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.”