From Egg to Dead in 6 Weeks

The broiler chicken industry doesn’t farm animals. It manufactures corpses.

These birds aren’t “chickens” in any meaningful sense anymore. They’re unnatural products - engineered to balloon in size faster than their bones can hold and their hearts can manage. From 1957 to 2005, the growth rate of these beings increased by over 400%. They now gain more than 60 grams a day. Many collapse under their own weight. Some die before they even reach the slaughter line.

This isn’t progress. It’s slavery with extra steps.

Individuals or Units of Production?

Efficiency means turning individuals into commodities more quickly. The question isn’t “how can we meet their needs?” It’s “how can we extract the most flesh in the shortest time?”

The result? Birds bred to break. They can’t walk. They sit in their own waste. Skin burns, footpad lesions, skeletal collapse - it’s all routine. They’re so deformed they can barely reach food or water. They don’t live. They exist, briefly, to be used.

These birds are denied not only freedom but also function. Chickens in nature scratch, perch, roost, forage, dust-bathe, explore. Broilers bred for profit don’t do any of that - not because they don’t want to, but because they physically can’t.

Their free living ancestor, the red junglefowl, can live for over a decade in nature. The birds we’ve modified to serve us are killed in just 5 to 7 weeks.

Killing Them from the Inside Out

Their internal organs fail. Their bodies grow too fast for their hearts to cope. Cardiac arrest, fluid build-up, heat exhaustion - they die by design. The system doesn’t care. There are always more to breed.

This isn’t about welfare. This is about power. This is about control over another species so absolute that we’ve remade their very biology to suit our demand for cheap breast meat.

Slower-growing chickens - still exploited, still killed - show fewer of these extreme failures. But they are still owned, still used, still denied the most basic freedom: the right not to be live as property for someone else’s gain.

Parents in Prison

And the birds forced to reproduce this misery?

Broiler breeders are genetically wired to grow rapidly, just like their offspring. But to keep them alive long enough to lay eggs, the industry deliberately starves them. Not metaphorically - literally. Feed-restriction is the norm.

This chronic hunger leads to aggression, pecking, cannibalism. Psychological collapse is built in. Once again, the industry creates the problem, then profits from the aftermath.

Even the so-called “better” breeds still live under lock and key, still forcibly bred, still slaughtered or discarded when no longer useful. There is no version of this system that respects autonomy.

Welfare Won’t Fix This

Some campaigners argue for slower-growing breeds. Longer lives. Bigger cages. Better enrichment. But here’s the truth: you can’t make commodification ethical by padding the cell.

Slower growth means more land taken from wild animals. More crops grown to feed more bodies over longer lives. More pollution. More displaced free living animals. More lives, not fewer.

It’s not just that welfare “reforms” fail to protect animals. They actively increase the environmental cost of using them. Factory farming is awful - but it’s also more “efficient” in terms of land use than these “high welfare” alternatives. It kills fewer free living animals and uses fewer resources.

That’s the choice the industry - and its defenders - offer us:  

Torture them faster. 

Or torture more animals for longer.

Option three? 

Reject the entire system.

Golden Cages

Breeding, imprisoning, and killing sentient beings for unnecessary products is the problem. Giving them slightly more space to die in doesn’t solve that. It just makes consumers feel better while continuing to exploit.

Welfare measures don’t confront the injustice. They reinforce it. They make people think that the issue is how we use animals - not that we use them. It’s a bait and switch.

The RSPCA and other “welfare” brands sell labels that mean nothing. “Humane” gas chambers. “Enriched” sheds where birds can’t walk. “Freedom” foods where freedom is never an option.

Let’s be honest: none of this is about the chickens. It’s about consumer comfort. And the animals pay the price.

Why Are We Doing This at All?

This isn’t a broken system that needs fixing. It’s a functioning system that needs abolishing.

Chickens aren’t resources. They aren’t breast meat with beaks. They aren’t data points on a feed conversion ratio. They are someone - not something.

So no, switching to slower-growing breeds isn’t progress. It’s just slower exploitation. There is no kind way to own someone. No gentle way to force them to live a life they didn’t choose. No ethical reason to keep breeding bodies into existence just to kill them.

The question isn’t “how can we improve their lives?”  

The question is: why do we keep creating these lives just to destroy them?

Reject Use, Reject Supremacy

This is not about “welfare improvements.” This is about ending animal use. Ending domination. Ending the idea that some lives exist for others to own, modify, and kill.

We don’t need meat. We don’t need eggs. We don’t need excuses. What we need is to stop breeding sentient individuals into a system designed to exploit and destroy them.

This is not a call for reform.  

This is a call for emancipation.