America’s favorite animal to eat—the chicken—has also become its most expendable: In 2021, nearly 556 million chickens in the U.S. died in hatcheries and on farms before reaching the slaughterhouse, their carcasses in landfills, incinerators, compost piles, or pet food.
An additional 41 million never entered the food supply, because they died during transport to slaughterhouses or were slaughtered but deemed unsafe to eat for various reasons, including tumors, wounds or infections.
That’s all according to one New analysis International animal rights group Animal Equality published today.
To put Animal Equality’s results in perspective, these 597 million chickens that are never eaten — 6 percent of the 9.8 billion raised for meat in the U.S. each year — are far more than the combined number of turkeys, pigs, and cattle slaughtered for meat annually. .
So many chickens die prematurely on farms startup Even built a robot so that their farm workers don’t have to – it’s built into the industry’s business model.
In 2021, the National Chicken Council, the industry’s main trade group, released a report 5.3 percent Mortality rate, or the proportion of birds that die prematurely, but that analysis only includes chickens that die on farms. Animal Equality’s report provides a more comprehensive account of other deaths in the production chain, such as chickens that die after birth in the hatchery where they are conceived and born, in transport to the farm and those that are slaughtered but not killed. Enter the food supply.
“The industry knows that a significant part – [nearly] 600 million animals — dying, and it still allows them to profit,” said San Thomas, International Director of Research for Animal Equality. Throughout the group’s undercover investigation of factory farms, Thomas said, “We don’t see veterinary care for a sick hen, because that single hen is not important to the industry.”
All these dead chickens constitute a form of hidden food waste that causes unimaginable suffering to the birds. destruction From what has become characteristic of American poultry farms: painful diseases, heart attacks, dehydration, starvation and rough handling.
Furthermore, around one-fifth Chicken meat that enters the US food supply is discarded by grocers, restaurants and home consumers. When accounting for both wastes in the production chain And waste at the consumer and retail level, nearly a quarter of the chicks hatched — about 2.6 billion each year — are never eaten.
The problem seems to be getting worse. Since the mid-twentieth century, the poultry industry has steadily reduced its on-farm mortality rate. But in the past decade, it has been on the rise, recently reaching levels not seen since the 1960s.
It’s well understood what kills farm chickens: infectious diseases and health problems stemming from how the birds grow too big and too fast. Over the past decade, producers have been breeding chickens to get bigger, which may explain why more are dying on farms. Another possible reason for the rising mortality may be that chicken farms, under pressure from public health officials and advocates, have used fewer antibiotics in recent years, as the poultry industry’s use of these life-saving drugs is a major driver of the antibiotic resistance crisis.
Both of these problems can be addressed in ways that reduce animal suffering and protect antibiotics used in human medicine. One of the nation’s largest chicken companies is showing how to do it, but the question is whether the rest of the industry will follow.
What is the reason for the increase in the number of dead chickens in the farm?
Around the 1950s, US farmers began feeding antibiotics to their chickens and other farm animals to promote rapid growth and prevent disease. Instead of preserving animals when they are sick, drugs have been widely used as crutches to keep farmed animals alive in the unsanitary, overcrowded warehouses where most of them grow and where disease spreads.
In the early 2000s, approx Half of all antibiotics Ever been fed to animals produced worldwide.
Over time, public health experts have learned that this practice has come back to bite us: bacteria commonly found on farms, such as salmonella and E. coli, mutating and becoming resistant to antibiotics, making the drugs less effective in treating humans.
Throughout the 20th century, many efforts by the US Food and Drug Administration to limit antibiotic use in food production failed in the face of pharmaceutical lobbying pressure and growing anti-regulatory sentiment. But after decades of pressure, US fast food restaurants and big chicken companies finally took action, as did the FDA.
In 2014, only 3 percent of chickens were raised without antibiotics; By 2018, More than half wereAnd 90 percent of chickens were raised without antibiotics relevant to human medicine. It was a major public health victory, but the livestock industry was quick to follow to indicateIt’s more chicken-led death on the farm
As a result, Tyson Foods — the nation’s largest poultry producer — and Chick-fil-A each Rolled back Their “no antibiotics” promise and reintroduced a class of antibiotics called ionophores, which are not used in human medicine. Ionophores pose little threat to human health Some experts are concerned They can still contribute to the growth of bacteria resistant to antibiotics.
