Question
What about backyard chickens?
Alternatives
What if animals were farmed humanely? My aunt and uncle have a farm…
Summary
Chickens, perhaps even more than any other farmed animal, have been intensively bred to be production machines. This is a form of interspecies abuse. The breeds of hens in our farming systems have been selectively manipulated to lay hundreds of eggs yearly, many times more eggs and larger ones than their wild forebears. This is only one facet of a torturous regime they endure that is inconsistent with their health and quality of life. Life in a backyard would almost always be better than a factory farm, but modern hens can never escape the fact that their bodies have been bred to suffer. If you care at all about the pain of these friendly, inquisitive creatures, the best policy is to eat plants instead.
Discussion
The industrial factory farm is one of the cruellest creations of humankind. They are the inevitable product of the sheer quantity of meat people consume and the relentless push to make it profitable. They are part of a perverse cycle of intensification: creating a more industrial system that sacrifices animal welfare leads to cheaper animal products, and creating cheaper animal products leads to people consuming more of them. There is much talk about historical human progress, and while there are many rising indicators of human ethics and well-being, for animals, a different story has unfolded. There have never been more animals living in factory farms, and the conditions of these lives seem to be on a downwards trajectory. This industrial system has pushed animals towards ever more confinement, more intensive genetic meddling, earlier slaughter, and less autonomy to pursue their natural desires.
Economics over ethics
A widely viewed debate about the ethics of eating animals was held some years ago. The side arguing against the interests of animals starting out with a statement something like this, "We don't support or want to defend the factory farm, but". This turned the debate from their side largely into irrelevancy. To avoid talking about factory farming while discussing the real-world ethics and consequences of eating animals is to avoid the elephant in the room in order to discuss its shadow. In the United States, the percentage of animals raised on "humane" farms is below 1%. For pigs, chickens, turkeys, ducks, and increasingly cattle, shrimp and fish, the percentage of individuals that lead anything like a decent, natural life is minimal. The reality of animal farming is increasingly and overwhelmingly factory farming.
It is profit, not ethics, that governs the way we treat farm animals. People have voted with their wallets for the cruel factory farm. The inescapable result of each person wanting cheap animal products is that a community of animals has to endure life in factory farms before their, literally, premature slaughter. For every person who eats an animal product heavy diet, it has been calculated that at least 26 land and hundreds of aquatic animals are bred and confined in farms for them. Multiply this by billions of humans and you start to comprehend the collosal scale of animal farming. Industrialised animal agriculture and the universal meat-heavy diet are modern creations wholly dependent upon each other. To abolish the worst aspects of factory farming, to meaningfully reduce the suffering and vast environmental footprint these farms cause, animal product consumption would probably need to be scaled back to pre-industrial levels.
This is not to say that people support the factory farm intellectually. Some interesting but hard to understand surveys in developed nations have shown wide support, often around half of the population, for banning slaughterhouses and factory farms. People will often say they want farm animals to have better treatment and also that they would like to eat fewer animal products. This doesn't seem to correlate to action, however. The old political contradiction seems to come into play: people want things to be better, but they also don’t like having to change or paying more for things. In place of consequential action, people, almost whimsically, talk about more humane farms. They place their hope and conscience in the hands of impractical fixes that they aren't morally serious enough about to think through fully. They idea is that humane farms could be a “drop-in” alternative for factory farms, that these humane farms could provide a win-win outcome by having more compassionately raised animals providing products in similar quantities and at similar prices. Neither part of this win-win dream scenario is true. The best that any of the "more humane" farms currently operating can provide is slightly less cruel meat at prices much higher than standard factory-farmed products. The economic practicalities of providing anaesthetic for the many surgeries done in factory farming, or for raising animals in ways consistent with their natural desires just don't add up. Huge corporations have, for many decades now, been optimising and refining a factory farming system built on the subjugation of every animal interest to profit. Anything resembling a traditional farming approach will never compete with the scale and efficiency of these huge international conglomerates built to churn out animal body parts and secretions at the lowest cost.
Hypocrisy
Even among the rare animal product-consuming people who think much about humane farming, very few of them are even loosely consistent in what they buy. It is actually a strange thing to be vegan and have so many people ask you questions like "What about if we treated animals better?", but when you ask how often they buy more humane alternatives, the answer is usually a blank stare. There has been some improvement for some animals, such as laying hens, in some countries. Free-range eggs and "certified" products have become more common, but in many countries the definition of what is free range has also been watered down in the interests of greater profit making. What are called "true" free range egg consumption in the US has been in the low single digits for decades, though this number is much higher in Australia and the United Kingdom. The more moderate move from battery cage to barn raised hens has been more successful, accounting for between a fifth to two thirds of eggs sales in most developed nations. Interestingly when asked why they prefer barn laid or free range eggs the majority of consumers cite not hen welfare, but taste or health concerns as the main reason they buy them. While these medium intensity methods do offer significant improvements in welfare over caged alternatives, they are ultimately limited in their scope purely by economics. Other forms of animal products, however, have not seen anywhere near the level of uptake of humane alternatives. Why people who eat meat regularly bring up the discussion of humane farming, which they don’t seem to want to pay very much for or go to any effort to make happen, remains a mystery. It's like their fantasies about the potential for humane animal farming in the future creep into the existing world just enough to absolve their conscience about what is actually going on. There are many pleasing fantasies we can have, but surely it is what we do and pay for to happen in the real world that defines our ethical self.
