According to a new commentary paper in the journal Nature Food, some of the worst animal suffering in the world can be prevented at a rate of just a couple of pennies per hour: the extreme pain experienced by chickens raised for meat.
Over the last 75 years, chickens have been bred to grow incredibly large and incredibly fast. Their rapid growth rate has made chicken the most affordable and plentiful meat in the US, where over 9 billion are raised and slaughtered annually.
But it’s come at the cost of making chickens suffer terribly throughout their short lives from a range of health and welfare issues, like heat stress, heart failure, and lameness — difficulty walking — which can be so severe that chickens die of dehydration or starvation because they can’t even stand and move to get water and food.
It’s arguably the largest form of systematized animal cruelty humans have ever invented.
Despite the scale and cruelty of conventional chicken farming — and other forms of livestock production — animal welfare has largely been left out of food policy discussions. The nonprofit Welfare Footprint Institute, composed of a team of animal welfare researchers that led the Nature Food paper, is looking to change that by putting a cost on preventing animal pain.
The group looks at how animals are bred, the conditions in which they’re raised, and the prevalence and frequency of problems like injury and disease in those systems to determine how many hours of certain types of pain they experience. Scientific research on animal welfare — using behavioral observations, neurophysiological markers, and response to pain-relieving drugs — informs WFI’s work, and the group’s population-level estimates try to account for differences in individual animals’ experiences.
According to their research, the average factory-farmed chicken experiences:
That’s about 700 hours of pain. Considering that chickens raised for meat only live for around 1,100 hours, or 45 days, and sleep for a sizable portion of that, they experience some level of pain for much of their waking life. These painful hours represent a kind of “welfare footprint,” the authors argue.
“As consumers, producers, policy-makers, investors and advocates, we are able to easily find out the prices of products, and we now also have carbon footprints to understand environmental impacts,” Kate Hartcher, a senior researcher with WFI and a co-author of the paper, told me over email. “So, why not have the same for animals?”
One simple change, Hartcher and her co-authors argue, can improve the welfare footprint of chicken meat for mere pennies: switching to slower-growing chicken breeds.
Raising chickens slow and fast
For the last decade, animal welfare groups have campaigned for meat producers and major food brands to adopt what they call the Better Chicken Commitment, a slate of reforms including using slower-growing chicken breeds, which are known to have lower rates of lameness, heart and lung disease, heat stress, and other issues. It also calls for other changes, like giving chickens more space and using a more humane slaughter method.
According to the Welfare Footprint Institute, chickens raised according to these standards suffer about 33 fewer hours of disabling and excruciating pain compared to conventional fast-growing chickens. Poultry companies have resisted calls to switch to slower-growing chicken breeds because they cost more to raise, taking about two weeks longer to reach their lower slaughter weight.
But, according to the Welfare Footprint Institute’s new paper, which was written in conjunction with researchers from the Stockholm Environment Institute and the University of Colorado Boulder, the cost is minuscule in terms of how much it costs to prevent pain. Switching to slower-growing breeds, according to their analysis, would prevent at least 15 to 100 hours of disabling and excruciating pain at a rate of 45 cents per pound for producers. (And even that range is a very conservative estimate, Hartcher told me, because it doesn’t account for all of the many serious welfare problems on chicken factory farms.)
Put in other words, an hour of these intense forms of pain could be averted at a rate of just half a cent to three cents.
In 2019, agricultural economists estimated that slower-growing breeds raise production costs by 11 percent to 26 percent and increase wholesale chicken prices by 10 to 36 cents per pound. The switch could moderately raise the price of chicken for consumers but, Hartcher said, “instead of focusing on the ‘costs’ of improving animal welfare, we show that the cost of preventing pain is tiny, and the benefits are enormous.”
A brutal trade-off
The National Chicken Council, the industry’s leading trade group, however, has argued against using slower-growing breeds — not just on economic grounds, but also on environmental ones. To meet current chicken demand with smaller, slower-growing breeds, the NCC says, the US industry would need to raise a lot more birds — an additional 4.5 billion or so per year, an approximately 50 percent increase. That also means using more land, pesticides, and fertilizer to grow chicken feed, all of which contribute to climate change.
This is generally true, even if the National Chicken Council is far from an authority on environmental sustainability (the poultry industry is a major air and water polluter). The National Chicken Council didn’t respond to a request for comment on the Nature Food paper.
Exactly how much slower-growing breeds increase greenhouse gas emissions is unclear and can vary depending on the specific breed, feed sourcing, and farming practices. A 2022 study found a 16 percent emissions increase, while a 2022 trial by poultry giant Perdue Farms found a 9 percent to 13.4 percent increase. According to a European chicken industry group, using slower-growing breeds when paired with other welfare reforms increases the climate footprint of chicken meat by 24 percent.
Whatever the exact environmental difference, arguing against treating animals better because it would marginally raise climate emissions implies a disturbing position: That raising animals who’ve been bred to suffer terribly is permissible so long as it’s better for the climate. In surveys, consumers say they care similarly or even more about animal welfare than sustainability.
However, this logic has proven persuasive to influential policymakers, environmental researchers, and some environmental groups. In 2023, when the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization published a road map on how the world can feed a growing population without blowing past climate targets, it wrote that the livestock sector “requires intensified productivity via improved genetics” — in other words, using breeds that make animals grow bigger and faster, and suffer more.
But Hartcher said her and her coauthors’ analysis challenges the notion “that the intensification of animal production, including faster growth rates, can be justified by environmental considerations alone, given the disproportionate and severe animal welfare harms and only minimal variations in environmental indicators.”
The switch to slower-growing chickens does, however, present a different dilemma for animal advocates: Is it better to farm fewer chickens who are all suffering a lot, or more chickens who are each suffering somewhat less?
Ultimately, most animal advocates — and some environmentalists, too — try to square the tensions in these trade-offs by recommending that we eat less meat overall and treat each animal better, an approach sometimes called “less but better.”
“Almost in all of these cases, you’re never going to land on the optimal thing,” Cleo Verkuijl, a senior scientist at the US branch of the Stockholm Environment Institute and a co-author of the Nature Food paper, told me. But now businesses and policymakers can at least account for animal suffering rather than ignore it, and make more reasoned — and hopefully, more humane — decisions.
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