The chicken wings eaten for the superbowl would wrap around the Earth 3 times…
…where are all of those chickens?
It is estimated that the number of chicken wings consumed for the Super Bowl alone would circle the circumference of the earth three times if they were laid out one after the other. 1.4 billion chicken wings are consumed, which would be enough wings to circle the circumference of the earth three times - and that’s just for one sporting event.
In fact, every single year we slaughter 80 billion land animals of which more than 72 billion are chickens. This means that every single second, almost 2,300 chickens are slaughtered.
We kill so many chickens and throw away so many chicken bones, that scientists have hypothesised that in the future our current time will be defined by the vast quantities of fossilised chicken bones that we will have discarded.
Where are all these chickens coming from?
The footage in our video was obtained by investigators from farms in the UK, a country ranked as having among the highest animal welfare standards in the world.
The life of chickens raised for their flesh, referred to as broiler chickens, starts in a breeding farm. Fertilised eggs come from facilities where males and females are used for breeding and kept in indoor barns. These chickens are starved to slow down their rate of growth so that farmers can get as many eggs as possible. Once the chicks have hatched they are taken to the farms where they are placed in barns.
However, starvation leads to the prevalence of abnormal behaviours such as aggression and feather pecking. The continuous breeding causes the female chickens to develop raw, painful skin.
According to the UK’s National Farmers’ Union (NFU): “Poultry sheds are comfortable and safe places for the birds, meeting their resource and behavioural needs. These are sheds where birds thrive and grow at their optimum because all of the conditions are right.”
However, each of these barns can hold as many as 50,000 birds. Farmers house around 17 birds per square metre of floor space. This means that each bird is given an area of floor space smaller than an A4 sheet of paper.
Chickens have been selectively bred to reach slaughter weight by the time they are between 35 and 42 days old. For comparison, if a newborn human grew at the same rate as a farmed chicken, they would weigh 392 pounds, or 178kg, by their third birthday.
This abnormal rate of growth frequently leads to organ failure and leg problems as their bodies grow too fast for their joints and organs to keep up. Hardly the comfortable and safe environment the NFU would like you to believe it is.
The selective breeding, combined with the conditions on the farms, such as the faeces covered floors that lead to the air becoming polluted with ammonia, results in chickens dying early and painfully. In the UK, it is estimated that one out of every 25 chickens being farmed dies before slaughter. These birds are also not counted in the official tally of slaughtered animals, meaning that if this rate of death was the same worldwide, as well as the 72 billion chickens who are slaughtered each year, around three billion more chickens will have died on the farms.
However, the National Farmers’ Union states that:
Farmers work their way through each of the chicken barns daily, removing any dead chickens, and culling those that are dying. This is done by the farmers dislocating their necks. In these barns, the farmer dislocates their necks and throws them to one side, leaving them to convulse on the floor. He then continues to make his way around the barn before he picks the chicken up later on.
For the chickens who survive and reach slaughter weight, teams of catchers work their way through the barns by first herding the chickens into a confined space. They then grab multiple chickens at a time, picking them up and forcing them into the crates that will take them to the slaughterhouse.
Once at the slaughterhouse, they will either be killed in gas chambers or have their throats cut.
While the number of chickens we kill is staggeringly large, it’s important to remember that each one of the tens of billions who are killed annually is an individual undergoing a life of suffering. Each chicken has to endure this process subjectively - the pain, fear and suffering all experienced by each one of the chickens we farm.
It’s easy for us to detach from the reality of what is happening to animals by viewing them as abstractions, but it’s important for us to recognise that in each of these barns there are tens of thousands of sentient, conscious individuals, whose lives, to them, are the most important and valuable things in the world.