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 Food & drink 

Ten weeks to live



...and they're the lucky organic ones. In the time it takes to read this sentence, thousands of chickens will have been electrocuted, beheaded, disembowelled, stripped of their feathers and bagged for the supermarket. By the time you've read this special report, by Anthony Browne, you'll never want to eat one again...

Sunday March 10, 2002
The Observer


It seems so ordinary, so innocuous. Drive down the narrow country lane, trees arching above you, and turn into the unmarked drive and past the pond, and you could be entering an elite golf club, secluded from the Oxfordshire countryside that embraces it.

Those who drive by can have no idea that they are just yards away from what campaigners call the biggest animal welfare scandal in Britain. Sunk down behind the beech trees are eight vast low wooden sheds. It is all clean and clinical: concrete everywhere, no mud, no puddles, none of the smell of the countryside. There is barely a sound. The are only two signs: 'wheels must be washed', and 'wear dust masks'. Men in white overalls and hairnets walk between the sheds.



There are no tractors or trailers and yet this is a farm, the most industrialised form of agriculture in Britain today. It is also the most secretive, and what goes on behind the shed doors away from public gaze, while lawful, has been the subject of a series of scathing reports from animal welfare groups up to the European Commission.

Put on your protective overalls, your hairnet, wash your hands, disinfect your boots, go into the control room with its pipes and electronic meters, disinfect your boots again, knock on the door and enter. First the tart stench of ammonia hits you, the deep rumble of thousands of clucks lambasts your ears, and then there it is, the pinnacle of agricultural achievement: stretching as far as the eye can see, 26,000 chickens, with no natural light and no fresh air and little room to run around, a computer allocating them water and a scientifically engineered protein and energy feed. They are just three weeks old, but are genetically selected to grow so unnaturally fast they are three weeks from slaughter. In a never-ending two-monthly cycle, the farm receives around 200,000 one-day old, yellow fluffy chicks, grows the 'crop' and sends them to slaughter.

It is one of more than 100 farms the company owns; the company - which wanted to remain unnamed for fear of reprisals - is one of a handful that supply 90 per cent of the chickens raised in Britain. It is not only the most industrialised agriculture in Britain, it is also the most concentrated in just a few large hands. The chicken companies own the farms, the slaughterhouses and the food processing plants. Unlike sheep, cows or pigs, the independent farmer cannot compete against the mechanised conglomerates that last year produced 817 million chickens in a process that is fully automated all the way from the hatching of the eggs to the breading of the chicken Kiev.

And what a success the industry has been. Sales of chicken have exploded from £500 million in 1984 to £2.5 billion now, easily outselling all other meats. It has improved efficiency so much that chicken is cheaper than it was 20 years ago, with a whole roast chicken sometimes costing as little as a pint of beer. The food is also getting safer: rigid application of hygiene procedures - treating the farms as clinically as a food factory - has meant that in just a few years the amount of fresh chicken in supermarkets infected with the vomit-inducing salmonella bacteria has fallen from one in three to one in 20.

Peter Bradnock, chief executive of the British Poultry Council, glows with pride at his industry's progress as, dressed in white overalls, he takes me around a state-of-the-art, stainless-steel factory: 'It's driven by the market, and the market demands consistent quality and safety. The industry has achieved a consistent source of affordable protein that is safe and nutritious.'

There is no doubt that the rise of chicken is driven by the market, riding a wave of health awareness that has seen millions of us give up red meat for the lower-fat white meat of poultry. People have also resorted to chickens as a refuge from the scandals of BSE and foot and mouth disease that have afflicted other meats. From Chicken Tonight to Chicken McNuggets, the bird has assumed an unrivaled position in the nation's diet. On average, each of us eats more than a dozen chickens a year.

Bradnock insists that the astounding popularity of chicken is based on much more than just health: 'It's easier to deal with than a lot of other meats - it's easier to cook, with no gristle, and there is no blood in it, which is a big factor for young people in particular. It's just a very good, consistent vehicle for carrying other flavours.'

But let's just hold the enthusiasm for a minute. This is an industry that the public sees nothing of and knows virtually nothing about: you can see cows, sheep and pigs in fields but the British consumer never sees the chickens behind shed doors.