Backyard farming has an emotional appeal, as it tries to replicate the stories children enjoy reading about animals and farms. In our storybooks there are mother hens clucking happily with their chicks under their wings, a rooster on a fence crowing to greet the sunrise, a happy piglet on some grass, and a smiling cow with a flower in its mouth and her calf by her side. These fairy tales are often replicated on the outside of animal product packaging. Inside those packets, however, is the reality of animals that experienced many cruelties and had an unnaturally short life before they were transported to face the horrors of a slaughterhouse. Many of them have never known a consistent family or relationships, have never been allowed to express their natural behaviours, and may have never seen the sun except perhaps when crammed together in trucks while being transported to their death. Pigs, cows, roosters, large fish- there are very few animals that conveniently fit into the backyard farmer ideal, but then backyard farming is more about bucolic fantasies than any serious solution to the widespread suffering of farm animals.
Out of sight, out of mind
Let us return to consider the poor chicken, perhaps the most widely abused animal in the world. If you ever wonder about the scale of factory farming, think about the fact that there are more individual chickens in Europe than the top 100 wild bird species combined. Some kind people try to adopt egg laying hens at the end of their productive life cycle, when the industry would usually send them for slaughter. As there are around 8 million laying hens in the world at any given time, the ability of adoption to make anything more than a tiny dent in these numbers. Rehoming an animal from a factory farm that would otherwise be slaughtered, whilst a noble idea, also comes with various health and often mental issues for the birds. Corporations with profit, not hen welfare, in mind, have intensively selectively bred the modern factory-farmed hen. Wild chickens lay two clutches of eggs each year, comprised of around one to two dozen eggs. The modern factory-farmed chicken has been bred to lay 10-15 times this amount, producing an egg almost every day. The eggs they lay are also significantly larger. This intense production regime takes a terrible toll on the hens' small bodies, leaching calcium and other vital nutrients. Animal sanctuaries that take in hens from factory farms often give the hens hormones to slow down their egg production and give their bodies a chance to heal, though this isn’t a healthy long-term solution either. Chickens can live for up to 20 years, but egg-laying factory-farmed chickens are killed at less than two years old because, in industry jargon, "their production falls rapidly". In other words, these poor hen's reproductive systems and bodies are spent, and they are slaughtered to be replaced in the cycle of suffering by some unfortunate younger hen.
The brothers of these egg-laying hens don't escape a cruel fate either. Male chickens are worthless to the egg industry. They haven't been bread to grow unnaturally fast and large like broiler chickens in the meat industry, so they are immediately killed and disposed of. Male chicks are killed en masse, generally by being fed through a grinder (called maceration or shredding) while still alive. Another common alternative is by suffocating/gassing. Note: these horrific methods are considered the “more humane” ways of killing male chicks and are recommended in Australia by the The Royal Society for the Protection of Animals. The RSPCA is the primary body certifying welfare standards for animal agriculture in Australia. They certify 90% of chicken products sold under the brands of the major Australian supermarkets. Allowing fast-growing breeds and grinding male chicks alive are just two of the cruelties that happen in products bearing the RSPCA stamp of approval. The Royal at the start of their name is perhaps the first hint as to how progressive the RSCPA are with respect to farmed animals, but more revealing is that their certification logo has a dog/cat paw in the middle of it. They perpetuate the older standard of animal welfare societies, which were mainly concerned with the treatment of cats, dogs and other pets we share our daily lives with. They will advocate for dogs to be walked at least once a day, while stamping their approval on products made from pigs who have lived their lives indoors in concrete and steel pens. This is arbitrary speciesism. Footage of the conditions inside some RSPCA-certified piggeries is confronting, and if anyone were to keep their dog or cat in such conditions, the RSPCA would no doubt call for their prosecution. Animal welfare standards even have specific exceptions for farm animals, because apparently, cruelty is fine when it keeps meat cheap and corporate profits flowing. No matter how cruel farming practise are, they can not be prosecuted if they are considered standard practise for the industry. Consumers enjoy the cheap animal products these corporations sell and ask few of any questions about the animals, the answers to which they don't want to hear anyway.
