This is the actual living situation of the chickens whose flesh and eggs Americans eat.
Breeding a “Better” Chicken
Chicken breeders have been hard at work developing a “better” chicken, which to their way of thinking is the heaviest possible one. (Remember, profit is per pound.) The result is a bird whose skeleton becomes, every year, less able to support his increasingly massive weight. The fleshy bodies of broilers today grow so fast that their bones and joints can’t keep pace. The trade journal Broiler Industry reports that the chickens raised for meat today can hardly stand under their weight, so they spend most of their time huddling “down on their haunches.”34
Skeletal disorders are common. Many of these animals crouch or hobble about in pain on flawed feet and legs.35
Problems like these are not considered particularly noteworthy by the industry that tells us they take care of their chickens “just like a mother hen,” because lameness affects only the living animal, not the price to be had for his flesh. Animals can be sold for meat whether or not they are crippled.
The same breeders who brought us these grossly top-heavy birds are hard at work to accomplish other grotesque feats of genetic engineering. You may have thought, as I did, that God pretty much knew what He was doing when He designed animals. But the folks at the Animal Research Institute of Agriculture, Canada, have a better idea. The director of the institute, R. S. Gowe, enlightened me on the subject when he spoke at a conference in Ottawa in December 1978 on “Livestock Intensive Methods of Production.” Said Gowe, proudly:
At the Animal Research Institute, we are trying to breed animals without legs, and chickens without feathers.36
I must admit it took me a while to comprehend why anyone would want to breed a chicken without feathers. But I finally came to understand why at least six universities in the United States and Canada are presently trying to do so.37 If only chickens didn’t have feathers, then the folks who care for them “just like a mother hen” would be spared the bother of plucking them out.
Flipped Out
There are many other ways, besides having feathers, that chickens make themselves difficult to their caretakers. Poultry Digest describes the growing problem of “flip-over syndrome.” This condition
is characterized by birds jumping into the air, sometimes emitting a loud squawk, and then falling over dead.38
Postmortem exams show the birds’ hearts are full of blood clots, but it is not known whether this is a result or a cause of their deaths. The problem of “flip-over syndrome” has the experts stymied. They don’t have any idea what makes the birds suddenly jump into the air and die. I don’t know, either, but I think it is probably safe to say that the birds are not jumping into the air because they cannot restrain a spontaneous upsurge of joy and delight.
The Fine Cuisine of Chicken Heaven
What do you think the lucky residents of today’s chicken heavens dine on before we dine on them? Researchers who wrote an article titled “Poultry Production” in Scientific American investigated contemporary chicken cuisine, and they were seriously concerned with its quality:
The modern fowl thrives on a diet almost totally foreign to any food it ever found in nature. Its feed is a product of the laboratory.39
A poultry man summarized the matter this way:
Virtually all chickens raised in the United States today are fed a diet laced with antibiotics from their first day to their last. Without antibiotics, the industry could not maintain the intensive farming practices. An awful lot of them die anyway, before we can get our profit out of them. Without antibiotics, why, we’d be back to the backward practices of yesteryear. 40
Heaven forbid! Why, back then the chickens were deprived of a steady supply of sulfa drugs, hormones, antibiotics, and nitrofurans.41 And what on earth did the poor birds ever do without the arsenicals? Over 90 percent of today’s chickens are fed arsenic compounds.42
I had assumed that the diet fed to chickens would be one chosen for its ability to keep the animals healthy. But such, I have found, is not the case. Broilers fetch a price according to their weight, not according to their health, so their diet is selected purely for its ability to maximize their weight as cheaply as possible. Similarly, the diet fed to layers is selected strictly for its ability to stimulate egg production at the lowest possible cost.
As a result, these are not the healthiest animals you could find. According to Poultry Digest, an increasing number of today’s chickens suffer from “caged layer fatigue.” These birds undergo the withdrawal of minerals from their bones and muscles and eventually are unable to stand.43
Caged layer fatigue is actually only one of many health problems that flourish among modern chickens, whose diet is not designed with their health in mind. In the classic work on contemporary animal agriculture Animal Factories, Peter Singer and Jim Mason report:
Vitamin deficiencies common in poultry factories… result in a variety of conditions, including retarded growth, eye damage, blindness, lethargy, kidney damage, disturbed sexual development, bone and muscle weakness, brain damage, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, and deformed beaks and joints. Dietary deficiencies and other factory conditions can cause a variety of bodily deformities. In poultry, fragile bones, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs, and swollen joints are among the symptoms of mineral deficient diets … Some poultry diseases can leave birds with malformed backbones, twisted necks, and inflamed joints.44
These poor animals are riddled with disease. In fact, due to the danger of humans’ contracting diseases from chickens, the Bureau of Labor has listed the poultry-processing industry as one of the most hazardous of all occupations.45
Many of the health problems that occur regularly to these sad creatures were unknown only a few years ago. It is common today for caged birds to lose their feathers. It isn’t known whether this is from rubbing constantly against the wire, from feather-pecking by other birds, or because of the totally unnatural diet and lack of sunlight. But whatever the cause, the result is that without their feathers the chickens’ skin begins to rub directly against the wire.46 When I first saw these birds I was startled by the sight and didn’t even recognize they were chickens. Their skin is raw and sore and bright red. They look more like a walking wound than a bird.
It is hard to underestimate the health of today’s chickens. Driven to a state of hysteria, their raw skin rubbing constantly against the wire cages in which they are packed like living sardines, a staggering percentage of these animals contract cancer. A government report found that over 90 percent of the chickens from most of the flocks in the country are infected with chicken cancer (leukosis)!47
You and I may wonder at the level of health in food produced by a system that so totally disregards the health and well-being of its animals. But today’s poultry producers are rarely hampered by such considerations. They are a dedicated group, with a steadfast single-mindedness of purpose. Only their purpose is not, as you might have thought, to produce healthy food. As Fred C. Haley, president of a 225,000-hen Georgia poultry firm put it:
The object of producing eggs is to make money. When we forget this objective, we have forgotten what it is all about.48
The money Mr. Haley is talking about is not made by the farmer who spends his day with the animals. It is made by agribusiness oligopolies. The actual chicken farmer amounts to a mere hired hand who virtually works for the huge “integrated chicken processors” and “amalgamated poultry producers.” He is the one in daily contact with the birds; he is the one who sees and lives with the animals; and he may very well have feelings about what is being done to them. But if he protests, well, he can always be replaced by someone better suited to the job. He is not the one who has devised the