Faster, cheaper, sicker

Chicken meat has never been more abundant, but as what cost to the birds? Joyce D’Silva’s organisation is challenging the breeders through the courts

Forty years ago, when chicken meat was still a luxury, fewe than 8 billion broilers a year were consumer worldwide. This year some 49 billion chickens will reach our tables, while out in the factory farms chickens are being hatched, grown and slaughtered with ever increasing speed to meet the escalating demand for lean protein and fat profits. There is a hidden cost to this, and it is paid by the chickens themselves.

Three decades ago it took nearly three months to grow a broiler chicken to an average slaughter weight of 2 kilograms. This year, a typical fluffy day-old chick will be ready for slaughter after just 41 days – and the commercial imperative is to reduce this by a day a year. One wonders where the cut-off point will be. More immediately, where is all this faster growth coming from, and what is it doing to the animals?

For the answers, we need to look not at the notorious confinement practise of the industrial ‘factory’ farming – though these do create scandalous welfare problems – but a far more insidious practice: extreme selective breeding.

In recent decades, genetic selection of breeding animals for greater productivity (profit, in other words) has given us dairy cows producing 10 times as much milk as their calf would drink, double-muscled beef cattle so large that caesarean births are the norm, chickens growing so fast that their bodies give way under the metabolic strain. Yet because the breeding techniques are labelled ‘conventional’, as opposed to ‘GM’, they have so far escaped intense scrutiny. This could be about to change.

Last month, the international campaigning group that I direct, Compassion in World Farming (CIWF), brought a case to the High Court in London challenging the UK government’s policies on broiler farming. Our main goal in the case – the first judicial review of its kind – is to end selective breeding of broilers for fast growth. Judgement is due this month.

Why is this case necessary? Let’s look at the evidence. Chickens reared for meat today are growing twice as fast they were 30 years ago. They are also being bred from an ever narrowing gene pool: 98% of the world’s meat chickens are descended from birds supplied by just three companies. These birds grow so quickly and to such a weight that their skeletal structure often gives way, leading to lameness. A recognised method of ‘gait-scoring’, in which trained researchers assess the bird’s mobility as they move around the shed, reveals that as many as 20% have moderate to sever lameness.

And that means suffering. Research in the UK at the University of Bristol has shown that lame chickens will select feed laced with analgesics, and that ingestion of these painkillers facilitates more normal movement – both evidence that these chickens are in pain. The high metabolic rate of fast-growing chickens can also put intolerable strain on the cardiovascular system, and a significant proportion of the birds develop conditions known as ascites, which leads to heart failure, oedema of the liver and , eventually, death.

CIWF has filmed both fast-growing and slower growing birds. There is a striking contrast between a shed full of fast-growing broilers, many struggling to get to feed and water points, and the free-range, slow growing birds running about on strong legs and even able to fly up to trees to perch.

And the picture gets worse. If the fast-growing chickens are fed normally and not slaughtered young, only about half will survive to one year. To keep chickens alive long enough for them to reach puberty and breed (20 weeks0 they have to be raised on severely restricted diet. With rations down to 30% of what they would normally eat, the birds are chronically hungry and stressed.

Our legal challenge to all this draws on a European Union directive of 1998, which stipulates no animals should be farmed ‘unless it can be reasonably be expected on the basis of its genotype…that it can be kept without detrimental effect on its health or welfare’.

The directive also declares that animals should be given enough food to keep them in good health and satisfy their nutritional needs. In the UK, the law goes even further, requiring a diet that promotes ‘positive well-being’.

The farmers of fast-growing chickens cannot be squared with such laws. And while our challenge focused on UK government, its implications are global. A victory in the High Court would send a strong signal to multinational breeding companies hat growth rate and efficiency with which birds turn feed into meat must not be the overwhelming selection criteria. Slower-growing breeds already exist which can and must be used.

The very least we our farmed animals is a fundamentally sound genetic make-up and enough food to avoid near-constant hunger. It is time to ensure that our laws deliver these welfare basics and curb the extremes of selective breeding. Any reluctance to act would be disaster for chickens – and in the long run, a disaster for our chances of safeguarding farm animal welfare in a future threatened by cloning and genetic engineering.