Blog written by Julie Hurst, volunteer blog writer

Cute and fluffy, little yellow chicks adorn everything Easter, from cards and table decorations to cakes and chocolate eggs. And while these baby birds conjure up images of lives spent foraging freely in the open countryside, for chickens bred for meat - known as broilers – these bucolic scenes couldn’t be further from the truth. 

THE BROILER INDUSTRY IN NUMBERS

The UK broiler industry operates on a vast scale. It’s a business responsible for raising and killing more than one billion chickens annually, and is worth in excess of £3.1billion a year.

At any one time there are 126 million broilers trapped within the UK farming system, and 95% of these are subject to life inside intensive units designed to maximise production while keeping costs to a minimum. One Hereford-based producer alone, Avara, ‘processes’ two million chickens at its factory farm every single week.

As the industry seeks to generate ever more profit, units are constantly increasing in size and we’re now seeing thousands upon thousands of birds packed into huge soulless warehouse spaces known as ‘mega-farms’.

While there’s no formal definition in the UK of what actually constitutes a mega farm, typically the term is used to describe units that house more than 125,000 broiler chickens. Between 2016 and 2023, these farms increased in number from 768 to 933, with the greatest concentration spread across Lincolnshire holding a staggering 36 million birds. 

LIFE INSIDE A UK BROILER FARM

Broiler chickens are bred to grow abnormally fast, so their time on this earth is shockingly short and extremely painful. While chickens can live naturally for many years, those bred for meat inside UK farms reach slaughter weight in a matter of just 35 days. The speed of their growth is all too often too much for their fragile bodies to bear, and as a result they regularly suffer from lameness, organ failure, muscle diseases and bone deformities. Burns to their delicate skin are also distressingly common, caused by lying in their own waste – many simply cannot stand and collapse under their own weight.

Living conditions are designed purely for profit, so the birds are kept inside closed buildings where temperature, artificial lighting, ventilation and food and water are tightly controlled. Space is also severely restricted, with each chicken allocated an area the equivalent of less than an A4 sheet of paper. This means that they can’t move around freely let alone stretch and spread their wings. And as for expressing their natural behaviours, such as perching, ground pecking and foraging, sources of enrichment are sorely lacking inside these miserable barren sheds.

THE BETTER CHICKEN COMMITMENT

In an effort to alleviate the immense suffering, welfarists are campaigning for the introduction of the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC). This requires companies across the supply chain to agree to a set of improved standards which include a change in breed type to slower-growing chickens, a reduction in stocking densities to provide more space, and access to natural light. To date, over 380 companies across Europe have agreed to implement these voluntary standards, however progress has not been encouraging.

In its latest annual ChickenTrack report, which records the progress of 85 companies across eight European countries, Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) state that 30 companies have yet to record their progress, and those that have are falling behind in what are the two most important areas, moving to slower-growing breeds and reducing stocking densities. 

THE BETTER CHICKEN COMMITMENT DOESN’T WORK

Unfortunately, the failure of voluntary assurance schemes such as the Better Chicken Commitment is not surprising, and there are several reasons for this.

Firstly, maximisation of profit is the industry’s priority. Compared with intensively-farmed, fast-growing chickens, it costs 33p more to rear a BCC bird and 22 per cent more land is required to produce a tonne of BCC poultry meat, both cited as key factors behind the reluctance of many companies to even consider adopting its standards. One of the supermarkets refusing to sign up, Lidl, has been in the press this week for finally conceding to giving its own-label chickens more space (a meagre 20% more), but is remaining silent about the fact that it continues to supply cheaper so-called ‘frankenchickens’, despite all the pain and misery they suffer. 

Secondly, the industry has an extremely poor track record when it comes to implementing ‘welfare’ provisions. In 2019 our hidden cameras caught three months of footage at Free Range Chickens Ltd, an RSPCA Assured farm in Suffolk. While this trusted assurance scheme’s promises include ‘enriched living conditions’ and ‘space to move’, as well as measures for implementation and enforcement, the evidence we collected showed not only the woeful disregard of agreed standards, but horrific levels of abuse, violence and inhumane behaviour towards innocent chickens.

And thirdly, under UK legislation it is in fact ‘an offence to cause unnecessary suffering to any animal’. If companies can keep birds in such awful conditions and subject them to treatment which can only be described as cruel, with what appears to be impunity, we shouldn’t really expect that they will commit to improve chicken welfare voluntarily.  

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THE HIGHER WELFARE CHICKEN FARCE

Some birds are of course supposedly bred to ‘higher welfare’ standards, although the numbers are dwarfed by those that are intensively farmed. Only 3.5% of chickens are reared as free-range and less than 1% are in organic systems, due once again to the prioritisation of profit – as the British Poultry Council (BPC) itself has said, “These are available for consumers to purchase if that is their preference, but they come at a cost to our efficiency and productivity”. 

In reality, the life these so-called higher welfare chickens are forced to lead is just as torturous. A glance at the Draft Production Standards attached to the government’s recently launched Consultation on Fairer Food Labelling sets out in black and white just how negligible the difference between the various welfare tiers actually is. The fact that both free-range and organic chickens spend most of their lives indoors, and that they too are killed in a matter of days are just two examples of why ‘higher welfare’ systems are no better for chickens.

COST VERSUS COMPASSION

While endeavours to improve the welfare of broiler chickens are commendable, they are focused on making changes to the current systems of farming. Given that the environments in which the birds are forced to live are designed purely to suit the needs of the industry, not the interests of the chickens, any form of action simply won’t be enough. Cost will always be the deciding factor, not compassion.

The only way to alleviate the immense suffering is to address its root cause, which is the breeding of these birds for food. Each one of our feathered friends is a unique individual, a sentient being with the right to enjoy a life free from human exploitation. Ending factory farming is the only possible way to end their plight.

As always,

For the animals.