It is left to animal welfare groups to blow the whistle on the nation's love affair, issuing disturbing tales of deformed and diseased birds leading unnatural lives. 'A lot of people say to me they don't eat red meat because of concern about animals, but in terms of animal welfare, it's far better that they eat a cow that grows up in a field,' said Joyce D'Silva of Compassion in World Farming.

A modern chicken farm has virtually nothing in common with its predecessors after the Second World War - not even the animals. Chickens - descended from the South-east Asian jungle fowl - were at that time kept for their eggs, and at the end of their egg-laying life they were killed for meat. These older birds had a strong, gamey flavour.

But in the 1950s farmers in America, and soon afterwards in the UK, started growing chickens specifically for their meat, paving the way for the modern broiler industry. While broilers were bred to put on as much breast meat as quickly as possible, other hens were bred to lay big eggs as often as possible. The two types of chicken now have virtually nothing in common - they are different sizes, shapes and colours: broilers are white, laying hens are brown. Indeed, the industry is proud of how scientific it has become, doing everything to maximise output and minimise cost. In the control room of the Oxfordshire farm, the monitors hum, showing the exact temperature, air ventilation, amount of water drunk, amount of feed eaten. It is a soulless machine for growing chickens.

In each of the eight identical sheds, 200 feet long and 80 feet wide, the 26,000 birds cover the floor like a living feathered carpet. Most sit, some stand, staring, with an average space each of nine inches by nine inches. There are no windows, and the birds never see the sky or natural light. Small lights dangle from the roof keeping light at a sufficiently low level so that the birds aren't too active, burning up energy. Full darkness sends the birds to sleep, preventing them from eating and putting on weight, and so is kept to the minimum of one hour a night. They have a 23-hour day.

Throughout their six weeks of life, the birds get no change of litter. Acrid ammonia rises from the excrement and urine on the floor. The birds never breathe fresh air, but fans slowly ventilate the room, automatically monitored to keep the temperature at the optimum for fast growth.

The 'formulated ration' designed to make the birds put on as much weight as possible and to defecate as little as possible is distributed through a network of pipes. The scientific diet means that the chickens only need 1.7kg of feed to put on 1kg of body weight. This is half the amount of feed they needed 20 years ago, helping cut costs.

The diet no longer contains antibiotic growth promoters, which chicken farmers dropped two years ago after consumer pressure, and it is now illegal to add growth hormones. But it does contain a powerful medicine to combat the coccidea parasite. The water the birds drink is heavily chlorinated, and everyone who enters must first disinfect themselves, in order to reduce the chance of salmonella bacteria entering the shed. The birds live in such cramped conditions that if salmonella enters, it would sweep round like wildfire. The equally poisonous campylobacter bacteria remains a problem: around half of the birds are infected with it.

The chickens are three weeks old, but already weigh in at more than 800g each. In three more weeks they will be more than twice the size, giving them no room at all to move. Three breeding companies, which supply 90 per cent of chicks used in chicken farms worldwide, have selectively bred them to grow as fast as possible. Modern broilers now put on weight twice as quickly as 20 years ago, reaching the slaughter weight of 2kg in 42 days rather than 80: they are the fastest growing bird in the world.

First thing each morning, the farm manager Les takes a walk around to check how the birds are doing. He collects up any that have died in the night, and wrings the necks of any that look poorly. In the last three weeks, in this one shed, 444 birds have died or been culled.

Les has been in the business for 15 years, and is proud of how professional it has become. 'The industry's really gone forward in the last five to 10 years. It's a lot more scientific now. We have more technical knowledge than we ever had.'

At six weeks, when the birds are just a quarter of the way to puberty (they have a natural lifespan of about seven years), the lights are dimmed further to passify them, they are collected into crates, and taken by lorry to a nearby 'processing plant'.

The plant is a vast automated factory where live chickens go in one end and chicken carcasses come out the other. It kills and processes 15,000 chickens an hour, a million a week or 50 million a year, a speed of butchery that defies comprehension.

The only time the birds are touched by human hand is when a team of five takes them out of their crate and hangs them upside down with their legs in shackles on a conveyor belt that winds its way through the factory. It is on this conveyor belt that the birds will die and their bodies be processed ready for the shelves of Tesco, Sainsbury's, Safeway or Asda.

