Imagine a situation in which over 90% of the people in the world are cripple , who can't walk normally and suffer from constant pain for about half of their lifetime. A global nightmare!
Our real world is much worse than the one you have just imagined.
This is an every day reality for a population, which is 8 times larger than the human one annually.

The industry which makes meat out of little fragile chicks, also referred as broiler chickens, is indubitably the most extreme example of humans’ absolute and destructive domination over non-human animals.
A domination which is found in every aspect of the chick’s miserable short life.

The massacre numbers are unbearable. 139 million chickens are murdered every single day. 96,500 every minute! 1,600 a second!
Right now, while you are reading this sentence, thousands of sentient creatures are brutally slaughtered somewhere in the world. More than 3,200 in a second. And there will be even more tomorrow.

The suffering begins at birth

The chicks never experience maternal care. Under natural conditions the mother hen is fiercely protective of her chicks, sheltering them under her wings for their first two months of life. In the meat industry, a few hours-old chicks are thrown into prisons. Motherless from day one, the chicks must fend for themselves in huge windowless sheds with up to 100,000 other birds. Humans have broken their ties with their own mothers and their natural environment.

Under natural conditions, chickens live in complex social structure and have complex communication. Chickens spend 50% of their time foraging for food. They have strong sense of personal space. In the sheds, the chicks are denied of fresh air, social order and normal hierarchy, adequate resting period, sunshine, dust bathing, quietness, ability to forage, natural diet and space.

Chickens can function well in groups of up to 90, a number low enough for each bird to find a niche in the pecking order. In crowded groups of thousands, no such social order is possible, so the frustrated birds peck one another intensely, sometimes they even kill one another.

As the birds grow, space for each individual decreases. At some point each bird has only 20x20cm of floor and must push his/her way trough a solid mass of other chickens to reach food and water points. Many die in the attempt.

The violent body invasion

Picture a six-year-old child weighting 156kg. Terrifying!
Now try to imagine him walk.
Hideous and cruel for a child, but a present reality for a six weeks old chick.

Naturally chicks reach maturity at 18 weeks of age, when they weigh less than 1kg (2.2lb). A human child reaches maturity at 18 years of age weighing about 60kg. By 1976, the domestic chicken reached 1kg just after 6 weeks rather than 18. So picture, for comparison, not an eighteen-year-old but a six-year-old child weighing about 60 kg. Today, because of the intensive selective breeding by the broiler industry in the past 25 years, the six-week-old chicken weighs up to 2.6kg.
That is the equivalent of a six-year-old child weighing 156kg!
In the next few years, Chickens will reach over 2kg in less than five weeks or reach about 3kg in 6 weeks, the equivalent of a six-year-old child weighing 180kg.

Today's meat chickens have been genetically altered to grow three times faster and three times larger than their ancestors. Pushed beyond their biological limits, hundreds of millions of chickens die each year before reaching 6 weeks of age. The modern broiler is a genetic freak, doomed to eternal physical and mental ills.

By nature, chickens are alert and nimble creatures who forage for food.
These forest-dwellers have been forced to subsist in alien bodies in an alien environment. They are not suited for the life imposed on them in order to satisfy humans' demands.

Broiler chickens have been forced to grow three times faster than normal chickens through dietary, lighting and genetic manipulations, resulting in painful skeletal and metabolic diseases. An example is Tibial Dyschondroplasia, in which the young leg bones of the growing birds develop crippling fissures and fractures.
Several decades ago, 1.2% of chickens suffered from Tibial Dyschondroplasia. Today, 50% of the chickens suffer from this human-created disease.

The combination of forced rapid growth and excessive weight causes chronic, painful lameness and abnormal gait. The bird’s body grows too fast for the bone plates to accommodate. Consequently, the birds develop angular bone deformities and “kinky back”, in which the vertebra snaps and puts pressure on the spinal cord, causing paralysis. The birds can only move by using their wings to balance.

