Chickens

Hens are crammed into battery cages so small that they can't even lift a wing. Other Viewing Options Download Video Embed code to post this video on your MySpace page or blog.

Chickens are inquisitive, interesting animals who are as intelligent as mammals like cats, dogs, and even primates.¹ They are very social and like to spend their days together, scratching for food, cleaning themselves in dust baths, roosting in trees, and lying in the sun. Dr. Chris Evans, administrator of the animal behavior lab at Australia’s Macquarie University, says, “As a trick at conferences, I sometimes list [chickens’] attributes, without mentioning chickens, and people think I’m talking about monkeys.”²

Chickens are precocious birds. Mother hens actually cluck to their unborn chicks, who chirp back to their mothers and to one another from within their shells!³ The intelligence and adaptability of chickens actually make them particularly vulnerable to factory farming because, unlike most birds, baby chickens can survive without their mothers and without the comfort of a nest—they come out of the shell raring to explore and ready to experience life. Learn more about the intelligence of chickens.

But the more than 9 billion chickens raised on factory farms each year in the U.S. never have the chance to do anything that is natural to them.⁴ They will never even meet their parents, let alone be raised by them. They will never take dust baths, feel the sun on their backs, breathe fresh air, roost in trees, or build nests.

Chickens raised for their flesh, called “broilers” by the chicken industry, spend their entire lives in filthy sheds with tens of thousands of other birds, where intense crowding and confinement lead to outbreaks of disease. They are bred and drugged to grow so large so quickly that their legs and organs can’t keep up, making heart attacks, organ failure, and crippling leg deformities common. Many become crippled under their own weight and eventually die because they can’t reach the water nozzles. When they are only 6 or 7 weeks old, they are crammed into cages and trucked to slaughter.

Birds exploited for their eggs, called “laying hens” by the industry, are crammed together in wire cages where they don’t even have enough room to spread a single wing. The cages are stacked on top of each other, and the excrement from chickens in the higher cages constantly falls on those below. The birds have part of their sensitive beaks cut off so that they won’t peck each other as a result of the frustration created by the unnatural confinement. After their bodies are exhausted and their production drops, they are shipped to slaughter, generally to be turned into chicken soup or cat or dog food because their flesh is too bruised and battered to be used for much else.

Eating Chickens Is Bad for Your Health According to a major 2006 Harvard study of 135,000 people, people who frequently ate grilled skinless chicken had a 52 percent higher chance of developing bladder cancer compared to people who didn’t.

Because the male chicks of egg-laying breeder hens are unable to lay eggs and are not bred to produce excessive flesh for the meat industry, they are killed. Every year, more than 100 million of these young birds are ground up alive or tossed into bags to suffocate.

Chickens are slammed into small crates and trucked to the slaughterhouse through all weather extremes. Hundreds of millions suffer from broken wings and legs from rough handling, and millions die from the stress of the journey.⁵

At the slaughterhouse, their legs are snapped into shackles, their throats are cut, and they are immersed in scalding hot water to remove their feathers. Because they have no federal legal protection (birds are exempt from the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act), most are still conscious when their throats are cut open, and many are literally scalded to death in the feather-removal tanks after missing the throat cutter.

Learn more about the lives of chickens.

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¹ William Grimes, “If Chickens Are So Smart, Why Aren’t They Eating Us?” New York Times, 12 Jan. 2003.
² Grimes.
³ “Behavioral Research,” Chicken-Yard.Net, 30 Nov. 2001.
⁴ Wayne Pacelle, “Mercy, Mercy: Chickens Deserve Same Humane End as Pigs and Cattle,” Humane Society of the United States, 2005.
⁵ T.G. Knowles and L.G. Wilkins, “The Problem of Broken Bones During Handling of Laying Hens: A Review,” Poultry Science, 1998.