Broiler chicken is a prime example of science unleashing evil.
Remember, ideologies such religion, politics, nationality etc., are not the only "privileged" ones to unleash evil. Everything under the sun and touching human minds have the potential to become evil.
If your plate is filled with misery, you are indeed feasting on misery (when there zillion misery free alternatives). Diet of misery can never be a healthy diet from your body.
There is an unending quest to find a better chicken because humans simply cannot control their taste buds even when billions live a miserable life.
When Peterson was a child, a typical chicken would take around four months to reach its slaughter weight of 2.5 pounds. Growth rates began to crank upwards in the 1950s, and by the 1970s, as Peterson rose to the heights of his reputation, the chicken was well on its way to becoming a new beast — one featuring a “distinctive new morphotype,” according to scientists. Today, chickens reach 5 pounds in two months, while consuming less food.
Consistently fast-growing and fat chickens became the foundation of a small empire. Before Peterson passed away in 2007, his company was cranking out more than a million broilers each week and bringing in $180 million in annual sales. That made Peterson one of the country’s top 25 poultry operators — and one of the biggest businesses in Arkansas.
The domesticated chicken — Gallus gallus domesticus — had meanwhile been turned into one of the planet’s most important animals: our most-consumed meat. With a global standing population of at least 25 billion, these birds outnumber every other vertebrate species. The total standing biomass of domesticated poultry is around three times higher than the biomass of all wild birds combined.
Understanding the human relationship with our fellow animals — and considering the future of how we might or might not eat those animals — requires reckoning with this unlikely bird.
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But the rise of poultry, and of poultry science, has not been great for the chickens themselves. They are now less functional animals than meat-growing machines. So much of a chicken’s energy gets devoted to growing as big as possible as fast as possible that the parts less useful to us humans — lungs and hearts, say — are neglected and wither. Due to underdeveloped immune systems, the birds are dosed with antibiotics. Many full-grown broilers are unable to stand under their weight. Activists and critics have called them “prisoners in their own bodies.”
They’re also more literally prisoners: Most broilers spend their brief lives locked inside massive sheds alongside tens of thousands of their genetic cousins. Each bird gets around a square foot of space, so many that are still young enough to walk have no choice but to step over their immobilized relatives. This is an ethical nightmare, clearly, but also an existential threat: So many identical chickens packed so close together is a breeding ground for disease. The latest strains of avian influenza have grown so severe that endangered wild birds have to be immunized to prevent their extinction. That several humans have tested positive for bird flu over the past few years is also worrying; the worst pandemic in the past century, with a death toll perhaps 30 times worse than Covid, came after bird flu jumped through poultry farms into human populations in 1918.
The specter of chickens killing us through disease is what first led me into the annals of the industry, and eventually to Peterson. What hope is left, I wanted to know, for those of us who enjoy eating meat?
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In the 1940s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture helped sponsor several “chicken of tomorrow” contests, competitions meant to see who could develop the fastest-growing birds. Many of the entrants attempted to tweak and perfect one of the classic, long-known chicken breeds. But the initial winner took a more daring approach: He crossed a popular East Coast meat bird with a different breed developed in California, creating an entirely new hybrid chicken. Three years later, the same breeder won a second national contest, again with a crossbred bird. A revolution had begun.
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Many of the companies that advertise “free-range” or “pastured” chicken raise these Cornish Cross hens. Andrew deCoriolis, the executive director of Farm Forward, a nonprofit that advocates for safer, healthier and more humane agricultural practices, argued that it hardly matters where such a chicken spends its life. Cornish Cross hens need so much help from humans that they may lead better lives if kept indoors, he said. Studies have found that the greatest factor impacting a chicken’s welfare is its breed. The cruelty, in other words, is inscribed at the genetic level.
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Even if you do not care about animal welfare, there are reasons to despair over industrial chicken. You might worry about human welfare, for example: Modern chicken production is a labor nightmare, sometimes conducted by underaged and undocumented immigrants. And if you don’t care about laborers, there’s a more self-serving reason to worry: Chickens are a major public health risk. The use of antibiotics could drive the evolution of drug-resistant super-bacteria that could infect humans, too.
Perhaps scarier, though, is that chicken CAFOs are breeding grounds for influenza. Population density helps increase pathogen transmission, while genetic homogeneity helps drive pathogen evolution, so sometimes mild viruses become far more deadly. Even early animal agriculture practices created what anthropologist James C. Scott called “a perfect epidemiological storm.” Since then, the scale and density of agriculture has increased enormously.
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Decades of advertising have told the world that to eat meat is to be powerful and virile, an ideal of maleness in a world where men dominate. (Studies show that meat eaters tend to hold more authoritarian political viewpoints.) As a man myself, perhaps my desire to eat meat is the result of brainwashing.
