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Dylan Rainbow
Greg McClure
Writing 39C
27 April 2016
A Review of Literature on the Practices and Implications of Chicken
Factory Farming
According to Food and Water Watch, there were over one billion broiler
chickensthat is, those used for meaton large farms in the United States in
2007. This number had nearly doubled from 583 million just ten years
before. This incredible growth demonstrates the proliferation of so-called
factory farms over several decades in the United States and around the
world.
This essay is a review of various studies concerning the practices of
factory farming and the ethical considerations for the welfare of factoryfarmed animals. I shall focus discussion on the treatment and exploitation of
broiler chickens and egg-laying hens, although factory farming has similar
adverse implications for other animals, including pigs and cattle. I will begin
by providing a brief definition and history of factory farming as it evolved,
starting in the late 1900s. With reference to Singers Animal Liberation, I will
examine in detail the methods used by factory farms to maximize
production, and I shall also discuss various studies suggesting correlations
between these methods and the chickens welfare. Finally, I shall consider

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the ethical problems that factory farming, and more generally, eating and
using animals, poses.
The argument that factory farms are inhumane and morally
reprehensible is often based on the underlying assumption that animals
raised in factory farms are bound to suffer. In this essay, I will shed light on
some of the research that offers objective evidence that may be effective in
justifying this assumption. There are plenty of ways in which factory-farmed
animals could potentially suffer; for chickens in particular, common practices
that are likely to negatively impact the lives of these birds include beak
trimming, confinement to battery cages or small spaces, a deprivation
process known as forced molting, and unnaturally rapid growth. While it may
seem intuitive that these practices are simply cruel, it is also apparent that
the empathy and objection of activists is not enough to stop factory farms
from treating animals poorly.
Of course, the subject of how we humans treat the animals we use for
food leads us to the far-reaching question of whether we should be eating,
using, and perhaps even taking care of these animals in the first place. Homo
sapiens have been killing and eating animals since the beginning, and it
appears as though our hunger for meat as a species has not declined much,
if at all, in those hundreds of thousands of years. But does our history of
dominating other creatures suggest that we should treat animals as we
please, eating them and using them as egg- and milk- and fur-producing
machines? These philosophical issues are an important part of the animal

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rights debate. In the concluding section, I shall touch upon this fundamental
problem in terms of ethics and our moral responsibilities as the most
dominant and influential animal on Earth.
Factory farming describes a form of intensive farming in which
livestock are raised in densely populated environments. These farms, also
known as concentrated animal feeding operations, are designed to produce
at maximum efficiency, but they do so largely at the cost of animals welfare.
Factory farming is a controversial topic not only because of the way the
farms treat their animals, but also for the adverse effects that these giant
operations have on the environment and public health.
Factory farming has its roots in the 1960s and 70s. After World War II,
agricultural production soared, even as the percentage of farm workers had
declined significantly since 1900. This increase in production can be largely
attributed to the rise of mechanization, rural electrification, and synthetic
chemical fertilizers after the war (Weeks 37). It was also during this period
that the fast food chain model became popular in the United States, which
created a huge demand for cheap meat and dairy products. As demand
grew, producers had to make the process more efficient just to keep up.
Raising livestock the traditional way, in large open areas, was simply no
longer practical.
In his famous 1975 book Animal Liberation, Princeton professor and
leading animal rights philosopher Peter Singer devotes an entire chapter to
the exploitation of animals on factory farms. Singer writes that his aim in this

