The industrial production of farmed chickens undoubtedly constitutes one of the most massive and systematic forms of animal suffering ever created by man. According to a recent study published in the journal Nature Food and relayed by the Vox website, it would be possible to alleviate this cruelty at an extremely low cost, of the order of a few cents per hour of pain avoided.
Over the past seventy-five years, genetic selection has caused chickens to grow to impressive speed and size. This rapid development has made chicken the most accessible and widely consumed meat in the United States, where more than nine billion animals are slaughtered each year. In France, 687 million chickens would have been slaughtered for their meat in 2023. But this meteoric growth comes at the cost of a short and very painful life: chickens suffer in particular from heat stress, heart failure and severe lameness which sometimes even prevent them from eating or drinking, which irremediably leads to death.
This reality represents, according to researchers, the greatest form of organized animal suffering ever invented by man. Despite the scale of the phenomenon, animal welfare is still too often absent from political debates on food. The Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI), a group of researchers specializing in animal welfare at the origin of this study, nevertheless proposes to change the situation by quantifying animal pain.
Concretely, scientists have estimated that the average lifespan of a farmed chicken is around 1,100 hours, or 45 days. In this time, these animals experience approximately 700 hours of pain of varying intensities, ranging from “unbearable” pain, which prevents normal activity, to milder, but nonetheless bothersome, pain. These cumulative hours form what the authors call the animals’ “welfare footprint.”
For Kate Hartcher, co-author of the study, “As consumers, producers, policymakers and activists, we know the prices of products, and we now have the carbon footprints to understand the environmental impact. So why not have the same thing for animals?” According to her, a simple change could significantly improve the suffering of chickens, at minimal cost: favoring slower-growing breeds.
Simple solutions…
For the past decade, campaigns like the “Better Chicken Commitment” have advocated for the adoption of breeds that are slower to grow, less prone to diseases like lameness or heart failure, as well as other reforms like larger living space and more humane slaughter methods. The standards defended allow, according to the WFI, to reduce the duration of the most intense pain suffered by chickens by approximately 33 hours. However, companies oppose it, citing the higher costs associated with extended aging time.
The analysis carried out jointly with researchers from the Stockholm Environment Institute and the University of Colorado indicates, however, that the investment to avoid this suffering is minimal. Switching to slower-growing breeds would prevent at least 15 to 100 hours of intense pain per animal, at a producer cost of less than 80 cents per kilo of meat.
… but a negative ecological impact
The National Chicken Council, the main American industrial union, opposes these developments, not only for economic reasons, but also environmental ones. According to the union, to meet demand with smaller, slower-growing chickens, the industry would need to raise about 4.5 billion more chickens per year, an increase of about 50 percent. This surplus would imply an increase in agricultural areas, pesticides and fertilizers, contributing to climate change.
Current studies generally confirm an increase in greenhouse gas emissions of 9 to 24 percent when breeding slower-growing breeds, depending on agricultural conditions. Yet arguing that animal welfare can be sacrificed in favor of a slight reduction in emissions is a hypocritical position, especially when surveys show that consumers value animal welfare as much or more than environmental sustainability.
For Hartcher and his colleagues, the intensification of animal production, in particular through the rapid growth of animals, cannot be justified solely by environmental considerations, given the serious consequences on animal welfare and the relatively small differences in ecological indicators.
This transition, however, raises a major dilemma: is it better to raise fewer chickens suffering more or more chickens suffering a little less? Most animal rights activists and some environmentalists are leaning towards a combined solution inviting people to eat less meat, but of better quality.
As Cleo Verkuijl, a scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute and co-author of the study, explains, “in almost all cases, we will never find an optimal solution, but today, thanks to these analyses, companies and decision-makers can at least take animal suffering into account instead of ignoring it, and thus make more balanced, and hopefully more humane, choices”.
