Chicken is our favourite protein – but there’s a cost
Chicken has become a cut-price protein. We consume more of it than any other meat, and the amount we eat is expected to keep climbing. While the price of chicken has dropped, production has boomed and critics say it has a cost to animal welfare. Gerard Hu
They come for them at night, when the chickens are docile enough to be handled. They grasp them by the feet, sometimes five in each hand, then carry them to the transport cages. All night it goes on, until by morning thousands have been removed. The operation is meant to be over by the time it’s light but it continues until noon. By then 250,000 chickens have been sent to the slaughterhouse.
Left behind are thousands of dead birds which have been smothered in the panic.
It was just such a scene at one of New Zealand’s industrial poultry farms in 2015 that sufficiently appalled a night-shift team leader to complain to the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI).
He said the farm, which was contracted to Tegel, was guilty of mass smotherings, catchers collecting too many birds at once, loading them incorrectly into crates, and withholding food and water for too long.
Tegel itself recognised the problem because chickens were arriving at the processing plant with severe bruising and haemorrhaging.
The complainant put part of the problem down to the high staff turnover of mostly Tongan and Asian workers, low wages and poor training.
In its report on the incident, MPI warned the farm owner that inspectors would visit to observe the chicken catching process, and nominated a day.
According to the report, it was a ‘‘random, onthe-spot’’ visit. The workers were seen carrying two chickens per hand, the correct number were placed into crates, and overall, the process complied with the welfare code.
MPI dismissed the complaint, advising the night-shift leader the problem was more related to a dispute he had with a forklift driver who was incorrectly loading the chickens on trucks. As a result, 548 died of overheating.
Such reported incidents are rare. In the past five years there have been only four complaints, none of them leading to a prosecution, MPI said in response to an Official Information Act request.
In one of these complaints, a pile of 40-50 chickens was seen out the back of a Tegel meat chicken farm near Auckland, a number of them still alive among the dead – eyes open, unable to move or stand. The operational manager was ‘‘extremely contrite’’, and MPI issued a warning.
A 2015 complaint about a Tegel farm near Christchurch detailed: ‘‘As many as 800-900 birds per day on average getting smothered in the sheds by the catchers chasing them and causing the birds to get pushed up against the wall’’. MPI ruled this was a ‘‘vexatious complaint’’.
Poultry Industry Association chief executive Michael Brooks says the industry has the lowest number of animal welfare complaints and prosecutions of any sector in New Zealand agriculture.
But critics cite the reluctance of workers to make complaints and MPI’s unwillingness to crack down on the industry as factors in the lack of prosecutions.
The National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee sets out a code of welfare for meat chickens. Under the section Physical Handling, it points out that transport and handling of animals is innately stressful, and that must be taken into account.
Other welfare issues have been raised as proof there is something not right with the industry.
The modern meat chicken or broiler is unrecognisable from that of 40 years ago, when birds took 12 weeks to reach their slaughter weight of 2 kilograms. Today the plump Ross and Cobb breeds tip the 2kg mark in just five weeks.
This speed to market, backed by an intense farming regime, has helped chicken become an affordable luxury; an easy protein to purchase at a price that’s fallen in relative terms in the past 20 years. The sheer number of chickens now processed by the industry is as hefty, with more than 95 million fresh chickens killed for eating in 2017 compared with frozen, a lowly 23 million. In 1996 just over 39m fresh chickens were processed by the industry.
During the same time the price has halved in real terms. While the volume of red meat we eat has dropped, chicken has forged ever upwards. It’s estimated we eat about 20 chickens each per year on average.
But what is life like for a meat chicken? Typically they spend their short lives in windowless sheds, packed in with upwards of 40,000 other birds and weeks of accumulated waste.
Bred to produce the maximum amount of meat in the minimum amount of time, broilers often become so top-heavy that they can’t support their own weight.
American professor of animal science Temple Grandin has stated ‘‘lameness is the single most important welfare issue in the meat chicken industry’’, and is contrary to the five animal freedoms New Zealand recognises under its Animal Welfare Act.
These are freedom from hunger and thirst, discomfort, pain, injury and disease, and freedom to express normal behaviours.
Recently AgResearch scientists studied the leg health of 6409 broilers on 20 North Island farms.
Since last carrying out similar research in 2005, they discovered an increase in shed and flock sizes, and a hike in the average growth rate of the birds. They also found evidence that heavier and older birds were becoming more lame.
Packing too many chickens in a shed is a recipe for problems. In the first weeks when they are small there is plenty of room to spare, but by 32 days of age there are about 19 birds weighing about 2kg each crammed into a square metre.
Conditions are also ripe for diseases such as breast blisters and dermatitis, caused by chickens making contact with excrement.
Often a proportion of chickens are culled at this age to make room for the remaining longer-lived animals which are killed at 43 days. The catching itself is a stressful business as teams thin out the flocks.
SPCA chief scientific officer Dr Arnja Dale says she would like to see fewer than 30kg of chickens per square metre at all times. The animal