How We Treat Chickens in the Meat Industry

🐥 Chickens Are Not “Food”. They Are Living Beings.

When most people hear the word chicken, they think of a dish, not of a living bird with feelings, intelligence, and a family life of her own. Yet, every year in India, we artificially bring billions of baby chickens into the world and make them suffer tremendously because of our demand for their flesh.

Chickens and hens are intelligent, social birds with rich natural behaviors and each chicken has a unique personality. Some chickens are bold and friendly, others shy or watchful. In their natural surroundings, they form complex social hierarchies known as pecking orders, have strong social bonds, and can recognize the faces of more than 100 other birds. Chickens love to dust-bathe in the sun with wings outstretched, forage for seeds and insects, and scratch the earth with their claws. Mother hens gently cluck to their chicks even before they hatch, teaching them different calls and guiding them to food even teaching them which food to avoid. Chickens and hens also purr when content or happy, and can be playful and funny. Like all animals, they thrive when allowed to live freely. These gentle birds are not “food,” but families with hearts and homes of their own. 🐥✨

But none of this matters inside the broiler chicken industry.

💔 Life of a Broiler Chicken:

• Chicks are born artificially in hatcheries, never seeing their mothers or experiencing a mother’s love.
• Workers cut off their beaks with a hot blade to prevent them from pecking each other out of stress.
• We cram them into filthy sheds with thousands of others, forcing them to stand on hard, dirty floors.
• Corporations that are focused only on profits have selectively bred chickens to grow unnaturally fast, reaching “slaughter weight” in just 6–8 weeks.
• The excessive weight causes them immense pain because their legs can’t take the weight of their bodies and their heart and lungs can’t function well for that weight.
• When they reach the “slaughter weight”, workers pack them into trucks, throwing them roughly into the cages on these trucks, to send them to slaughterhouses.
• Many die during transportation even before reaching the “chicken shop”.

Even the parent birds who produce fertilized eggs for the broiler industry suffer immensely. Workers artificially inseminate hens in painful procedures by pressing their genitals to insert semen, take away their eggs, and these hens never see their chicks. As for male roosters: workers in broiler farms press their genitals for semen extraction. This is a cruel practice they do multiple times a week. These cruel practices are taught to workers as if these birds have no feelings or can’t feel pain.

👉 The truth is, chicken meat production is not only violent and exploitative but also unsustainable and unsafe. In India, poultry farms and chicken shops blatantly violate both animal welfare and food safety laws. Hens and chickens are crammed into filthy, overcrowded cages with no space to move, often without clean water, proper ventilation, or veterinary care. Workers debeak chicks without anesthesia, birds are transported in suffocating crates, and slaughter is carried out in unhygienic, illegal conditions. These practices not only cause extreme suffering to sentient beings but also endanger public health, spreading diseases like salmonella and bird flu. Despite existing regulations, the industry thrives unchecked, prioritizing profit over compassion and safety. Investigations by Animal Equality India have revealed shocking cruelty in poultry facilities, while the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has a guidance document for poultry farms and shops it has repeatedly issued warnings about violations of hygiene and slaughterhouse rules.

🌱 We Can Choose Better

Every time we pick plant-based meals instead of chicken flesh, we take a stand against this cruelty. Delicious, affordable vegan alternatives are available, and by choosing them, we not only save lives, but also protect our health, and reduce environmental harm.

✨ Imagine a world where chickens are seen as they truly are: sensitive, intelligent individuals, not products. That world starts with our choices.