Hanging upside down passing into the factory, the birds are remarkably passive as they stare out, their darting eyes their only sign of concern. The only protest they make is a flap of the wings when the belt dips down, taking their heads into a bath of electrified water. It is meant to stun them, but many die from it, their hearts and nervous systems shut down by the powerful current.

After a few seconds, the unconscious birds are dragged out of the bath, hanging limply, water dripping from their heads. Their throats are sliced as they pass a swirling blade, those hanging too close getting their heads chopped right off, others having their neck barely nicked. A man with a bloody apron stands poised, knife in hand, ready to finish off any birds that may have survived the electric bath and throat slicing. Around his feet lie dozens of heads, cleaned up only every hour or so.

Most of the chickens' heads dangle below their bodies, connected only by a shard of skin, their gurgling throat exposed to the outside air. Thick dark blood spurts and oozes out, pouring down into a vast trough, carrying away the life blood of 260 birds every minute. This is industrialised death. The carcasses dangle their way along the conveyor belt, any remaining heads being sliced off within seconds.

The headless chickens are then dragged through hot water to open their pores and loosen their feathers. As they pass though three sets of automatic pluckers, rubbery artificial fingers rub their feathers off. Wet, bloody feathers lay in heaps on the floor. 'They go in dressed, and come out undressed,' jokes the factory manager.

As they continue their odyssey along the conveyor belt, the naked headless chickens have a hole drilled in their backside by one machine, and their innards scooped out by another. Their livers are automatically passed down a line for use in liver pat¿s, and their hearts and intestines pass down another line for pet food. The eviscerated birds are then internally vacuumed, their feet and gizzards cut off.

For two hours these carcasses swirl around two miles of conveyor belt in the chiller room, reducing their temperatures to just a few degrees above freezing. A digital camera photographs each chicken, and a computer analyses the image for signs of bruising or mechanical damage at the rate of four birds every second. It's a new piece of kit costing £250,000, and the plant manager is very proud of it. 'It doesn't get tired - it's the same on Friday afternoon as it is on Monday. It takes out human error.'

The chilled carcasses are allotted their destinies as they enter the vast processing hall. It's an extraordinary sight, thousands upon thousands of chickens dangling from stainless steel wires at every height, crossing the room in different directions, while people in white overalls and caps scuttle about. The birds are automatically weighed, graded and transferred onto different lines for processing. Some go to the Kentucky Fried Chicken machine, where the bodies are automatically cut up into drumsticks, thighs and breasts. Others are trussed up ready for roasting, with marinade flavours from lemon to garlic and herbs injected deep into their flesh. UK manufacturers insist they don't inject water to increase the weight, although the water content rises during chilling and freezing. However, the Food Standards Agency found last year that imported chicken meat is sometimes bulked out with water, increasing the weight by as much as a third. The FSA and trading standards officers have also become increasingly concerned that racketeers are putting chicken meat condemned as unfit for human consumption back into shops and restaurants.

In just over two hours, the chicken has been converted from a living animal to a plastic-wrapped supermarket product, virtually untouched by human hand. It isn't just about improving efficiency, but also improving hygiene. 'The less contact it has with people, the less chance of infection there is. We have made so many advances in terms of food hygiene and productivity,' gushes the manager. 'People want to go back to nature and give up all this, but there's no going back.'

But while the handful of chicken companies glory at their increased efficiency and productivity, animal lovers are left despairing, cataloguing a series of horrors that are enough to put even the most ardent chicken fan off their nuggets. The single greatest cause of concern is the effect of the selective breeding of the unnaturally super-fast growing broiler. 'It's the biggest animal welfare issue in the UK today. There just hasn't been the same genetic pressure on other livestocks,' said Caroline Le Sueur, head of poultry at the normally moderate Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which has just produced an expos¿ of the industry entitled Behind Closed Doors.

Joyce D'Silva said: 'We've made an animal that can hardly live to puberty even though it has a natural life span of seven years. They have unsustainable bodies, and that's been done in the name of cheap meat.'