Studies have shown that 90% of birds have a detectable abnormality in their gait. Pathological leg conditions which have been found in broilers include: tibial dyschondroplasia, twisted leg, tibia septic arthritis in joints, "kinky back" and slipped tendons.

Though they live only a few weeks, chickens suffer old-age illnesses such as heart attacks, as their hearts and lungs are unable to keep up with the fast growth of their body muscles. Heart attacks and the so-called “acute death syndrome” are major causes of mortality.

The strain on their cardiovascular system is enormous, causing “congestive heart failure” which causes ascites - a pooling of blood fluids in the abdomen. The high oxygen demand of rapid growth in the modern broiler combined with restricted space for blood, which flows through the capillaries of the lung, results in an internal accumulation of yellow or blood-stained fluid in the abdomen. Cardiac arrhythmias have been found in broiler chickens as young as 7 days of age!

The unnatural growth rate of broilers combined with the lack of space to move or exercise, force the birds to rest on the wet, dirty, ammonia-ridden litter. This leads to painful breast blisters and hock burns which are very common. Foot and breast lesions and ulcerations are also frequent.

The faster a bird grows the higher the incidence of leg problems.
The birds spend 40% less time walking because of legs weakness and chronic pain. Humans severely disable billions every year for the sake of a few more cents over the soar body of each "little money unit". The chicks can’t stand because their legs are deformed and they can’t sit as a result of the breast blisters and the hock burns. There is no way to avoid the constant pain.

The health problems of the chickens are so severe that if they were allowed to live on, instead of being slaughtered at 6 weeks, most would die before reaching the age of puberty, at 18 weeks.

The broiler industry has virtually bred animals, which are simply not viable. They are unable to reach adulthood because of the related problems of crippling leg and heart diseases.
Generally, it doesn’t concern the industry, because the vast majority of the birds will be slaughtered before reaching adulthood. But the industry is in a bind, some of the birds must reach adulthood to be the breeder flocks. Those that are to produce the future generations. These birds must not only survive, but also remain sufficiently healthy to breed.

If these chickens were fed normally, most would die before puberty and the survivors would suffer from reduced fertility. To avoid these problems, the industry has to find a way of slowing down the fast growth rates of the breeders (growth rates which have been imposed on the breeders to ensure that their offspring put on weight as quickly as possible). The industry’s "solution" is to feed breeders on severely restricted rations - in some cases, just 25% - 50% of what they would eat if given free access to food. Broiler breeders are chronically hungry, frustrated and stressed. The birds are highly motivated to eat all the time and display abnormal forms of oral behaviour such as stereotyped pecking at non-food objects and excessive preening. Such behaviours are characteristic of birds whose desire for food is deprived, and who are undernourished.

They are literally going mad of hunger.

Despite the severely restricted rations, male breeders still experience chronic orthopaedic problems, which cause chronic pain.

The effort to squeeze more and more money over the chicks broken and deformed body, leads to enormous amount of experiments. One example regards the lighting. Artificial lighting in the broiler sheds is carefully controlled. Initially, lighting is bright to accustom the chicks to the location of food and water and encourage maximum eating and rapid growth. This lighting is then dimmed (to a level of 2-5 lux) in order to discourage aggression and fighting between chickens. The chickens suffer from a gloomy lighting all day long.
In the name of greediness, humans would do anything, even turn off the sun.

Broiler farmers usually rear five or six batches of chickens a year. Two or three weeks are needed between batches to allow the sheds to be fumigated and cleared of the litter. The litter is not changed or cleaned, during the chickens' time in the shed, and so becomes increasingly wet and greasy and covered with the bird's faeces. It is estimated that 80% of the litter by weight consists of faeces by the time of slaughter. Stress and disease are inevitable under these conditions. Strong ammonia fumes can lead to keratocon-junctivitis, a painful eye condition leading to blindness. Heart attacks (also called acute death syndrome), chronic respiratory disease, fatty liver, kidney syndrome, a wide range of bacterial and viral infections lead to high mortality amongst flocks.

