How Much Does the Better Chicken Commitment Improve the Lives of Chickens?

While we as humans certainly have an intuitive sense for what animals are thinking, feeling, and experiencing, animals have no way of telling us outright; at least, not in any language we can understand. This makes the question of quantifying animal welfare a notoriously difficult one—and for a long time, our inability to communicate with non-human beings has been used as a justification for overlooking and denying their rights.

But, as we know, the fact that animals can’t speak to us doesn’t mean they don’t deserve lives free of suffering. As Jeremy Bentham argued in 1789, in his groundbreaking Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: “The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

Inside the walls of a factory farm, where thousands of animals experience immense suffering every single day, the deeply ingrained morals and guideposts established by human compassion utterly cease to exist. Michael Pollan expounds upon this phenomenon in his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma:

It’s not easy to draw lines between pain and suffering in a modern egg or hog operation. These are places where the subtleties of moral philosophy and animal cognition mean less than nothing, indeed where everything we’ve learned about animals at least since Darwin has been simply . . . put aside. To visit a modern CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) is to enter a world that for all its technological sophistication is still designed on seventeenth-century Cartesian principles: Animals are treated as machines—”production units”—incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this any more, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert one’s eyes on the part of everyone else.

When we’re no longer willing to avert our eyes, we are forced to confront the reality that billions of animals are being pushed to the limits of their suffering, right now, on factory farms around the world. Until the day these systems can be improved, how can we attempt to understand and quantify what these animals are experiencing—in order to argue for practices that will mitigate their suffering?

A groundbreaking framework for quantifying animal experiences

Developed by the Welfare Footprint Project—a team of accredited researchers in the fields of animal welfare, veterinary science, and pain research—the Cumulative Pain Framework attempts to answer the eternally difficult question of how to measure and compare animal experiences. The framework “allows us to measure how different components of animal production systems affect the emotional experiences of animals.” In other words, it gives us a scientific framework to quantify the amount of pain an animal is experiencing and prove that certain practices can measurably improve their welfare.

The Welfare Footprint Project describes their framework as having two pillars:

1. The first pillar breaks down complex animal production systems into individual parts that allow us to track the conditions animals experience (for example, injury, illness, or frustration from not being able to move) and incorporate this evidence into a model that can be continually updated.
2. The second pillar measures the affective impact each welfare challenge has on the animal.

The Cumulative Pain Framework measures the time animals spend in four clearly defined categories of pain intensity: Annoying, Hurtful, Disabling, and Excruciating. These empathic names evoke pain experiences that we, as humans, can understand and relate to. And the framework doesn’t just take physical pain into account—it defines “pain” as “any negative affective state,” meaning it also considers the psychological suffering that animals experience on factory farms.

This framework has incredible implications for examining the real-world effectiveness of policies and standards for improving animal welfare—among them, the Better Chicken Commitment.

What is the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC)?

Backed by leading animal welfare organizations and experts, the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC) is the primary set of standards designed to improve the lives of “broilers,” or chickens raised for meat.

The USDA Poultry Classification Guidelines define a broiler as “a chicken younger than 10 weeks old of either sex, that is tender-meated with soft, pliable, smooth-textured skin and flexible breastbone cartilage.” See any indication in this definition that the chicken is a living, feeling being? Neither do we. That’s why it’s so important that we implement a universal standard to ensure chickens raised for meat are treated like the sensitive, intelligent creatures they are.

Unlike egg-laying hens, whose lives can be significantly improved by simply eliminating the use of battery cages, broiler chickens are subjected to many different atrocities from birth until slaughter—making it especially complicated to improve their welfare with changes in practice. That’s where the Better Chicken Commitment comes in, providing one comprehensive list of recommendations for companies to reduce the suffering of chickens raised for meat.

Grounded in scientific research and developed by welfare experts, the BCC addresses issues related to selective breeding, poor housing conditions, stocking density, and slaughter. It includes guidance on which chicken breeds a farm can raise (preventing selectively bred “fast-growth” chickens), how these chickens are housed, how tightly they are packed together, and how they are slaughtered. Specifically, it prevents the use of “live-shackle slaughter,” an inhumane method in which chickens are hung by their ankles, pulled through an electrified bath, slit by the throat, and too often, boiled alive.

