broiler – precisely, of the meat chicken, an industrial object, hatched, shipped as chicks, raised to slaughter weight in but six or seven weeks, and then dispatched on an evisceration line for processing, transport and consumption around the globe. This study shows that the modern chicken, engineered over a century for rapid growth with meatier breasts and thighs, and the modern chicken industry, deployed for speed, efficiency and profit, leaves much to be desired from animal welfare, social and environmental perspectives. The broiler not only symbolizes, but actually is, billions of tons of chickens produced in tightly packed sheds, and billions of tons of poorly handled or stored fecal matter and offal including guts, feathers, and piles – millions – of dead animals. The broiler is generally produced by poorly paid contract workers at massive factory farms. On top of all this, the broiler presents a series of new health and safety risks, including new disease vectors for bacterial diseases and Avian Influenza.
1 Over the course of less than a century, chickens were transformed from farmyard birds to factory birds that are confined to sheds for all of their short, seven-week lives.
The major production unit for the broiler, the concentrated animal feed operation (CAFO), consists across the globe of thousands of huge sheds erected in the last 10, 20, 30 years or so, with some of the sheds containing tens of thousands of fowl, each bird unable to move a more than a step, and each denied fresh air and free range – a kind of chicken gulag, where the purpose of each inmate is to devote all of its energy to the Chicken State before its eventual slaughter. The owners of CAFOs and other factory farms resist change in their chicken manufacture practices that might alter the production system in the direction of animal welfare or greater pollution control by pointing to the uncertainties and costs associated with change. Their owners claim the CAFOs need not be regulated more carefully for animal welfare because they meet national – and occasionally international – standards, they satisfy real and growing consumer demand for meat protein, and the solution to pollution and waste is being engaged head-on. Yet factory farms persist in pushing their employees, the environment and the chicken itself harder and harder, and when a factory farm is built in a pastoral, rural community, no one is happy, least of all the local residents who find their daily lives disrupted by the smell of ammonia, the sounds of trucks, and the domination of the local economy by an industry – the factory farm – that owes allegiance to owners, bosses and managers, not those residents. And, yes, European CAFO-generated chicken leaves a better taste in the mouth than the American broiler that suffers through weaker regulations in comparison to EU ones that cannot guarantee bird health or welfare.
Factory-farm chickens have spread across the world, and they are grown to maturity so quickly that it is difficult to determine even roughly what their total number is. I have tried to make sense of broilers’ numbers. Over 53 billion broiler chickens are killed annually for their meat. The broiler’s life is short and under the total control of its industrial handlers. Chickens peck out of eggshells after 21 days in an incubator. The incubator and the brooder, both nineteenth-century inventions, enabled separation of chicks from mother hens, and eggs from meat production. Being quite successful in producing eggs and freeing up human labor, the incubator and brooder accelerated the path to the complete industrialization of an animal. But, if chicks can walk at birth, then they are denied that possibility and stuffed into massive sheds. Were they only to be comfortable in their temporary homes with temperatures of 32 to 35 °C and humidity of 60 to 70 percent! But their purpose is not to move, but to eat and gain weight as quickly as possible – in the United States to, on average at 47 days, 2.6 kg, and in the European Union, at 42 days, to 2.5 kg. Since they reach slaughter weight within several weeks, they have poorly developed immune systems. Yet the overpacked sheds, filled with shit, feathers, shavings and dead birds, are breeding grounds for infections. The broilers must be fed or sprayed with antimicrobials (“vaccinated”) against Salmonella, Newcastle disease virus, infectious bronchitis, Avian Influenzas, Marek’s disease and others. The broiler is a bird, but it is also an industrial object, an output made of energy, chemical, and water input in carefully controlled environments.
The broiler is a prisoner in a technological panopticon with no prospects of hunting, pecking and roosting as chickens normally hunt, peck and roost. In the twentieth century, a kind of free-range life persists in many places, and even in urban and suburban backyard settings where they are pets, egg producers, insect swallowers, and also a source of food. In the unforgiving factory farm, various technologies of control focus the chicken’s metabolism on rapid weight gain. But free-range chickens are in the distinct minority. At factory farms, chickens occasionally get natural daylight and natural ventilation, but they are rare exceptions. Only a few countries – the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Sweden, for example – require windows in chicken sheds. The barren, seemingly infinite sheds that prevail in factory farms have only feeding and drinking points. Higher welfare would necessitate more space (reduced stocking density), slower-growing breeds, a later slaughter time, and access to outdoors. Very few chickens in the world (less than 1 percent) are raised free-range – that means at least half the time outdoors.2 Since chickens are outdoors animals, this means a forced change in their behavior. They have been invited inside, under lock and key, for less than a century, but in this century they have become a major source of protein for billions of consumers.
This books aims at a global history of the industrial chicken. By the late 1950s, led by the United States, agricultural manufacturers had embarked on integrating the industry from bottom to top, from egg layers to chick producers to contractors responsible for shed raising, to processing plants for slaughter and reassembly as whole birds, parts, and various other products. The integrators own and control the delivery of the inputs – the birds, the feed, the antibiotics – all of which are to be tended and applied as specified by contract laborers or hourly paid workers. By the end of the century, this system had spread across the globe, with Brazil, China, France and the US among the leaders. These countries, often following the example of US factory-farm practices and businesses, accelerated a striking industrial transformation in agriculture. They have united nature and technology in a production paradigm. They have developed a single species of animal – moreover, a monoculture of animal – that is engineered to ensure a uniform product, the broiler. The broiler has been subjugated to the production ethos and the profit motive of the capitalist system, in this case primarily in the CAFO. The CAFO is a powerful tool: almost universally, nations have responded in a welcoming fashion to the broiler imperatives of efficiency, speed and industry concentration because people want cheap animal meat, and they have been slow to respond to growing community turmoil, pollution and public health threats.
Consumers and Their Role in Making the Modern-Day Broiler
A major reason for the success of the broiler has been growing consumer demand for chicken meat. Consumers are major actors in the chicken story – and in animal meat industries generally. Granted, in this book I focus on the production and technology sides of broilers. But it must be pointed out – if it is not obvious – that consumers north and south, east and west, in post-industrial nations and traditional peasant societies, have a growing, almost insatiable, appetite for meat. They want it on the table at home, and they want more poultry. They love it at KFC in China – the average Chinese person now eats more meat annually than the average American person. They want their nuggets when they pull up to a drive-in window of a fast-food joint in the US. France has become the fourth-largest producer and consumer of chicken in the world, satisfying to the French palate, and through exports also those of Saudis, South Africans, Spaniards and Brits. Americans consumed, in one day, 1.3 billion chicken wings during the broadcast of the 2018 football Super Bowl alone. July 29 in the US is National Chicken Wing Day. (Boneless wings, increasingly promoted by restaurants, are not wings at all, but slices of breast meat deep-fried like wings and served with sauces.)
Consumers seem content not to think about factory farms or the agricultural laborers who toil in them. They have offered little criticism – until recently – of deforestation of vast tracts of land to facilitate meat, especially
