occurs when the top of the leg bone disintegrates as a
result of bacterial infection, oppressive body weight, and oxygen deficiency
in the contaminated chicken houses that exacerbate the birds’ pre-existing
pulmonary pathologies. Necrotic enteritis involving the bacterial agent
Clostridium perfringens shows intestines swollen with gas, oozing putrid
fluid, and full of ulcers. Gangrenous dermatitis, a skin disease, affects
the legs, wings, breast, vent, abdomen and intestines of the birds as a
result of toxins emitted by Clostridium perfringens in conjunction with
exposure to immunosuppressive viruses in the chicken sheds.
The 600-foot-long windowless metal sheds the chickens are raised in can be
seen lined up and clustered together in rural areas. Inside the sheds,
30,000 or more young chickens sit in a swirl of disease microbes, carbon
dioxide, methane gases, hydrogen sulfide, nitrous oxide, lung-destroying
dust, ammonia fumes, and particles of feathers and skin suspended in the
air. The ammonia fumes rise from the decomposing uric acid in the chickens’
accumulated droppings.
The National Chicken Council’s Animal Welfare Guidelines allow
atmospheric ammonia in the sheds as high as 25 parts per million, even
though 20 ppm burns the eyes, skin, and respiratory tracts of the chickens
and weakens their immune systems by being absorbed into their bloodstream.
Trying to ease the pain, afflicted birds rub their heads and eyelids against
their wings. The skin on their stomachs and legs ulcerates in the ammoniated
manure they are forced to sit in, and respiratory illnesses are chronic and
ubiquitous.
The lighting in the chicken houses is kept dim so that the birds will move
only to eat, drink and sit down again, in order to accelerate their weight
gain. To a person standing in the doorway of one of these buildings – as I
have often done on the Eastern Shore of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia,
where at any given time over half a billion chickens are confined – they
resemble, as a journalist in the U.K. wrote, “a sea of stationary grey
objects.”
At the slaughterhouse the chickens are torn from the transport crates and
hung upside down on a movable rack. As they move toward the automated knife
blades, they are dragged face down through an electrified water trough
designed to slacken their neck muscles and contract their wing muscles for
proper positioning of their heads for the blades and to paralyze the muscles
of their feather follicles so that their feathers will come out more easily
after they are dead. The word “stun” for this process is inaccurate, as the
birds are rendered neither unconscious nor pain-free, but are electrically
shocked while fully conscious, a fact described in the poultry science
literature since the 1980s.
Millions of birds are conscious and breathing not only as their throats are
cut but afterward, when they are plunged into the scald water tanks to
loosen their feathers. In the scalder, according to former Tyson employee
Virgil Butler, “the chickens scream, kick, and their eyeballs pop out of
their heads.” The industry calls these birds “redskins” – birds who were
scalded alive. In recent decades, various “stun/kill” methods of gassing the
birds in mixtures comprising CO2, argon, nitrogen and oxygen have been
experimented with and adopted in some slaughter plants. Decompression
chambers have also been tried. Proponents claim these methods are less
cruel. Compared to being tortured with electrical shocks, this is probably
true.
Parent Flocks
The chickens raised to produce the mechanically-incubated eggs that become
“broiler” chickens are called “broiler breeders.” Male and female chicks are
kept separate for five months, at which time they are brought together in
houses holding 8,000 to 10,000 birds with ten or twelve roosters for each
100 hens. Their eggs are taken away, so the parents never see their chicks.
Roosters are routinely culled (killed) for infirmity and infertility, and
because “if a particular male becomes unable to mate, his matching females
will not accept another male until he is removed.” Little more than a year
later the birds are sent to slaughter.
Left to eat unrestricted, the roosters and hens become so large and disabled
that they cannot mate properly or even move without pain. To curb these
effects, broiler breeder chickens are kept in low light on semi-starvation
diets. Typically, a whole day’s food is withheld every other day starting
when the birds are three weeks old. When the food is restored, the chickens
rush pitifully to the feeders and gorge themselves. On days without food,
they peck compulsively at spots on the floor and at the air and try to drink
more water to compensate for their emptiness, but since more water results
in wetter droppings, their water is limited leaving the chickens with
nothing to do but suffer.
