Frankenchickens: The ‘nightmarish’ reality of how chickens are farmed in the UK

Next time you pick up a chicken in the supermarket for a Sunday roast, it might be worth wondering how it got to be the size it is.

According to the NGO The Humane League, an estimated 90 per cent of chickens reared for meat in the UK grow to unnaturally large sizes - causing extreme suffering in the process.

These chickens are growing 400 per cent faster than they did in the 1950s - all because farmers have been allowed to selectively breed the animals in order to maximise profit.

“This creates a whole host of health and welfare problems,” explains Amro Hussain, senior public affairs lead at The Humane League UK.

“It causes them to collapse under their own body weight, painful leg conditions, redraw burns on their skin from sitting in their own excrement, muscle disease.

“It couldn’t be further away from the image that the public generally has in their mind of healthy, spry chickens.”

This growth is the equivalent of a human baby growing to the weight of an adult tiger in two months.

As well as being evidently cruel, this widespread practice is also against the law, according to the legal team at The Humane League. That’s why the charity is calling for a judicial review, urging the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to take action.

British law states that animals can only be kept for farming purposes if their genetics don’t cause a detrimental effect on their health or welfare.

But the majority of chickens reared for meat, approximately 900 million birds, are growing meat so fast their bodies can’t keep up. This is leaving many of the animals unable to walk, move, or live comfortably.

Just looking at video footage of these birds, struggling to keep their heads up and covered in injuries, it seems very