Broiler chickens have been selected for extreme growth rates that compromise welfare. Breed reform, housing improvements, and consumer pressure are driving positive change.
Broiler chicken welfare represents one of the clearest cases of production selection creating systematic health and welfare compromise at enormous scale. Birds selected to grow at twice their natural rate experience skeletal, cardiovascular, and metabolic systems struggling to keep pace with tissue accretion. Lameness — the primary welfare indicator — is so common in fast-growing commercial broilers that many producers and consumers have normalized it as an industry characteristic rather than recognizing it as a welfare failure. The evidence that slower-growing breeds dramatically reduce welfare problem rates, at a small cost premium per bird, demonstrates the feasibility and economic accessibility of improvement. Breed selection is ultimately a welfare choice that falls primarily on producers, retailers, and the regulatory environment rather than individual consumers.