Parent flocks are plagued with disorders including an aberrant aggression by
the roosters toward the hens attributed to the birds’ impoverished
environment, food frustration, and genetic malfunction including the fact
that chickens bred for meat have been bred to become sexually mature at
three months old instead of the normal six months, so that halfway through
their infancy, adult sex hormones are driving them without the
neurobiological maturity of an adult bird. In addition, the rooster’s body,
legs, and feet are too big for the hens who are themselves abnormally heavy,
disproportioned, and slow moving and have thin, easily torn skin, and
nowhere to go. “Spent” breeder hens we’ve adopted into our sanctuary in
Virginia have arrived with large patches of raw bare skin and ragged
feathers. The soft tuft of feathers that protects their ears is missing,
exposing the ear hole, which does not happen in healthy young chickens
living a normal life.
“Egg-Laying” Hens
The formation of eggs in birds is a complex biological activity based on the
absorption of a specific combination of nutrients in the presence of light.
A foraging hen knows how to select the calcium and other nutrients she needs
to synchronize her laying cycles with the cycles of nature. Sunlight passes
into her eye, sending a message to her brain, which in turn sends its own
message to the anterior pituitary gland which produces a hormone that causes
the ovarian follicle to enlarge. The ovary generates the hormones that
stimulate the processes required to form an egg, the purpose of which in
chickens, as with all birds, is to renew each generation via the natural
mating of hens and roosters.
Chickens in battery cages at Weaver Brothers Egg Farm, Versailles, Ohio.
Photo by: Mercy For Animals.
In the twentieth century, the small and lively leghorn hens of
Mediterranean descent were forced into metal cages stacked and lined in
buildings farther than the eye can see through the haze of pollutants. An
article in Egg Industry magazine explains that prior to the 1960s,
flocks of 250 to 10,000 birds were kept on floors in houses where feeding,
watering, and egg collection were done by hand. In the 1960s, a “great cage
debate” arose among breeding companies, poultry professors, building
designers, and equipment manufacturers over what types of facilities to
invest in for the future. The cage system prevailed, with the result that by
the 1970s, buildings were being constructed for flocks of 30,000 hens. By
the 1980s such buildings were enlarged to hold 50,000 to 120,000 hens in
wire cages.
In the 1980s, egg producers abandoned single-standing buildings for
complexes “where you could put a million layers or more on a single site,
then connect the houses by a common corridor and an egg belt, with all the
egg production flowing into a single processing and packing plant.” The
switch to these interconnected building complexes led to the now standard
operations in which 150,000 to 400,000 hens are confined in a single
building with two to five million debeaked hens imprisoned at one location.
Genetics, lighting, and chemicals have combined to produce a hen capable of
laying 250 to 300 eggs a year, in contrast to the one or two clutches of
about a dozen eggs per clutch laid in the spring and early summer by her
wild relatives. Genetic selection for premature egg-laying cuts the cost of
feeding and housing pullets for six months while creating many problems,
including the formation of eggs that are often too big for the body of a
five-month-old hen, causing her uterus to protrude, inviting infection and
vent picking by her cell mates. Egg-laying is further manipulated by forcing
the hens to sit under artificial lights designed to mimic the longest days
of summer. The U.S. industry “corrects” the ovarian breakdown that results
from these harsh practices by starving or semi-starving the hens for days
and weeks at a time in the process known as forced molting. This is done to
“rejuvenate” the hens’ reproductive systems for a few more months of
egg-laying before slaughtering the survivors or gassing them to death.
Originally, each hen had 48 square inches of cage space, and undercover
investigations indicate that many still do. The U.S. lobbying group United
Egg Producers stated in the 1980s that an average of “48 square inches per
bird or 12 square inches per pound of bird liveweight is adequate.” A hen
requiring 74 inches merely to stand, with a wingspan of 30 to 32 inches,
could be legally confined with five or ten other hens in a cage too small to
stand up in let alone to spread her wings, preen, or turn around.
