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our videoMore chickens are killed and eaten than any other animal. Anyone who has ever encountered chickens kept as companion animals knows that they are intelligent and inquisitive - and are also feisty and very far from being 'chicken'.
There are two types of commercial chickens - 'broilers' raised for meat and 'laying hens' who are used to produce eggs.
Broiler chickens are crammed into dark, dingy sheds, sometimes 100,000 at a time. They are bred to reach their slaughter-weight in just six weeks. They put on so much weight, so quickly that their still-developing legs often buckle under the strain. Access to food and water points then becomes even more difficult, as the birds are unable to force themselves through the crush. Weaker and sicker birds collapse and die from thirst and hunger.
The cramped conditions may also lead to abnormal aggressive behaviour, such as pecking at each other, which can turn to cannibalism. To try to stop this from happening, chicks have the ends of their beaks sliced off with a hot blade, which is extremely painful. Inside the sheds, the litter that lines the floor is not changed for the duration of the birds' lives. They are forced to stand and sleep in their own faeces and urine, which covers their feet, causing ulcers and sores and often burns away the feathers on their breasts. Because of the terrible conditions, bugs and germs run rife. Farmers put antibiotics in the food in an attempt to fight off disease and infection.
The birds are sent off to slaughter when only six weeks old, to be made into nuggets and other chicken meat products for people's plates.
The life and death of turkeys is virtually identical to that of chickens.
Hatcheries breed different types of chickens for egg production or for meat. Each year, 'useless' male chicks born of the egg-laying variety are 'disposed of' as they are of no use to the industry being unable to lay eggs. The males – as well as the weak and sick females - are separated from the rest and thrown into giant sacks or crates to be sent to the gas chamber or a giant mincing machine into which they are thrown alive.
75% of eggs produced in the UK come from 'battery' hens. Battery farms consist of row upon row of wire mesh cages stacked on top of each other inside huge windowless sheds. Four or five hens are crammed into each cage, with less space each than three-quarters of an A4 piece of paper. They can barely move, let alone stretch their wings.
The stress of living in such conditions will often cause the hens to be abnormally aggressive, pecking at and pulling out one another's feathers. In extreme cases this leads to cannibalism. Decaying corpses of dead birds are rarely removed from the cages, as the farm workers might not even notice them. To try to avoid hens injuring each other, they have the tips of their beaks sliced off when they are chicks.
Before they are 18 months old, hens are usually worn out and not ‘profitable’ enough for the industry. These are sent for slaughter and sold for just a few pence, to be used as ingredients in cheap products such as stock cubes.
Battery cages are so inhumane that they will be banned in the EU from 2012 – but that still means years of suffering ahead. And the replacement, so-called ‘enriched’ cages, will make little difference – because a cage is still a cage and the extra space that each hen will have is equivalent to the size of a postcard.
