Chickens are intelligent and emotional creatures capable of feeling pain, frustration and even empathy. They’re known for their chatter, using over 24 distinct sounds to communicate about food, danger and their feelings. A mother hen starts talking to her chicks while they’re still in the egg, helping them recognise her voice.
Chickens raised for meat, known as ‘broilers,’ face some of the worst animal welfare issues today. On Australian factory farms, it’s legal to pack tens of thousands of chickens into a single shed, where the litter beneath them is never cleaned. The buildup of acidic waste often leads to painful burns on their bodies.
Originally bred for both eggs and meat, chickens were selectively bred from the 1950s to grow faster and bigger, especially in the breast muscles, to meet demand. Generations of genetic selection, modified diets, and engineered living conditions have enabled the industry to raise more chickens, faster and at a lower cost. In less than a century, the industry has created chickens that grow twice as big in half the time.
Today’s fast-growing chickens are bred to be so heavy that their bones can’t support their bodies, causing pain and limiting natural behaviours like perching and foraging. Many suffer heart and breathing problems or struggle to reach food and water, often dying before they reach slaughter weight–at just 35 days old.
If they survive long enough to reach slaughter weight, the chickens are grabbed, crated and transported to the slaughterhouse, where they are strung up painfully by their legs and forced to hang upside-down in metal stirrups, as a conveyor belt carries them through an electrified bath to ‘stun’ them before their throats are cut with an automated knife. All chickens endure the same fate, whether they are raised in factory farms, barns or free-range systems.
Beyond the routine cruelty of factory farms and abattoirs, ‘ventilation shutdown’ is a particularly brutal method of mass killing used during disease outbreaks. The process involves cutting off ventilation and raising temperatures, which causes chickens to suffer an agonising death that ends in suffocation. It has been used through bird flu epidemics to deliberately kill millions of chickens. Alarmingly, the practice of ventilation shutdown is on the rise in the US.
What about ‘free-range’?
Broiler chickens raised in free range farming systems may be provided with more space, but they still spend most of their life inside. The Free Range Egg and Poultry Association requires outdoor access from 3 weeks old, but most broiler chickens are slaughtered between 4-6 weeks, meaning they only spend 1 week outside–if they’re lucky. Outdoor access doesn't guarantee that hens can actually get outside; it only requires a door they could theoretically use, even if they are blocked from ever doing so by crowded conditions.
It’s a common misconception that chickens don’t impact climate change since they don’t produce methane like cows. In fact, the land used to grow corn and soy for chicken feed contributes to deforestation, which drives carbon emissions and destroys habitats. Processing chicken meat also requires a lot of energy and water. Skipping just one chicken breast per week for a year saves 4,321 gallons of water—equivalent to flushing the toilet 2,700 times!
Most critical is the pollution caused by the enormous amount of waste. Chicken manure releases nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas even more potent than methane. While the pig and dairy industries produce more manure than the chicken industry, litter–the mixture of manure and dead bodies the chickens are forced to bed in–has 4 times the nitrogen and 24 times the phosphorus of waste from pigs and cows.
Although this can make chicken manure a useful fertiliser, it’s also a major threat to water and soil quality. Farms often spread manure on nearby fields, but when there’s too much, it runs off into waterways. This overload of nitrogen and phosphorus fuels algae growth. As the algae die and decompose, oxygen is depleted from the water, creating ‘dead zones’ where aquatic life can’t survive.
Around large-scale chicken operations, local communities are forced to breathe air thick with dust particles and the stench of ammonia. Beyond the unbearable odours, air pollution from chicken farming poses serious health risks and makes once-thriving areas unlivable.
Chicken plays a big role in chronic illnesses, including Australia’s leading cause of death: heart disease. Believe it or not, eating chicken raises cholesterol levels just as much as red meat. Plus, cancer-causing substances (carcinogens) can naturally occur in chicken, increasing the risk of breast and prostate cancers.
Chicken is also a major source of food poisoning. Imagine a shed crammed full of sick chickens living in their own waste. An estimated 1 million people get sick every year from chicken contaminated with harmful germs. Campylobacter, a bug that can cause severe, sometimes deadly, diarrhoea, is the top culprit. Salmonella is next, leading to symptoms like diarrhoea, fever and stomach pain. There’s also evidence that E. coli from chicken waste is responsible for causing urinary tract infections.
The widespread use of antibiotics in the chicken industry adds another layer of risk. Giving entire flocks antibiotics for growth and disease prevention is common practice in Australia and across the globe. This overuse is contributing to the growing public health threat of antibiotic-resistant infections. Recent investigations have found dangerous, drug-resistant bacteria in chicken sold at Australian supermarkets.
Zoonotic diseases pose an equally severe risk to public health. Chickens are especially concerning because they’re prone to influenza viruses that can quickly mutate and spread to humans. One ‘bird flu’ virus in particular, H5N1, has a shocking 50% fatality rate in humans. To put that in perspective, the deadliest pandemic in human history, the 1918 flu, had a fatality rate of just 2.5%. This danger hit closer to home recently when Australia reported its first human case of H5N1 in May 2024.