Criticism in Switzerland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom in the 1970s spread
to the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. By the late 1990s, growing
animal-welfare concern prompted United Egg Producers to commission a
committee to develop recommendations that set housing standards by 2008 at
67 square inches of space per hen for white hens and 76 square inches for
the slightly larger brown hens, to be increased to 86 square inches in 2017.
Similar standards were set in Canada and the European Union. In 2008 the
European Commission reaffirmed a 1999 directive banning the barren cage
system by 2012. Unfortunately, the ban allows so-called enriched cages. An
“enriched” cage has a tiny perch, a nest box made of plastic or something
else, and maybe a sprinkle of sand or wood shavings. If anything, the
enriched cage system, which has also been adopted to an extent in the United
States, makes the already negligible “henitentiary” inspections even more
daunting – a situation Clare Druce describes in her devastating book
about the poultry and egg industry, Chickens’ Lib: The Story of a
Campaign. It was Clare and her mother, Violet Spalding, who launched the
crusade on behalf of battery-caged hens in the early 1970s, exposing the
cruelties of the British and European governments, including the Church of
England and a business run by nuns, who claimed that their thousands of
debeaked hens “sit in their cages all day long and sing.”
In 2008, a ballot measure in California won the support of 63 percent of
voters believing the measure would ban cages in the state by 2015. However,
the law did not actually require California egg producers to eliminate cages
for the state’s 20 million hens, but was crafted instead to make cage
systems more difficult to maintain. Welfare promoters assumed that under the
new law, producers would switch to “cage-free” housing, in which thousands
of hens are enclosed in single-floor units or in multi-tiered buildings with
platforms designed to crowd more hens into the volume of space, enabling
producers to make more money from the facility.
As a result of the law’s ambiguity, California egg producers have continued
keeping the majority of hens in battery cages both barren and “enriched.”
Consequently, a new voter initiative is set for the November 2018 state
ballot stipulating that after certain dates, cage-free hens must have a
square foot of living space per hen, or a foot and a half depending on
whether the facility is single-floored or multi-tiered. Compared to living
in a tiny metal cage, a hen in a cage-free facility must surely suffer less,
but “cage-free” does not mean cruelty-free for birds who yearn to be
outdoors all day digging in the soil, sunbathing, dustbathing, perching in
trees, running around and socializing as they please. Having run a sanctuary
for rescued chickens since the 1980s, I’ve watched their natural interests
and behaviors revive and flourish under the influence of fresh air, sunshine
and the earth under their feet.
In my visits to several “cage-free” operations in Pennsylvania and Virginia,
I’ve witnessed the sadness and madness of these places, including the
deafening voices of thousands of distressed hens and the hopeless dreariness
of their lives. The owner of The Happy Hen in Pennsylvania joked about the
ragged condition of the hens’ feathers: “We have a saying: The rougher they
look, the better they lay.” The owner of Black Eagle farm in Virginia
smirked when we mentioned the industry practice of killing “spent” hens by
shoving them into metal boxes and hosing them to death with carbon dioxide
(CO2): “I think it freezes their lungs.” This is true. The carbon dioxide
burns, freezes, and asphyxiates the hens, who mean nothing to their owners.
Since roosters don’t lay eggs, more than 6 billion male chicks are trashed
by the global egg industry each year as soon as they hatch in the mechanical
incubators. Upon breaking out of their shells, instead of being sheltered by
a mother hen’s wings, the newborns are ground up alive, electrocuted, or
thrown into plastic-lined trash cans where they slowly suffocate, peeping to
death as a human foot stomps them down to make room for more chicks.
Chickens Anthropomorphized
Agribusiness practitioners dismiss farmed animal advocates as
“anthropomorphic.” By this they mean that the advocates have a sentimental
vision of farmed animals in contrast to the utilitarian function they serve.
