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When does it stop? At what point does the search for cheaper food come up against animal welfare? The answer should have been “some time ago.”
The common chicken raised for meat grew to a full size of 1 kg in 1976. Only 25 years later, selective breeding produced a chicken that grows to a full size of 2.6 kg. Moreover, this bird is fully grown in just 42 days—seven weeks from egg to our table. Many people worry about GM food, but selective breeding alone can produce such walking blocks of meat. It will be selective breeding which will raise the target weight of a chicken to 3 kg and beyond in the next few years, while cutting the time taken to achieve it to five weeks or less.
This “progress” has been achieved at too great a cost. Birds that are too heavy suffer not only from the spaces they are kept in, which are as small as A4 paper, but also from many heart and leg problems brought on by their size. For all these reasons, four percent of broiler chickens die before they make it through their seven-week lives.
The way to change this is to make consumers aware of the facts. The main difficulty in protecting animal welfare in these “efficient” farming systems is that consumers do not care much about where and how the meat is produced. That is one reason why animal protection campaigns should be allowed to be on TV.
Consumers who realize the importance of animal welfare—if you have read this far, this means you—must continue to push shops into providing more chicken that comes from farms where animals can run freely and eat naturally.