A recent report by the European Scientific Committee on Animal Health and Animal Welfare found that the chickens are artificially bred to grow so fast that their legs can't support their body weight. They spend twice as much time as normal hens just sitting, with as many as half suffering lameness. The committee concluded: 'Leg disorders are a major cause of poor welfare in broilers.' Because of their fast growth rate, their hearts and lungs can often no longer supply oxygen as fast as their hugely swollen muscles consume it. Frequently, they die of heart attacks - 'flipovers' as the chicken farmers nickname it. Others suffer ascites, or hugely swollen hearts.

They have an extraordinarily high mortality rate of almost one per cent per week, or seven times the rate of an egg-laying hen the same age. In total, about 100,000 broilers die every day. John Webster, the highly respected professor of animal husbandry at Bristol University, said: 'It is absolutely not right that animals in the first few weeks of their life should be experiencing heart disease or be crippled.'

The conditions in which they are kept is the other major cause for concern. With only an average nine-inch square in which to live, they are so cramped they can't move around, or display natural behaviour. The almost constant artificial light can make them blind or give them swollen eyes. Some end up deeply stressed from sleep deprivation, feather pecking each other aggressively. 'The birds are living in tighter conditions than battery cages - you know how horrendous the battery cages are, but this is far worse,' said Le Sueur.

They have no change of litter during their lives and simply sit in their excrement, accumulating ammonia burns on their skin, leaving brown marks that can be seen on birds on supermarket shelves. They are often covered with crusts formed by discharge and faeces, and become infected by a variety of bacteria and fungi. One study in northern Ireland found that 90 per cent of birds had a skin disease.

In the UK there are virtually no laws to protect the welfare of chickens, although the government makes some recommendations on the 'stocking density' - measured by the number of kilograms of bird per square metre. The EU science committee said that the stocking density must be no higher than 25kg (about 12 birds) per square metre 'for major welfare problems to be largely avoided'. The UK government suggests no more than 34kg, but even this is too strict for the industry, which sets itself a limit of 38kg.

Two years ago, the industry set up the Assured Chicken Scheme, a first attempt to set basic standards. The scheme's chairman Sir Colin Spedding said: 'Our aim is to improve the scheme at such a pace the industry can absorb.' But he doesn't see any problem with selective breeding: 'No one can see any problem with breeding to the genetic limit - there is nothing wrong with fast growth so long as it doesn't result in harm to the animals. Poultry are totally unnatural, as are all our livestock. There's nothing particularly desirable about things being natural.' Bradnock argues that while there have been problems in the past, there are far fewer now. For example, breeders have started selecting birds for stronger legs, making lameness less common. 'By and large the industry is conscious of the conditions in which it keeps the birds, and has invested millions of pounds in improving them,' he said.

It is not only animal groups that are revolted by the industrialisation of chicken farms, but also some farmers themselves. In the rolling hills of Berkshire, just a short drive from the Oxfordshire factory farm, the organic chickens of Sheepdrove Farm are treated with extraordinary - almost comical - care from the day they arrive to the day they are killed.

A warm shed holds one thousand yellow chicks, with a little conservatory area so they can see the outside world. A hi-fi system plays the sounds of the countryside - cows, birds, the wind - to acclimatise them to the free-range life that awaits them in three weeks time.

Their new homes are mobile sheds, sitting in the middle of grassy fields. Within the shed, they get 30 per cent more space than factory-farmed birds, but these birds are also allowed outside during day time. Each morning at dawn, a farm hand takes down the sides of the sheds, letting fresh air sweep in, and letting the birds scatter out over the fields. 'They hurtle out - there's quite a lot of insect life they can eat, and they go whey-hey, it's a new dawn,' says estate manager Charles MacLean, as he stands surrounded by clucking chickens in the middle of the shed wearing no overalls, no hairnet and muddy boots. There is no need for the hygiene precautions of factory farms, because these birds are allowed to build up natural immunity, and reared in such roomy conditions that salmonella and campylobacter never get a chance to take hold.

