Aren't chickens raised humanely for meat?

The objection

“Chickens are farmed in huge numbers, sure, but it’s quick and efficient, and the birds are looked after. What’s the harm?”

The answer

Start with the scale, because almost nobody guesses it right. Around 74 billion chickens are slaughtered for meat every year, over nine in ten of every land animal we kill [1]. If you care about animals at all, chickens are most of the story.

Now the bird itself. The modern broiler has been selectively bred to pile on breast muscle at a rate its body cannot support. It reaches slaughter weight in around 35 to 42 days, roughly five to six weeks, where its wild ancestor would still be a chick [3]. That speed is the cruelty. At about 40 days, studies find over a quarter of birds walk poorly and some can barely walk at all, their legs buckling under a frame grown too fast [3]. Hearts and lungs struggle to keep pace, and sudden death from cardiovascular failure is routine.

They live this out crammed together. EU law permits stocking densities of up to 39 kg of bird per square metre [2], by the end of the cycle roughly the floor space of an A4 sheet of paper each, in windowless sheds.

So “humanely raised” collapses on contact. The animal has been engineered to grow until it hurts, packed in until it can’t move, and killed before it is two months old. The harm is built into the bird before it hatches. There is no kind version of this at 74 billion a year.