Anyone who has studied the social life of birds carefully will know that theirs is a subtle and complex world, where food and water are only a small part of their behavioral needs. The brain of each bird is programmed with a complicated set of drives and responses which set it on the path to a life full of special territorial, nesting, roosting, grooming, parental, aggressive and sexual activities, in addition to the feeding behavior. All of these activities are totally denied the battery hens.12
Chickens are by nature highly social animals. In any kind of natural setting, be it a farmyard or the wild, they develop a social hierarchy, often known as a pecking order. Every bird yields, at the food trough and elsewhere, to those above it in rank and takes precedence over those below.
The social order is extremely important to these birds. According to studies published in The New Scientist, chickens can maintain a stable pecking order, with each bird knowing all the others individually and aware of its place among them, in flocks with up to 90 chickens.13 Beyond 90 birds, however, things can get out of hand. Of course, in any kind of natural setting, flocks would never get nearly that large. But in today’s “chicken heavens,” flocks tend to be larger than the 90-bird limit.
How much larger? Poultry Digest reports that the flock size in a typical egg factory is 80,000 birds per warehouse!14
Just Like a Mother Hen
In such a situation the birds are completely unable to satisfy one of the most basic and intense priorities of their nature, which is to develop a sense of social order and their place within it.
The results aren’t very pretty. Unable to establish any kind of social identity for themselves, the cooped-up animals fight constantly with one another. They are driven berserk by the lack of space and the complete frustration of their primal need for a social order. In their frustration they peck viciously at one another’s feathers, frequently try to kill one another, and even try to eat one another alive. The industry takes note of these developments, but only in terms of their effect on profits.
Feather-pecking and cannibalism easily become serious vices among birds kept under intensive conditions. They mean lower productivity and lost profits.
—THE FARMING EXPRESS15
Any behavior among chickens that threatens profits is known in the trade as a vice, a term that truly gives me pause. Where is the virtue in keeping birds in these conditions?
Since the animals insist on behaving like the proud and sensitive creatures they are, and trying even under these bizarre conditions to express their natural urges, the experts who manage today’s factory farms have to respond. They have to do something, because if very many of the birds kill one another, money is lost, and that is the one thing they can’t let happen. They know that the birds’ berserk behavior arises out of the unnatural ways in which the birds are kept. So what do the factory managers do? Make the conditions even more unnatural, of course.
The preferred method in the industry today is to cut off part of the chickens’ beaks, a process known as de-beaking.16 This does nothing to reduce the conditions that drive the chickens so mad that they attack one another viciously. But it renders them incapable of doing much harm to company profits.
The people who run today’s poultry factories are not concerned that the process of cutting off part of the chickens’ beaks requires cutting through highly sensitive soft tissue, similar to the tender sensitive flesh under human fingernails, and causes the animals severe pain. Nor do they mind the fact that they are crippling the animals and cutting off the animals’ most important member. Today’s poultry producers are highly satisfied with de-beaking. Employed almost universally in the industry today,17 this practice helps the producers to keep the chickens alive under the stressful, inhumane, and overcrowded conditions that are the cause of the animals’ unnatural aggression and cannibalism in the first place.
Even from a strictly dollars-and-cents viewpoint, however, there are a few drawbacks to the procedure. As one farm publication noted:
Sometimes the irregular growth of beaks on a de-beaked bird makes it difficult or impossible to drink where a normal bird would have no trouble.18
The factory experts are not pleased with the tendency of ungrateful young de-beaked birds either to die of thirst because they are unable to drink from nipple-type watering devices or else to starve to death within inches of their food supply because they can’t manage to eat. Nor are they happy with the birds who survive but can’t gain weight according to schedule because they have trouble eating. This is not something they want to see, because chicken flesh is sold by the pound.
Not ones to be defeated by the deaths and disabilities of de-beaked birds, however, today’s producers have sought to counter such losses and increase profits through advertising. They simply tell the public that their chickens couldn’t be happier. One huge broiler producer, Paramount Chickens, has aired TV commercials in which a smiling Pearl Bailey (who probably doesn’t know the truth any more than most of us) reassures us that Paramount looks after their chickens “just like a mother hen.”19
This is a remarkable statement. How many mother hens have been known to cut the beaks off their babies and force them to live under conditions in which they cannot establish a social identity and so are driven berserk?
Enlightened?
You have probably heard the magnificent trumpeting of roosters at daybreak, the passionate, full-throated announcement that dawn has come. The sound with which they welcome the day testifies, not only to their proud and passionate spirits, but also to how sensitive chickens are to light. This is a fact that modern poultry men know and do not hesitate to exploit.
In the windowless warehouses we are asked to believe are chicken heavens, the artificial lighting is manipulated in the most unnatural ways to maximize profits and minimize costs. Broilers are often subjected to bright light 24 hours a day for the first two weeks. Then the lights may be dimmed slightly and go off and on every two hours.20 At about six weeks of age, the animals have gone so completely crazy from all this that the lights must be turned off completely in an attempt to calm them down. But even then the absence of any outlet whatsoever for the birds’ natural energies and drives leads to a great deal of fighting, with the de-beaked birds pecking painfully at one another in the dark, often managing despite the mutilation of their beaks to kill one another. It’s at times like this that farm managers will sometimes reveal the depth of their compassion for the animals in their care.
It’s a damn shame when they kill each other. It means we wasted all the feed that went into the damn thing.
—HERBERT REED, POULTRY PRODUCER21
The lighting conditions for young layer hens (called pullets) are a little different from those provided for broilers, though not exactly what you’d call natural. These youngsters are kept in “grow-out” buildings that are usually kept completely dark except at feeding times.22 Then, when the young hens reach the age at which they can begin to lay eggs, everything suddenly changes. Having lived their entire lives in complete darkness, except at feeding times, the hens now find themselves subjected to harsh and continuous light.
At one farm, a period of 23 hours lighting a day has been tested.23
Agribusiness Lays an Egg
The folks who design what the industry tells us are chicken heavens are real virtuosos when it comes to manipulating the environment of the animals for maximum profit. When a layer hen’s production begins to slacken, the producers do not just sit back and let her output wane. Not when they have found it possible to bolster her egg production by a procedure known in the trade as force-moulting.24 The already panicked and exhausted hen will suddenly find herself plunged into complete darkness. The artificial lighting, which heretofore had been on for upward of 17 hours a day, is now completely cut