“All sorts of things go wrong in these systems. These are very fast growing birds. The typical chicken that’s produced in this and sold at the supermarket is 42 days old when killed, so it’s really a baby. But, it’s a very big baby because we’ve selected these birds over many, many generations to grow very, very fast and that’s the economics of it.
That’s the cheapest way to produce them, but one of the results is that their bones are still immature and they grow to this weight that, whatever it is when you buy them, four to five pounds, and their legs often can’t actually hold them and their legs may just actually crumple under them and they may just collapse on the floor, unable to walk.
And if that happens when they’re far away from the feeding pipe and can’t get food or water, they are just going to die of thirst and nobody is going to come through and say ‘Oh, there’s a sick bird I’d better do something about it.’ Every now and then they’ll pick up the corpses as they decay and get maggoty and so on. Mostly they lay there until they’re dead.”
—Peter Singer (Australian Philosopher of Bioethics)
