Age of the “Broiler” Chicken

Environmentalists use the term Anthropocene (“the age of man”) to refer to the current geological era as one characterized by humanity’s largely devastating impact on the planet. But in many ways we’re really living in the age of the “broiler” chicken. In a 2018 study published in the Royal Society Open Science Journal, researchers identify these modern factory farmed animals as the ultimate symbol of the Anthropocene based both on the extreme genetic manipulations that have caused them to grow so large so fast and on their unparalleled distribution across the globe.  (See “The Broiler Chicken as a Signal of a Human Reconfigured Biosphere” https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.180325). These are the animals I rescue at my small farm sanctuary. I’ve gotten to know them as unique individuals with as much personality as a dog or a cat, with the capacity to suffer as much as you or I have, which makes the tragedy of what we’ve done to them on a truly unfathomable scale that much more heartbreaking. Moreover, what we’ve done to them hasn’t just hurt the chickens. It’s hurting us in myriad, profound, and existential ways from air and water pollution, increased risk of certain cancers, food borne pathogens, antibiotic resistance, and in the fetid and vile places where we raise and slaughter them, creating the breeding grounds for viruses with pandemic potential, like the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) or “bird flu” which is currently circling the globe right now, decimating wild birds, leading to an excruciating “depopulation” of at last count close to 100 million domestic birds, many of whom were killed through what is widely considered an unnecessarily excruciating practice called ventilation shut-down, and which has now mutated to infect dozens and dozens of wild and domestic species from wild shorebirds to mammals including foxes, seals, dogs, cats, dairy cows, and yes, humans too.

The chicken industry is emblematic of the Anthropocene not just because of the physical remnants, the giant bones it will leave scattered across the earth for future civilizations to decode, but because, in its exploitation of living beings and the environment, in its profit-driven degradation of life, it reveals the anthropocentric worldview that spawned the Anthropocene. For most of human history, our species coexisted with the rest of life on earth. With the domestication of plants and animals 10,000 years ago we discovered we could control, dominate and manipulate the natural world, and then we told ourselves stories, secular and religious, from Aristotle to the Bible, that reified, sanctioned, and celebrated false notions of superiority and our right to rule the earth. With the industrial revolution, we doubled down on our assumptions of human supremacy, on our assumptions that we had a right to do as we pleased with the earth and other living beings. And we are now beginning to reap the consequences of our hubris, as we begin feeling the direct effects of climate change and other environmental harms and confronting the current and future ramifications of our unfettered exploitation of the natural world. 

One response to the undeniably perilous situation in which we now find ourselves is to look for technological solutions to reverse the damage. And technology has a role to play. Transitioning to clean energy sources is undoubtedly part of the solution, as may be clean meats (lab grown meat that doesn’t involve the raising or slaughtering of an animal). But we will not solve our problems through technology alone. As Albert Einstein cautioned, “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” A better, sustainable, more just, more compassionate world depends on our willingness to look at our consumption habits, to critically examine our way of life, to learn to see the world differently, and most importantly, to think differently about our place in the world, to dismantle the anthropocentric ideas that have gotten us to this point in human history where we are destroying our world, where our way of life is responsible for the extinction of an unprecedented number of diverse species, responsible for changing our planet’s climate in a way that could endure long after we’re gone, and responsible for the widespread suffering of trillions of individual beings. 

Animal agriculture, and the chicken industry specifically, is a microcosm of our world’s problems and epitomizes the mentality that serves as their breeding grounds. We have manipulated farmed animals’ bodies solely to serve our own interests, our wants, our desires. The modern broiler chicken bears almost no resemblance to their wild Southeast Asian jungle ancestors. While we have been selectively breeding them for thousands of years, it wasn’t until the 1950s that they became anything like what they are today. Since the middle of the last century, these animals have tripled in weight and size. It’s not increased feed or antibiotics that’s driven the unnatural growth. It’s genetics. Manipulated by us. Modern chickens now grow to be giants in weeks time, slaughtered as six to eight week old babies, many of whom are, even at that young age, already so big they can’t stand. Many collapse on the acidic putrid floor of the windowless sheds where they are housed for their miserable short lives. Too lame to move from painful infected sores on their feet or simply because their legs can’t support their unnatural weight, they experience burns on their skin from where they lie pressed against months of caked feces and urine. These babies have been designed to give us what we want, large white breast meat, with no concern whatsoever for the inherent worth of the life inside that body, with no concern for their welfare. 

We consume these bodies like insatiable hungry ghosts, eating five times as much chicken meat today as we did just 50 years ago. A marketing success like no other. We’re told that chicken meat is healthy, environmentally friendly, that these animals are somehow less worthy of our moral consideration. These are lies fed to us by marketing gurus and greedy corporate executives. 