But the data suggest that the poultry industry’s shift away from antibiotics isn’t the only reason for its rising mortality rate: despite antibiotic use remaining stable From 2018 to 2023The death rate on the farm continued to rise. Some of this can be attributed to disease outbreaks that affected the industry during this period, viz Infectious bronchitis, Avian metapneumovirusAnd Necrotic enteritis. But part of the problem may be what the meat industry has done to the chickens themselves.
Chickens are getting too big to survive
In the 1950s, poultry companies began breeding chickens for larger and faster growth. Then it took 70 days to reach the chicken.market weight” of 3 lbs. Now, chickens reach 6.5 pounds in just 47 days; About half the time to more than double the weight.
Among other traits, poultry companies selectively breed chickens that have large breasts, The most valuable part As a result of the bird, today’s chickens are extremely heavy compared to the chickens of the past.
Animal advocates say that this transformation made birds “Frankenchickens“that”Trapped in their own bodies“Which causes many health problems that lead to premature death. Many chickens’ small legs cannot support the weight of their large breasts, causing injuries so severe that they struggle to walk to reach food and water, resulting in death. Dehydration or starvation.
Between 2013 and 2023, when the use of antibiotics decreased, chickens bred 10.5 percent largerwhich may contribute to increased mortality. Fast-growing chickens “have relatively high mortality rates compared to slower-growing strains (and systems with higher welfare requirements),” Ingrid de JongA senior researcher in poultry welfare at Wageningen University in the Netherlands told me in an email.
It’s unclear how much of a role this played in the rising mortality over the past decade, though, because for decades, poultry companies have been making chickens bigger while reducing mortality. It may be that in recent years, these companies have hit a sort of biological limit — a point where raising the birds larger and larger has resulted in more of them dying on farms.
Animal advocates want to see a switch in the poultry industry Slow growing chicken breedWhich they argue will do more to reduce animal suffering than any other single change to the factory farm system.
Poultry companies don’t need to decide between more dead birds and the safety of antibiotics
Large chicken producers now wonder if they must choose between phasing out antibiotics to protect human health and keep chicken mortality low. But the experience of Perdue Farms, America’s fifth-largest chicken producer, shows that would be a mistake.
The company is not exactly one Shining Beacon of animal welfare — in most ways, its operations look like any other factory farm — but it has taken steps to reduce animal suffering that other major producers have not, and has committed to never using antibiotics, even after competitors have resumed using them.
Perdue began removing antibiotics from its production in 2002 and became antibiotic-free by 2016. At the start of the process, its mortality rate was slightly higher than the industry average, but now the company’s mortality rate is “about half a percent to one percent better than the industry.” Bruce Stewart-BrownPerdue Farms’ chief science officer, told me.
The company got there in part by cleaning up its breeding operations and hatcheries: “We’re not relying on these kinds of antibiotics to clean things that we can do ourselves.” For example, it works to get its breeding hens to lay eggs in their nests, rather than on the floor where disease can occur.
The company also refined its vaccine regimen, and adjusted the chicken feed by adding probiotics and removing animal byproducts, which can irritate the birds’ intestines, among other changes.
Throughout the poultry industry, many birds die in the last week of their lives – which is less than seven weeks – because of the health problems that accompany them due to rapid growth. To mitigate this problem, Purdue sends its birds to the slaughterhouse when they weigh slightly less than the industry average. “The last week becomes more difficult when you have heavy birds,” says Stewart-Brown.
The company is experimenting with several slow-growing varieties. That’s not going as far or as fast as animal advocates would like to see the company go, but it’s more than what Perdue’s competitors have done.
Many hatchlings die early in their lives in hatcheries, where they are handled roughly, from injury or mutilation, or from being injured on mechanical processing lines. Many also die during transport from the hatchery to the farm, where their fragile bodies are packed tightly in crates and do not receive food or water for 24 to 72 hours.
There is a growing push in Europe for On-farm hatchingwhich reduces mortality and shows the need for early-stage antibiotics.
Poultry production is the least regulated part of the meat industry, which is not saying much, beef and pork production are also completely deregulated. But there are no federal laws protecting chickens in hatcheries, farms or slaughterhouses. Setting meaningful regulations for animal welfare, farm hygiene and antibiotics will go a long way towards reducing animal suffering and mortality in poultry farms.
Absent it, the industry remains engaged in a perpetual game of optimization whack-a-mole, where public health and animal welfare are almost always sacrificed on the altar of endless chicken wings and cheap meat.
