Modern broiler chickens have been selectively bred for extremely rapid growth, causing widespread leg disorders, heart failure, and chronic pain — a welfare crisis affecting billions of birds annually.
Fast-growth broiler welfare is one of the largest-scale animal welfare problems in existence. Billions of birds experience chronic pain from leg disorders for a significant portion of their short lives. The genetic selection for rapid muscle growth has outpaced skeletal development, creating a biology that causes suffering regardless of how the birds are housed. Lame birds stand less, eat and drink less, show reduced cognitive performance, and demonstrate avoidance of noxious stimuli to a lesser degree — all indicative of pain-related behavioral suppression. Slower-growing breeds do not eliminate all welfare problems but dramatically reduce the baseline physiological suffering. The BCC represents a market-driven mechanism to accelerate breed transition in commercial supply chains.