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chapter is to demonstrate that under these methods animals lead miserable
lives from birth to slaughter (97). In using such language as miserable,
Singer freely admits that he has a strong personal opinion on the matter;
however, he warrants that, in order to make his account as objective as
possible, he draws evidence not from his personal observations but from the
sources that would more likely favor the farm industry itself (97). Singer
describes the various methods that factory farms use to maximize
production of chicken eggs and meat. Despite being published at a time
when animal welfare was not a significant public concern, Animal Liberation
has been a highly influential work, and I will be referencing Singers
descriptions of factory farming throughout this essay.
According to Singer, an essential step in the process of manufacturing
chickens on a large scale was confining them indoors. Typically, a broiler
producer puts upwards of 10,000 day-old chicks into a long, windowless shed
(Singer 98). Once the chickens have grown, these sheds become intensely
crowded. Such high stocking densities are not at all natural for the animals,
and can lead to adverse effects on welfare.
In a 2009 experiment, Stephanie Buijs, a researcher at the Institute for
Agricultural and Fisheries Research in Belgium who earned her PhD in animal
sciences, varied stocking density by housing various numbers of birds in
equally-sized pens under controlled circumstances. Buijs et al. then
measured six indicators of broiler welfare. The study found that dermatitis
and fearfulness (in males only) increased and leg health decreased with

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increasing stocking density. The study did not find a specific stocking density
above which all welfare indicators were suddenly altered; however, an
attempt at an integrated welfare score showed an overall decrease in broiler
welfare as density increased (Buijs et al.). The research indicates that,
despite being bred in these conditions for decades, chickens are not suited to
the densely-populated environments in which factory farms constrain them.
Even if these chickens had more space to roam around, their extreme
leg and body impairments would probably prevent them from moving much.
In Animal Liberation, Singer points to rapid growth as a likely cause of
various crippling conditions and deformities, which force producers to kill an
additional 1 to 2 percent of broilers (Singer 104). Singer also cites the
authors of a study of a particular form of crippling as concluding, We
consider that birds might have been bred to grow so fast that they are on the
verge of structural collapse (Singer 104). This structural collapse is no
exaggeration, as the chickens often develop so fast that their legs can barely
support their body weight.
The 2004 book Measuring and Auditing Broiler Welfare, which brings
together academic papers by international experts, discusses (among many
other issues) impaired mobility in broilers. The book is edited by two faculty
members of Bristol University: Dr. Claire Weeks, who specializes in animal
welfare and behavior, and Dr. Andrew Butterworth, who earned his PhD in
poultry pathology. In the first chapter, Dr. Joy Mench, Professor of Animal
Science at the University of California, Davis, writes that the development of

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skeletal disorders is related to selection and management for rapid growth,
evidenced by the fact that the disorders are rare in slow-growing meat
strains but common in modern commercial broilers (Auditing Broiler Welfare
3). Regarding the welfare of broilers with such conditions, Mench concludes
that affected birds may be in pain, have difficulty reaching food and water,
and are more prone to potentially painful skin conditions since they spend
more time lying in the floor litter and are stepped on and scratched by other
birds. Mench also notes that the lack of activity seen in broilers may only
worsen their skeletal problems, since there is evidence that inactivity can
contribute to abnormal bone development (Auditing Broiler Welfare 12-13).
Thus, the work indicates that rapid growth in broilers is likely to result in a
positive feedback loop in which leg and skeletal heath continue to
deteriorate.
Furthermore, there is experimental evidence demonstrating a
relationship between broiler lameness and pain. Mench refers to a 2000
study by T.C. Danbury et al. in which sound and lame broilers (from
commercial flocks) were trained to discriminate between two different
colored feeds. One of the feeds contained carprofen, a drug with analgesic
(pain-killing) properties. All broilers were given equal and unconstrained
access to both feeds. The study found that lame birds tended to self-select
more feed containing carprofen than sound birds (Danbury 309). The fact
that broilers prefer food containing the analgesic drug suggests that chronic
lameness is indeed painful for chickens. This point was further supported by