In backyard farming, the problem of too many male birds is on a different scale, but it doesn't go away. Roosters can also live up to twenty years, and with even a small flock of hens producing chicks, this will result in large numbers of roosters. Roosters aren't as placid or useful to human purposes as hens; they are often noisy, fight and of course don’t lay eggs. So they are mostly slaughtered in backyard farming at 3 to 4 months, before they start to mature. The hens are also generally slaughtered by any serious backyard farmers as their reproductive systems start to slow down and they become a waste of feed. Backyard farming may alleviate some of the intense confinement and cages of intensive systems, but for the hens it still involves slaughter and much physical suffering.
Factory farms and slaughterhouses are terrible places, and that is even with some oversight by the government. They have been made better in some countries primarily by the occasional activist breaking in and publicising conditions in them for a generally unaware public. We might expect backyard farming to be, on average, better for hens but the unregulated, unseen, unprofessional nature of it can also go awry. Amateur farmers keeping chickens purely for economic and production reasons may result in chickens suffering more painful deaths, untreated diseases, lower standards of care, less protection from predators, and even direct abuse. Spending a significant amount of money paying a vet to visit an individual sick chicken makes little sense if you have the animal for economic reasons. Suffering does exist on a scale, however, so despite possible wider variations, raising backyard chickens should mean an average improvement in hen welfare, but better does not necessarily mean positive.
Bucolic fantasies
As a solution to the vast industrial system of factory farming, how scalable is backyard farming? In Australia, the average consumer pays for twenty-five to thirty broiler chickens a year to be raised and slaughtered on their behalf. For chicken meat, a small family of four or five people might need to keep a flock of around 120 chickens, and engage in regular slaughter to maintain the average diet. This might even mean a larger flock than this to maintain breeding numbers, and then they would need more for eggs. Chicken flesh is less than half the meat Australians eat, so we would need to add a variety of other beings to this hypothetical suburban backyard as well, ponds for fish, stables, milking facilities and so on. A nuclear family would need to maintain a reasonably sized farm to sustain anything like current levels of animal product consumption. How could this even be done in the small suburban yards and apartments that today's increasingly urbanised and concentrated populations live in? This is all part of the reason most humans historically didn't eat as much meat as we do now: it simply wasn't possible before factory farms. If you want to argue for maintaining the modern animal-product-heavy diet, then you are arguing for maintaining factory farms.
Perhaps technology can provide a way out of this ethical dilemma and enable us to go on eating as we do without having to change? Cell-cultured meat, precision fermentation, and molecular farming: there are currently a handful of technologies that hypothetically promise to remove animals from factory farms and allow people to continue eating animals at current levels. None of these are yet proven at any scale, and until this happens, we will not know if they can compete on price and consumer demand with the industrialised animal agriculture system. We have little knowledge of whether the products they will produce will be comparable to current animal products in their texture, or whether they will be considered acceptable to consumers. The resistance many people and countries had to genetically modified foods is perhaps an example of the resistance that animal proteins produced by unfamiliar technologies could, and probably will, create. There will also be a very large animal product industry, profiting from the status quo, who will no doubt pay skillful marketers to push narratives creating suspicion and doubt about any alternatives.
Ethical simplicity
People who aren't vegan often get the idea in their head that being vegan is hard or complex, but this is just unfamiliarity and habit speaking. As a long-term vegan, I generally find it simple: Did the food come from a plant? No, don't eat it. Yes, then om nom nom! To be an ethical animal-product consumer, though, seems harder. The primary thing you need to know is not what to eat but the details of how the thing you are eating was produced. If you eat packaged food which contain animal products, go to restaurants and cafes, or eat food prepare by friends, family and colleagues, it seems there would need to be a lot of research and questions raised about how the animals were treated in whatever products were used. I can imagine long discussions with waiters and other people who serve or provide food. If you are engaged in backyard farming, it still won't change much of what happens when you purchase animal products outside of your house. For people who want to live in a more ethically consistent manner, the simpler and more effective path might be to follow a vegan diet. Of course if we are talking about ethics, practicalities of convenience and hassle are relevant but not the core of the story. Taking a sentient being's freedom away, using its body for profit and production, taking away family life from them, and killing them while still essentially children, will always be a form of oppression.
Habit can blind us to our agency for positive change. Whether we think about them or not, every day we are making powerful choices about other sentient lives. Through our daily consumption choices, at restaurants and supermarkets, we directly affect animals. We have some control over whether other beings experience more or less pain, or even exist. We affect the lives of others for better or worse, even if we aren’t aware of it, or never see or interact with them. Veganism is part of taking responsibility for this wider ethical reality, of engaging in the hope that humans can transcend being a narcissistic and oppressive species.
Paying to outsource oppression and slaughter, however, as most people currently do, is ethically unacceptable. But, we can do better than to turn our backyards into more places to oppress and slaughter animals, even if it is a better sort of oppression. Luckily, we have a simple choice we can make to escape this ethical quandary. We can join the growing millions of people who are choosing to embrace veganism, for the animals. We can be part of a movement showing the way to a brighter shared future on our Earth between human beings and other life.