11 Compelling Reasons Not to Eat Chicken
Humans eat more chickens than any other land animal: more than 70 billion are killed for their flesh every year, including a billion in the UK alone. But is eating chickens sustainable, healthy, or ethical? Here’s what you need to know.
Chicken flesh was once a rarity, but consumption skyrocketed in the mid-20th century with the rise of industrial farming. Chickens were the first victims of factory farming, paving the way for other animals to be confined intensively.
Some humans eat chickens every day – but at what cost? Here are 11 indisputable reasons you should never eat chicken flesh.
Chickens Are Individuals
Chickens are individuals – gentle, social, curious animals who dream, make friends, and take care of their babies. They are someone, not something.
Chickens Spend Their Lives in Pain
To maximise profit, the meat industry has selectively bred chickens to grow larger and up to 400 times faster than is natural, reaching ‘slaughter weight’ at just six weeks old.
Dubbed ‘Frankenchickens’, these birds’ bones break easily, and they often spend their lives in constant pain while struggling to breathe. Often, they will be immobile and unable to reach food and water. This unnatural breeding and confinement cause such severe health problems that millions of chickens on UK farms die each year before they are sent to slaughter.
Chickens Are Almost Always Factory-Farmed
The chicken farming industry may try to dupe you with “high welfare” claims – but at least 95% of UK chickens killed for meat are raised on factory farms. Sometimes, these farms hold over a million birds at a time.
Each chicken is afforded a piece of floor space no bigger than an A4 sheet of paper where they are forced to live among the dead and their own waste – the air choked with the stench of ammonia. Hock burns, which can be visible on chicken corpses sold in supermarkets, result from this ammonia build-up.
Even the tiny proportion of chickens who aren’t raised on factory farms still live miserable lives, denied the chance to pick a partner, explore, and live life on their own terms. Multiple investigations revealed that “high welfare” labels don’t end cruelty, they are just a marketing strategy, All chickens, regardless of the farm they’re raised on, end up at the slaughterhouse.
Chicken Slaughter Is Horrific
Chickens in the UK tend to be gassed before having their throats cut. Often, this is done with a high concentration of carbon dioxide, which is extremely toxic. They spend their last moments in agony.
Alternatively, they may be hung upside down by their legs and shackled to a metal conveyor belt. The terrified chickens will travel through an electric water bath to stun them which is often ineffective. Many chickens are still conscious when their throats are cut. A PETA supporter was hung upside down outside KFC to show shoppers just how horrifying this process is.
Chicken Is Not Sustainable
Far from being sustainable, chicken farming is destroying the environment.
Animal agriculture is the leading cause of river pollution, and chicken farms are a major culprit.
Chicken farms are the main reason why the River Wye, one of the UK’s most iconic rivers, has been polluted almost to the point of ecological collapse. There are hundreds of factory farms in the area, leading to the waste from millions of birds ending up in the water. In 2024, parliament was told that chicken waste was turning the into a “sewage dump”.
Chicken Is Destroying the Amazon
Soya production is a leading cause of Amazon destruction – and the vast majority of is fed to animals on factory farms, not humans. At least 77% of the world’s soya is fed to animals, with only around 7% linked to human food like oil, soya milk, tofu, tempeh, and so on (and these aren’t just consumed by vegans!).
Major UK tofu brands, like Tofoo and Cauldron, state that they import soya from areas that are not linked to deforestation.
We import at least 1 million tonnes of Amazon-deforestation-linked soya to feed to the 1 billion chickens on farms. When someone eats chicken flesh, they’re consuming far more Amazon‑linked soya than most tofu‑eaters ever would.
Chicken Isn’t Healthy
Far from a ‘healthy option’, chicken flesh is linked to serious health problems.
Chicken raises levels of LDL (‘bad’) cholesterol just like the flesh of cows and pigs does. Typical chicken servings tend to be around 30% saturated fat. Studies have also linked chicken to breast and prostate cancers, as well as heart disease.
Chicken and E.coli Risk
E.coli is a type of bacteria found in chicken faeces. When you consume chicken, you are at risk of foodborne illnesses if it’s not thoroughly cooked. One study found that one in four UK supermarket chicken products contained antibiotic-resistant E. coli, meaning illnesses contracted from consuming it – such as UTIs – may not be responsive to antibiotics.
Conditions that have previously been easy to treat can become fatal because of human appetite for chicken flesh. This risk is only getting worse as farms become more intensive.
Chicken Farming Could Cause a Pandemic
Many experts believe the next pandemic is a matter of when, not if, and this is largely due to industrial farming.
Bird flu is the most significant pandemic risk we face spreading through millions of birds around the world and even mammals including polar bears, mink and cows. Humans have caught bird flu from other infected animals, and it has a very high death rate (potentially up to 50%). The disease cannot yet spread human-to-human, but the virus could mutate to allow it. If it does, a potential pandemic could dwarf the death rate of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Vegan Chicken Is Tastier
Plant-based chicken tastes great and doesn’t hurt birds. Fast-food restaurants like KFC and Burger King offer popular vegan chicken products. You can also buy vegan chicken in the supermarket – brands like THIS, Heura, and Beyond Meat are excellent bets.
Chickens Are Not Ours to Eat
Even if, hypothetically, you found a utopian farm where chickens were happy and killed in a mythical pain- and terror-free way (nb: these farms do not exist), it still wouldn’t be ethical to eat them. That’s because chickens, like all animals, are not ours to eat. The simple solution is to stop breeding chickens into a life of suffering.
Be Kind to Chickens – Remove Them From Your Plate Today
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