Business & Innovation...

Imagine chickens in an ideal farmyard, strutting around and picking at the ground, pulling out worms and bits of grass for lunch. Now, imagine chickens with pecs the size of softballs, too heavy to walk without falling forward, stumbling across a huge, overcrowded barn in a mad rush to the feed bin.

Nobody wants to think about it before they sit down to a chicken dinner, but chickens are being bred to have the chicken equivalent of double Ds more often than we think. Reported on February 12, on the Food Law Blog, British researchers are working on a new study that investigates broiler chickens that are bred to have huge breasts. These broilers, according to the study and Food Law Blog, “have been shown to exhibit difficulty walking, despite culling practices that were designed to remove severely lame birds from flocks.”

In fact, more than 27% of the birds had trouble walking, and 3.3% couldn’t walk at all—and this isn’t because they’re sick or because there are too many birds in the pen for them to really move, it’s because they’ve been bred to have breasts so big that they can’t carry their own weight. They have trouble standing up straight, much less move the way a chicken should.

How did this happen? The report points to “intense genetic selection” that has produced a bird that grow up to 100 grams each day, instead of the regular 25 grams. These big-breasted chickens, however, are, in some part, meeting consumer demand for larger chicken breasts.

What’s the solution? It’s simple: return chickens to the way they were meant to be raised (see scenario one above). The report recommends returning to a sustainable model of breeding chickens, which should include, not only shrinking the chicken’s breasts, but also changing our expectation in the meat section to a more reasonable, and mobile, chicken.