The BCC is a powerful standard that is driving change across the poultry industry. And like any standard, it’s subject to important questions and further development. In their analysis, the Welfare Footprint Project examined how much the BCC quantifiably improves the lives of chickens—and found that it drastically decreases the amount of time chickens will spend in pain over their lifetimes.

Why slow growth is critical for chickens

Using the Cumulative Pain Framework, the Welfare Footprint Project investigated how the BCC and similar welfare certification programs affect the welfare of broilers. Specifically, they dove into a pressing question regarding the BCC’s ban on rapid-growth breeds: Does the longer lifespan of a slow-growth chicken actually result in more overall suffering?

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The Welfare Footprint Project found the answer to be a resounding “no.” In fact, they found that the slow-growth requirement is one of the most important elements of the BCC when it comes to improving broiler welfare.

In the 1920s, the average broiler chicken weighed 2.5 pounds at the time of slaughter. By March of 2019, that weight had skyrocketed to 6.2 pounds. This change is due to selective breeding, which has exponentially increased the rate at which chickens will grow. Today, the vast majority of chickens raised for meat are selectively bred for rapid growth.

There are two main breeds of rapid-growth chickens: the Aviagen Ross 308 and the Cobb 500. These chickens are selectively bred to reach slaughter weight in just 50 days or less.

Rapid-growth chickens suffer from muscle myopathies, deformities, poor foot health, and the inability to comfortably walk or even stand. Due to the strain of rapid growth on their hearts, they are susceptible to Sudden Death Syndrome, a form of cardiac arrest. They’re also vulnerable to ascites, an excruciatingly painful condition that occurs when circulatory problems cause fluid to accumulate in the abdominal cavity. Due to their weight, these birds have trouble walking and often develop lameness—and when they spend most of their time sitting to relieve the pain, they are prone to painful skin lesions.

This unnatural growth can also lead to white striping, a disease in which a chicken’s body can’t keep up with her explosive muscle growth and replaces inflamed muscle with “stripes” of fat and collagen. In a 2021 investigation, The Humane League found evidence of white striping in 99% of packaged meat in supermarkets across the US—revealing the prevalence of jumbo birds in factory farms around the country.

“Because most welfare offenses endured by broilers are strongly associated with fast growth,” scientists at the Welfare Footprint Project explain, “adoption of slower-growing breeds not only reduces the incidence of these offenses but also delays their onset.” Specifically, they found that adoption of the BCC with a slow-growth breed results in a 66% reduction in disabling pain, 24% reduction in hurtful pain, and a 78% reduction in excruciating pain.

The researchers go on to point out that even if better management practices, such as enrichments and lower stocking density, are implemented to improve broiler welfare, “their impact is limited if the negative welfare effects inherently associated with the genetics for fast growth are not addressed.” They conclude: “The slower the growth rate, the higher the expected welfare impact.”

The widespread transition to higher-welfare breeds will be critical in the fight to improve the lives of broiler chickens. But every change counts—because incremental progress is powerful progress. Each single component of the Better Chicken Commitment—whether related to housing, slaughter, or stocking density—was designed to make a meaningful difference for animals on factory farms. Together, they provide a roadmap to transform the industry for the better.

The inner lives of animals

There’s so much we will never be able to understand or quantify about the lives, thoughts, and feelings of chickens. Studies have already shown that they display unique personality traits, experience empathy, draw on their positive and negative emotions to inform their decision-making, and can even perform basic arithmetic.

Still, research like the Cumulative Pain Framework and standards such as the Better Chicken Commitment can help us make changes that measurably improve chickens’ lives. And this work has implications that extend even beyond the Better Chicken Commitment.

Studying animal experiences reminds us that animals have their own view of the world, albeit different from our own. The more we can relate to their capabilities, their suffering, and the way they perceive the world, the more we care about how they are treated. While we may never fully understand the inner lives of animals, just the act of trying to understand—and acknowledging that they deserve the same compassion as we do—seems like a good start.