As well as insects, the birds eat the grass, which is seeded with five types of clover, yarrow, birdsfoot trefoil, chickory, plantain and sheep's parsley. 'Straight grass doesn't get them enough minerals from the soil - so these herbs provide the vitamins' said MacLean. He's also planting hedgerows either side of the chicken houses with a range of plants including hazelnut, Siberian pea, wild strawberries and blackberries, to give the birds extra shade and sources of food. The chickens have perches, dirt baths, and trays of grit which they need to eat to make their digestive systems more effective. 'It's all extra work - we employ two and a half men per 20,000 birds, whereas a factory farm would have one man for 90,000 birds,' he said. The organic farm also has a tenth the number of birds but covers at least four times the area.

Originally MacLean started trying to grow the Cobb and Ross breeds used by all factory farms, but found that they just couldn't cope with the low-energy diet. He now farms the slower growing Hubbard breed, which reach slaughter weight at 70 days rather than 42. Organic chicken's lives are longer and healthier, but in death all chickens are equal: they are slaughtered and processed in much the same way as the factory chickens.

MacLean insists that growing the birds to the organic standards of the Soil Association isn't just a question of animal welfare, but of taste. 'The more grass and clover they eat, the tastier they are. The carotene in the grass gives the flesh colour and flavour. They have the real chicken taste that everyone remembers from their childhood,' he said. Organic birds also live almost twice as long as factory birds, and the older the bird is, the stronger its flavour. A glance at the menu of top restaurants would suggest that most top chefs agree that factory-farmed is more tasteless than organic or free range. David Laris, executive chef of Mezzo, the largest restaurant in the Conran Group, said: 'Most of the chicken in supermarkets are rubber or cardboard - they taste of nothing. If the animal sits still, it produces no flavour. I go for free range - if an animal is working, using its muscles, it produces flavour - that's why legs have more flavour than breast.'

Organic chicken is rapidly growing in popularity, and its price is falling - in Tesco it now costs just 40 per cent more than factory-farmed chicken, down from 90 per cent more a year ago. But it still only represents around one per cent of the whole market, and not even the advocates of organic farming believe that it can replace factory farming - there is simply not enough land.

Factory farmers may make attempts to improve the welfare of animals, but none of the pressures that led to the industrialisation of chicken farming in the first place have gone away, and campaigners warn that the trends are in the wrong direction. The breeders are still artificially selecting birds to grow faster, so that by 2007, chickens are expected to be slaughtered at five weeks old. Caroline Le Sueur of the RSPCA said: 'The breeding companies are competing to produce birds that reach the slaughter weight even quicker - there is no limit.'

And then there are other developments in the pipeline that could remove chicken farming even further from nature. 'If selective breeding has taken it this far, imagine what genetic engineering could do,' said D'Silva. 'Just think of what the future will bring if we don't draw a line under it.'

But perhaps things won't go that far. The rise of organic chicken and the rejection of growth promoters show that consumers are starting to become more discerning. If the industry doesn't adapt, Britain's love affair with chicken may finally come to an end.

Feel like chicken tonight?

Broilers grow to twice the size they did 30 years ago and four times as fast as the birds used for egg production.

At 18-20 weeks laying hens are taken from breeding farms, put into cages, usually with four other birds and each hen can produce 300 eggs per year. This compares with only 12-20 eggs produced each year by their wild ancestors.

After 12 months, the hens egg-laying ability starts to decline. Hens are then slaughtered and used in baby foods, pet foods, pies and other processed foods. Most broilers are killed after 6 weeks when they have reached 2kg and by 2007 birds are expected to reach 2kg in just 33 days.

Over 47% of broiler chickens have been found to have dyschondroplasia, a disorder of bone growth in their legs and six million birds a year die from acute heart failure.

Male chicks from selectively bred egg-laying strains are not suitable for meat production and so are killed at one to three days old.

According to a Food Standards Agency UK survey 35 out of 68 of the samples sold to the catering trade were mislabelled. Some take-aways may be serving chicken which only contains 54% chicken despite labelling that claimed a higher meat content.

A Which? report found that out of 90 birds 12 had severe bruising, one chicken and one portion were diseased and two leg portions had skin infections.

The Food Standards Agency report found that one in four chicken sandwiches bought in the high street was contaminated with unsatisfactory levels of bacteria. This does not necessarily mean those eating a contaminated product would fall ill. 27 per cent of chicken sandwiches made on request for the agency's researchers were of 'unsatisfactory microbiological quality'.

Research by Chloe Diski






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