Facts about Chickens & The Chicken Industry:
Did you know … ?
- Each year in the US, more than 9 billion birds, pigs, and cows are raised and killed for food — about 8.5 billion, or close to 95%, of these animals are chickens.
- In 1925, it took 16 weeks for a chicken to grow up to 2.5 pounds. Today, chickens are genetically manipulated to grow to more than twice that size in just six weeks.
- If you grew at the same rate as a factory farmed chicken, you’d weigh 660 pounds by the time you turned two months old.
- Studies suggest that almost a third of factory farmed chickens suffer from leg deformities so severe that they actually have trouble walking.
- One farmer summed up the extent to which we have genetically manipulated chickens by saying, “We have successfully bred most of the chicken out of the chicken.”
- Factory-farmed chickens live in their own waste for their entire lives, which can, and frequently does result in ammonia burns, respiratory issues, and eye irritations.
- Shockingly, there are zero federal regulations that protect chickens, from the moment they hatch to the moment they’re slaughtered.
- Scientists have learned that, like some other animals including pigs, chickens are smarter than four-year-old children when it comes to skills involving math, self control, and logic.
- Also, scientists confirm that chickens have communications skills on par with primates, use sophisticated signals to convey intentions, can solve complex problems, can express empathy, and can be deceptive and cunning.
- Many veggie meats, which are made entirely from plants, taste identical to chicken. In fact, New York Times food writer and author Mark Bittman said Beyond Meat’s chicken-free strips “fooled me badly in a blind tasting.”