During the summer, millions of chickens die a horrible death from dehydration. Also, fires break very often in hot weather countries in the summer. The farmer who doesn’t see the chickens as sentient creatures but as production units, won’t make a big effort to save them. The facility is more expensive than the chickens, therefore more important, and he won’t hesitate to use a giant hose to save the facility, no matter what it would do to the chickens. If no one is there to do anything about it, the chickens will burn alive.

Their last day is probably the most traumatic one. The chickens are violently grabbed while asleep, in the middle of the night, by humans who are yelling at them while pitching and stuffing them into the crates, in which they will be transported to the next stage of human atrocity… the slaughterhouse.

Teams of catchers "depopulate" the sheds as quickly as possible, carrying four or more birds upside down in each hand. The chickens are held by just one leg. Their well-being is of little importance as the catchers "must" yield 400-500 chickens per hour. This brutal process is referred to by the industry as "harvesting". This expression says it all…
The prevalence of dislocated hips is one of the worst aspects of the broiler industry. As a result of the brutal yanking of chickens from their prisons, to the transportation trucks, their hips are often dislocated, causing immense pain.

During the journey, the birds experience sudden jolting movements, vibration, loud noises, deprivation of food and water and overcrowding. Extreme heat or cold and high levels of humidity combined with bad ventilation are also encountered. All these contribute to distress and extreme horror.

Long delays can occur between arrival at the slaughterhouse and unloading. This intensifies the stress imposed by the transport. These delays occur when birds arrive too late to the slaughterhouse. They are then left in the containers on the lorry to be slaughtered on the next day. In many cases these delays are accompanied by poor weather conditions, such as extreme heat or cold.

Once they arrive to the murder factory, the chickens that survived so far are yanked from the crates and shackled onto a conveyor belt by their feet, while still alive. In cases that the bird’s legs are too big for the shackles, the workers break them to fit them in.

The conveyor carries them into the slaying room where their heads pass through an electrified water bath intended to stun them. As they pass along further, an automatic knife cuts their throat, and then they proceed into a scalding tank to loosen their feathers before plucking. Unfortunately some birds lift their heads and miss the electrified water bath and are therefore still fully conscious when they reach the automatic knife. Some birds may also miss the knife and are then lowered into the 50-degrees scalding tank while still alive. Some regain consciousness inside the scalding tank, which means that they will be conscious when the plucking knives tear their bodies.

Back-up people are supposed to cut the throats of the chickens that miss the automatic knife, but due to the total concentration on speed in the processing plants this does not always occur.

What emphasizes speciesism and humans’ alienation more than anything, is the farming regulation – "40 kilogram per meter".
One sentence that unfortunately describes the relationship between human and nonhuman animals, in the most accurate way.
This relationship is devastating to all nonhuman animals. To more than 100 billion animals per year. This relationship has got to end.

Don’t let the routine confuse you:

Isolating animals from their natural environment is wrong!

Depriving the opportunity to carry out any natural behavior is wrong!

Depriving maternal care is wrong!

Depriving a normal social structure is wrong!

Spending a life in severely over crowded shed is wrong!

Living in the excrement of thousands of birds during a lifetime is wrong!

Genetically invading to someone else's body is wrong!

Creating a genetic freak, doomed to all manner of physical and mental ills in the sake of earning a few more cents is wrong!

Depriving animals from supporting their own weight is wrong!

Causing cardiac arrhythmias at seven days old is wrong!

Being exposed to sunlight only on the way to the slaughterhouse is wrong!

Crippling 50 billion creatures a year is wrong!

If you accept all this happening and wait until the last meat eater will be convinced, and you don’t think we must stop it right now, at any price, then you are not much better than those who take an active part.

DO NOT REDUCE SUFFERING WHEN YOU CAN ELIMINATE IT!