Providing environmental enrichment to broiler chickens improves welfare by enabling expression of natural behaviours. Simple additions to standard housing can make significant welfare differences.
Standard broiler houses are barren environments offering no opportunity for natural behaviour beyond eating, drinking, and resting. Chickens are naturally active foragers that spend much of their time investigating, scratching, and pecking at litter. Enriched environments — even simple additions like straw bales, pecking objects, and perches — allow expression of this repertoire, reducing boredom, abnormal behaviour, and injury. The cost of enrichment items is low relative to the welfare benefit, and some enrichments also improve production metrics by keeping birds active and reducing aggression.