When we think about our world’s most pressing problems, the environmental crisis, war, racism, genocide, and other horrors, the plight of chickens may seem insignificant. But so long as we dismiss the suffering of sentient beings with the very real capacity to suffer and experience a vast range of emotions, so long as we remain indifferent to their exploitation and abuse, we haven’t gotten the message that we need to get if we’re going to save our world.  So long as we accept and support an industry that sees all living beings as a means to an end, from the animals it abuses and whose lives it steals, to the workers whose rights it violates, and which treats our shared environment as its own personal toxic dumping ground, we are doomed. 

We can transition out of the Anthropocene and into a better, sustainable, more just and compassionate future for all sentient beings. We can transition into a new era, what some have called an Ecocene era, an era shaped by the truth of our interconnection with the whole of life and a reverence for that life. But getting there depends on our collective ability to recognize the anthropocentric hierarchical worldview that germinated and gave birth to the Anthropocene, a worldview based on hierarchy and speciesism, what Aristotle called the scala natura, an imagined natural hierarchy of life that sees humanity at the top of a pyramid, rightfully lording over all creation. This is the worldview that lies at the root of the world’s most pressing problems, the worldview that sanctions animal agriculture no matter how destructive it is, no matter how much suffering it produces.  

And if the ethical imperative of not causing harm and suffering to other living beings isn’t enough to move us to change, then maybe the harm and risks posed to the human species and our entire civilization can wake us up to the fact that our way of life is not working. If we think we’re immune from our treatment of the rest of life on earth, we need only stop to consider bird flu, which is, in truth, not just for the birds. Because of the direct threat it poses to the chickens at my sanctuary, I’ve been paying close attention to bird flu these last few years, as it spread out of China, where it originated, and into Europe, where most of us thought (hoped) it would stop, but then to the horror of scientists and sanctuaries alike, it made its way to the Atlantic flyway, which includes the Eastern portion of the United States, and then into the Mississippi flyway, where we are. From there it just kept going so that it’s now touched almost every corner of the planet.  In order to protect the animals here, we raced to put hard roofs over all the runs. We donned plastic booties, started sanitizing any shoes that went off the property, and locked the chickens indoors. I felt terror every time a flock of migratory birds flew overhead, as the virus is spread through the droppings of migratory birds, who have carried the virus around the globe. 

But we can’t blame the birds. Avian influenza are common and relatively benign in nature. This virus became deadly in large part by making its way into factory farmed chicken flocks, who are packed so densely into their unsanitary sheds that when the virus gets inside, perhaps hitching a ride on the bottom of a workers boot, it has the opportunity to spread like wildfire, quickly infecting tens of thousands of birds and mutating along the way before making its way back outdoors to re-infect wild birds, who are now carrying and spreading a much more deadly mutation. 

H5N1, the current bird flu, has been making these jumps, from factory farm to free living bird populations, for years. And as it has, it's picked up new mutations which now allow it to infect mammals, including foxes, cats, dairy cows, and humans. The more it spreads, and mutates, the greater the chance it will acquire a mutation where it can easily spread from human to human. Up until now there have not been a lot of cases of human infection, but when it has infected humans, it’s been incredibly deadly, with a mortality rate of about 50%. https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/h5n1-bird-flu-what-to-know. Compare that to Covid, which in the US has had a mortality rate of about 1% overall. Bird flu could become a pandemic like no other, wiping out half the human population by some predictions. Though it would be unbearably tragic, I can’t help but acknowledge the poetic justice it would be, if it were indeed bird flu that took us out, if it were a pandemic caused largely by our chicken factory farms, by the birds scientists have nominated as the poster child of the Anthropocene, who would ultimately strike the final blow. 

If we are going to heal the world and make a future worth having possible, we will need to embrace a new global ethic based on a post-Anthropocene worldview, a worldview based on respect for the inherent value of all sentient beings and the living world, one that reimagines our position in the natural order, which in truth is not a hierarchy but a deeply interconnected web of life.  There is no denying that we are an amazing species. We have a truly unique capacity to affect the entire planet, and we have a special role to play, but it’s not the role we’ve been playing. We are not Gods. And no God gave us the right to trash the planet and use and abuse other living beings and the whole of life as wantonly as we pleased. Our assumptions of human superiority keep us locked in a zero-sum game where no one wins. We need to create a new paradigm, one based on interdependence, cooperation, compassion, on reverence for the whole of life. We need to learn to see all life as valuable, to learn to live in a way that allows all beings to thrive. 

As we assess our current environmental crisis, and the larger polycrisis as some have called it, crises of war, democratic breakdown, economic and social crises felt around the world, we ought to take seriously what the scientists have said about the broiler chicken. For most people these creatures may be no more than a nugget, or a disassociated body part in a bucket, their fate insignificant in the face of what we see as bigger problems, but in truth, they symbolize everything that is wrong with our world. They symbolize our hubris, the anthropocentric worldview that has led us to the Anthropocene, and all the destruction that term encompasses, destruction to the planet, to the myriad other earthlings with whom we share the planet, and like a karmic boomerang, to ourselves. Evolving out of the Anthropocene and creating a sustainable world and future worth having rests on how we treat these animals, and the whole interconnected web of life of which we are an integral part.