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the observation that sound birds tended to avoid the feed with carprofen,
probably because high doses of such drugs can produce adverse side effects
such as nausea (Danbury 310). From this, it is only reasonable to conclude
that the lame broilers experienced enough discomfort due to lameness that
they were willing to tolerate the negative side effects of the drug in
exchange for reduced pain. Since factory farms tend to have high rates of
lameness, it is likely that broilers in such conditions suffer significantly.
An issue perhaps even more serious than lameness, however, has been
the confinement of laying hens to battery cages. A 2014 report by Jonathan
Ward, who earned a masters degree in business administration and has
worked with a number of nonprofits advocating for sustainable food and
farming systems, briefly describes the origin of such cages. Ward writes that
birds had traditionally been kept outside in small flocks, but when animal
farming trended toward mass-production in the second half of the 20th
century, farmers began bringing their chickens inside in cages. This change
provided many advantageseggs were easier to collect and clean, sanitation
improved, feed could be rationed, and birds were protected from dangerous
weather and animals (Ward 7). Thus, cages for laying hens became the
norm. While advantageous for the farmers, however, the cages had serious
implications for the hens welfare.
A 2009 report by Dr. Sara Shields for the Humane Society of the
United States compares the welfare of egg-laying hens in battery cages and
in alternative systems. Dr. Shields, a farm animal behavior and welfare

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specialist, claims that the overwhelming majority (95%) of laying hens used
for commercial egg production in the US are confined in battery cages that
afford each bird 67 square inches of space (less than the area of a regular
sized sheet of paper). Additionally, the cages prevent the hens from
performing most of their natural behaviors, including nesting, foraging, wingflapping, and more (Shields 1). Domesticated animals often retain their wild
behavioral instincts even in environments that no longer require that
behavior for survival, and nesting behavior in hens is a prime example (2).
Decades of scientific research indicate that caged hens suffer from
frustration and distress because there is no outlet for nesting behavior (2).
After analyzing many other behavioral preferences and needs, Shields
surmises based on scientific grounds that battery cages cannot adequately
provide satisfactory welfare for laying hens.
In 2010, the American Veterinary Medical Association composed a
literature review on another controversial aspect of factory farming
associated with egg laying hens: beak trimming. Also known simply as
debeaking, this is the removal of a portion of the upper and sometimes lower
beak of a bird in order to reduce peck injuries and cannibalism in groups of
poultry (Welfare Implications of Beak Trimming 1). The review addresses
welfare concerns, techniques, and possible alternatives to beak trimming.
The author notes that beak-trimming younger birds seems to avoid the longterm chronic pain that can occur in older birds; still, trimming at any age
causes acute pain and physiological stress. As was the case when Singer

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wrote Animal Liberation in 1975, beak trimming is currently considered a
necessary management practice for poultry (Welfare Implications of Beak
Trimming 3).
From the extensive research conducted over the decades since factory
farming began, it is clear that concentrated animal farming operations utilize
methods that put the welfare of broiler and laying chickens into serious
question. Although it can be difficult to scientifically assess just how much
animals suffer under certain conditions, the literature on the subject seems
to support the widely-held notion that conditions in factory farms are far from
ideal if we wish to minimize animal suffering. The statistics show that animal
welfare is a concern for most Americans. But if the people care about
animals, then why do they continue to support an industry that is notorious
for mistreating them? This cognitive dissonance is a serious roadblock to the
advancement of animal rights.

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Works Cited
Buijs, S. "Stocking Density Effects on Broiler Welfare: Identifying Sensitive
Ranges for

Different Indicators." (n.d.): n. pag. 19 Mar. 2009.

Web. 24 Apr. 2016.

Danbury, T.C., C.A. Weeks, A. E. Waterman-Pearson, S. C. Kestin, and J. P.
Chambers. "Self-selection of the Analgesic Drug Carprofen by Lame
Broiler Chickens." Veterinary Record 146.11 (2000): 307-11. Web. 27
Apr. 2016.
Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. New York, NY: New York Review of, 1990.
Print.
Shields, Sara and Duncan, Ian J.H.. "An HSUS Report: A Comparison of the
Welfare of Hens in Battery Cages and Alternative Systems"
(2009). HSUS Reports: Farm Industry Impacts on Animals. Paper 18.
Web. 23 Apr. 2016.

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