Somehow these little chicks remind me of the bravery of the human spirit and, as well, of our situation as a species. Are we not also driven by an evolutionary imperative, by the call of our own growth and potential for expansion? Are we not, as a race, standing now amidst the slime and eggshells of our primeval past, not knowing what will become of us yet already dreaming of the stars?
One thing’s for sure. Chickens are far more sensitive than most of us give them credit for. A study at Virginia Polytechnic Institute found that chickens flourished when treated with affection. Researchers there spoke and sang gently to a group of baby chicks. As a result the chickens were friendlier and put on more weight for the amount of feed consumed than did chickens who were ignored. The well-treated birds were also more resistant to infection than the other chickens.7
Welcome to Chicken Heaven
The raising of chickens in the United States today is not, however, a process that overflows with compassion for these animals. Nor is it anything like the barnyard operation that comes to most of our minds when we imagine the lives of chickens. Fundamental changes have taken place in the past 30 years. Formerly, chickens were free-range birds, scratching and rooting around in the soil for grubs, earthworms, grass, and larvae. They knew the sun and the wind and the stars, and the rooster crowing at the break of day was only one of many signs that showed they were deeply attuned to the natural cycles of light and dark.
But today this has all changed. The raising of chickens in the United States has become completely industrialized. We no longer live in the day of the barnyard chicken. We live now, I’m sorry to say, in the day of the assembly-line chicken.
There is a story behind today’s poultry and eggs that we would never know from the clean little packages for sale in brightly lit modern supermarkets. It all looks so neat, comfortable, and dependable, so carefully wrapped and labeled. As I stand in a tastefully decorated supermarket, serenaded by piped-in music, looking at egg cartons and poultry packages with happy drawings of smiling chickens, I find it hard indeed to imagine anything could be amiss. Every attempt is made to assure us that the chickens of today couldn’t be happier or better cared for, and that no expense is spared in bringing us quality eggs and produce. Advertisements for Perdue, Inc., one of the nation’s largest producers of chickens for meat, are typical. In them, the company president, Frank Perdue, tells us that his chickens live in “a house that’s just chicken heaven.”8
But it turns out there’s not a great deal of truth in describing contemporary chicken accommodations as “chicken heaven.”
To begin with, today’s chicken farms are not really farms anymore, but should more accurately be called chicken factories. Factories, because the chickens live their whole lives inside buildings entirely devoid of natural light. The day of the barnyard is long gone. There are no barns and no yards in today’s mechanized world of poultry production, only assembly lines, conveyor belts, and fluorescent lights. Factories, because these proud and sensitive creatures are treated strictly as merchandise, with utter contempt for their spirits, with not a trace of feeling or compassion for the fact that they are living, breathing animals. Factories, because the chickens are systematically deprived of every conceivable expression of their natural urges.
Today’s chicken factories are not farming as most of us conceive it. They are living expressions of the attitude that animals are things, raw materials to be consumed however we might wish.
I wish I were exaggerating. I wish I were describing isolated cases of negligent management. But I’m not. I’m describing the standard operating procedures of the egg and poultry industries today. I’m describing the operations that produce 98 percent of our eggs and poultry. I’m describing techniques and practices that are outlined and discussed every day of the week in trade journals such as Poultry World, Poultry Tribune, Poultry Digest, Farmer and Stockbreeder, and Farm Journal.
In the assembly-line world of today’s chicken factories, chickens aren’t called chickens anymore. If they have been bred for their flesh, they are called broilers. If they have been bred for their eggs, they are called layers. Now, not calling animals by their animal names, but giving them new names according to their food value to humans, may not seem like a big deal in itself, but it is part of a process that deeply conditions us all into forgetting the spirit of the animals as living beings with their own dignity. In fact, the industry makes a deliberate point of not seeing the animals as animals.
The modern layer is, after all, only a very efficient converting machine, changing the raw material—feedstuffs—into the finished product—the egg—less, of course, maintenance requirements.
—FARMER AND STOCKBREEDER9
Happy Birthday Factory Style
Male chicks, of course, have little use in the manufacture of eggs. So what do you think happens to the males? How are the little fellows greeted when, having pecked their way out of their shells, expecting to be met by the warmth of a waiting mother hen, they look around and seek to begin their lives on earth?
They are, literally, thrown away. We watched at one hatchery as “chickenpullers” weeded males from each tray and dropped them into heavy-duty plastic bags. Our guide explained: “We put them in a bag and let them suffocate.”10
It’s not a picture to bring joy to a mother’s heart, but over half a million little baby chicks are “disposed of” in this fashion every day of the year in the United States. In the seconds it takes you to read this paragraph, over 2,000 newborn male chicks will be thrown by human hands into garbage bags to smother among their brothers, without the slightest acknowledgment that they are alive.
And they are, perhaps, the lucky ones. Because for those chicks allowed to live, the “life” that follows is truly a nightmare.
In today’s modern factories, chickens, exquisitely sensitive to the earth’s natural rhythms of light and dark, never see or feel the light of the sun. Broiler chicks arrive at the producers via conveyor belt, in batches of tens of thousands. Fresh from the incubators and mechanized hatcheries, only a few hours old, the fluffy yellow babies peep constantly in frail little voices for their missing mothers. But they will never know the sound of their mother’s voice, nor the warmth of her body, nor the comfort of her protection. There will be no scratching in the dust for tasty bugs, no strutting and preening, no crowing to announce the dawn.
These little chicks come equipped with a God-given life expectancy of 15 to 20 years. But under the conditions of modern factory farming, modern broilers might make it to the ripe old age of two months. In comparison, the layers are veritable Methuselahs—the longest lived among them might possibly live as long as two years.
The more I’ve learned about these factories, the more ironic it has seemed to call them chicken heavens. Consisting of windowless warehouses, with tiers of cages stacked on top of one another from floor to ceiling, like shipping crates, the environment has been systematically designed to maximize the profits of the agribusiness corporations that own the sheds and the birds. It has not been designed with any concern whatever for the chickens’ natural urges, minimum comfort, or even health.
Inside the windowless warehouse, every aspect of the birds’ environment is totally controlled, in order to make them grow as fast as possible or produce as many eggs as possible, at the least possible cost to the company that owns the operation. Incidentally, the companies that own our nation’s chicken factories are not generally agricultural enterprises, as you might have imagined. As Peter Singer has shown in his excellent Animal Liberation, they are companies like Textron Inc., a manufacturer of pencils and helicopters. These companies go into the business simply because it looks like a profitable venture.11 Accordingly, they apply to chickens the business practices that work with pencils and helicopters, thus treating these breathing, passionate animals with the same consideration they use for pencils.
The Social Life of Hens
The renowned