Environmental enrichment improves broiler welfare by enabling natural behaviours.
Broilers in barren, flat-floored sheds cannot perform normal locomotor play, perching, or foraging behaviours. Providing perches, bales, pecking objects, and litter promotes activity, reduces leg problems, and improves behavioural repertoire. Enrichment is low-cost and delivers measurable welfare improvements — its absence in most commercial sheds is unjustifiable.