In reality, most advocates I’ve known for more than thirty years want farmed
animals to live according to their nature, instead of being configured to
mirror the human desire to farm and consume them.
While sentimental anthropomorphism can be a risk, anthropomorphism based on
empathy and careful observation is a valid approach to understanding other
species, including chickens. Inferences about their emotions, interests, and
desires rooted in our common evolutionary heritage are different from
imposing alien patterns on them for purely utilitarian purposes. The
treatment of chickens bred for human consumption exemplifies utilitarian
anthropomorphism at its worst. Chickens are severed from all human sympathy
and connectedness with the natural world while simultaneously being
subjected to a set of verbal, bodily, and housing constructions designed to
reflect only what the exploiters want to extract from them.
To the poultry industry, chickens are divisions of labor either piling on
flesh or churning out eggs. Rhetorically, they are characterized as
“broilers,” “fryers,” “layers,” “roasters,” and other dissociative marketing
labels. Industry officials cultivate the idea that they care about “animal
welfare,” but do so in a way that ensures public ignorance and complacency.
While accusing animal advocates of anthropomorphism for saying that sick
chickens mired in filth are miserable, they will turn around and tell you
the chickens are “happy” and call their brand of anthropomorphism “science.”
Over the years, arguments for surgically or genetically altering chickens in
the name of “better welfare” have been made. Everything from beak mutilation
to breeding featherless chickens to clamping big red plastic lenses in their
eyes to starving them and de-braining them and de-winging them and blinding
them has been proposed and carried out in poultry research laboratories and
commercial settings on the grounds of “improving welfare” for birds who are
stripped of every right to fare well.
The Future
Some people believe we are moving in the direction of “humane meat” and
“animal-friendly” agriculture as the public becomes better informed about
the realities of factory farming. However, a decline in animal factories
cannot happen as long as billions of people consume animal products.
Moreover, undercover investigations of “humane” poultry farms have exposed
the same misery, filth, neglect, and diseases as in the more massive
operations. At the very time experts are calling animal agriculture “one of
the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious
environmental problems, at every scale from local to global,” analysts are
predicting the doubling of the global farmed animal population as the planet
continues to overpopulate with human beings.
The good news is that animal-free eating gets easier all the time as more
and more people seek healthy, delicious vegan food products and restaurant
dishes. As a result of today’s culinary technology and entrepreneurial
investment, people are increasingly enjoying animal-free textures and
flavors without worrying about the health issues linked to animal
consumption and the fact that poultry is the number one cause of foodborne
illnesses in the world.
Whenever I tell people stories about our sanctuary chickens, many become
very sad. The pictures I’m showing them are so different from the ones
they’re used to seeing of chickens in a state of absolute, human-created
misery. Many people are surprised to learn that chickens have personalities
and will. My experience with chickens for more than thirty years has shown
me that chickens are conscious and emotional beings with adaptable
sociability and a range of interests, intentions, temperaments, and
affections.
From rotting in cages to roosting in branches, former battery hens enjoy
life at United Poultry Concerns. UPC Sanctuary Photo by: Susan Rayfield.
If there is one trait above all that leaps to my mind in thinking about chickens and watching them in our sanctuary yard among the trees and bushes, or sitting quietly together on the porch, it is cheerfulness. Chickens are cheerful birds, and when they are dispirited and oppressed, their entire being expresses their despondency. The fact that chickens become lethargic or “hysterical” in barren environments, instead of proving that they are stupid or impassive by nature, shows how sensitive they are to their surroundings, deprivations, and prospects. Likewise, when chickens are happy, their sense of well-being resonates unmistakably.
Karen Davis, Ph.D., is the President and Founder of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl, including by providing a sanctuary for chickens in Virginia. Inducted into the National Animal Rights Hall of Fame for Outstanding Contributions to Animal Liberation, she is the author of Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry and other groundbreaking books and articles about the plight and delight of domestic fowl.
This article was originally published on Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Advocacy For Animals.
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