A Factory Farm's Chicken Story

There are two groups of chickens in food production. Chickens that are raised for their meat (broilers) and chickens that are raised for egg laying (battery). In both cases female chickens are preferred, for egg production and because they have a tendency to grow faster than their male counterparts. Here is the life story of chickens in a factory farm:

The chickens are incubated and hatched at a large hatchery and shipped to the processing plant where they are sorted. The sorting is for the sole purpose of weeding out the undesirable chicks, most of which are male since they cannot lay eggs and they do not grow fat fast enough to produce a high enough return on investment, others are discarded if they are visibly scrawny or lame. The sorting procedure is fast and rough, the "sexers" - people who inspect the chicks for their sex handle them quickly and harshly so they can process thousands of birds a day. The sexing takes place in a few ways:

• Feather sexing - Some chickens have been bred so that female chick's wing pinfeathers are longer than the male for easy detection.
• Vent sexing - involves literally squeezing the feces out of the chick, which opens up the chick's anal vent slightly, allowing the chicken sexer to see if the chick has a small "bump," which would indicate that the chick is a male.
• Pubic bone sexing - placing an index finger on the pubic bones. If the index finger fits, then the chick is likely a female.

The unwanted chicks are tossed onto a conveyor belt where they are sent for culling. They are killed in one of these four ways:

• Maceration - an automated method where the chicks are dropped into a meat grinder alive and fully conscious where they are ground up. At the Hy-line Hatchery this technique is used to cull 150,000 chicks a day.
• Gassing - the chicks are gassed usually with carbon monoxide.
• Cervical dislocation - the spine is dislocated from the skull.
• Electrocution - a new method that has been touted as being cheap, reliable, and humane by its developers.

Sorting and processing chicks is mostly an automated process where conveyor belts move them through the different procedures. During this process many chicks fall off the belt or are injured by the equipment and are left to die from their injuries or starve to death.

After the sexing, the desirable chicks are sent to be debeaked. The practice of debeaking began in the 1930's to minimize flock loss due to cannibalism and feather pecking. The extremely crowded living conditions creates a stressful environment for the chickens which results in abnormal behavior and eventual profit loss for the company.

Debeaking is performed by a machine that cuts part of the chick's beak off either with a laser or a small guillotine device. In 1990, Michael Gentle and his associates at the Institute of Animal Physiology and Genetics Research, Edinburgh, Scotland demonstrated the effects of debeaking:
"To enable the animal to perform this wide range of activities, the beak of the chicken has an extensive nerve supply with numerous ... [nerve endings sensitive to mechanical pressures, heat and pain]....Beak amputation results in extensive neuromas [tumors] being formed in the healed stump of the beak which give rise to abnormal spontaneous neural activity in the trigeminal [threefold] nerve. The nociceptors present in the beak of the chicken have similar properties to those found in mammalian skin and the neural activity arising from the trigeminal neuromas is similar to that reported in the rat, mouse, cat and the baboon. Therefore, in terms of the peripheral neural activity, partial beak amputation is likely to be a painful procedure leading not only to phantom and stump pain, but also to other characteristics of the hyperpathic syndrome, such as allodynia and hyperalgesia [the stress resulting from, and extreme sensitiveness to, painful stimuli]." – Applied Animal Behavior Science, Vol. 27. 

Broiler chicks are debeaked once since they only live for seven weeks. Egg laying chickens are debeaked numerous times during their life.

Battery chickens are put into cages, usually 8-10 birds are in a cage the size of a filing cabinet drawer. The space available to battery hens has often been described as less than the size of a piece of paper. This is not enough space for the chicken to spread its wings or even sit. Usually the cages are wire mesh which causes the chickens to develop sores on their feet that are not attended to and can become infected. The extreme crowding creates a stressful environment for the birds which results in feather loss and attacking other birds. Chickens that attempt to break out of their cages become injured and entangled in the wire mesh left to suffer and die slowly. The cages often deteriorate creating holes in the mesh where birds fall through the cage floor becoming injured and unable to reach food they slowly starve. Birds that are found injured by poultry workers usually have their necks broken, however with so many chickens per cage and sometimes thousands of cages per facility many hens are neglected to suffer a slow death. In addition to this daily existence, many poultry workers have been filmed abusing chickens, throwing them indiscriminately, hanging them alive on cages to languish, and throwing injured live chickens in trash cans to suffocate under numerous dead birds. Once the hens have decreased their egg production, they are slaughtered.

Broiler chickens are grown by the hundreds of thousands in large windowless sheds. These sheds are environmentally controlled, the temperature and lighting are set for optimal growth. The lighting is manipulated to stimulate more eating and growth in a shorter period of time. For the first few weeks the light cycles every few hours to simulate daytime and night time. This causes the chickens to eat more and sleep less.

The chickens are selectively bred to grow bigger and faster. This unnatural growth rate creates problems for the birds. Their bodies grow so quickly that their legs and feet cannot support the weight of their bodies, as a result they develop hip and leg deformities and lameness. Many birds develop lung and heart problems and as many as 19 million chickens die each year from heart failure long before they make it to slaughter. Thousands of birds are packed into these sheds, usually with little or no ventilation. The chickens live for seven weeks walking in their accumulating droppings, since the sheds are only cleaned after they are taken to slaughter, causing hock burns (foot ulcers and blisters) The inadequate ventilation creates ammonia build-up burning their eyes and lungs. In the last few weeks the lights in the shed are dimmed significantly to reduce the stress the chickens encounter from overcrowding.

When the chickens are ready for slaughter, they are forcibly stuffed into mesh crates and transported by truck to the slaughterhouse. The chickens are shackled upside down on a conveyor belt where they are dipped into an electrified "stunning" bath. their throats are cut then they are pulled through scalding water that removes their feathers. The procedure rarely resembles this description. Often chickens are not stunned when they have their throats cut and suffer tremendously by malfunctioning equipment or because they moved to try to avoid the cutting machine. Some are still alive and conscious when they are pulled through the boiling water. In addition, it is well documented that many poultry workers abuse and prolong the suffering of these animals.

Approximately 80% of meat and egg production uses factory farming techniques in the U.S. and 60% in the EU.