Broiler breeder hens and cockerels suffer chronic hunger due to feed restriction. This underrecognized welfare problem deserves urgent industry attention and consumer awareness.
Broiler breeder welfare is perhaps the most severe and least publicly recognized welfare problem in commercial poultry. The hunger is not a brief, acute state but a permanent condition lasting throughout a productive life of 40+ weeks. Scientific evidence for the severity of this experience is robust — behavioral, physiological, and cognitive tests all confirm that restricted breeders are persistently, profoundly hungry. The scale (hundreds of millions of birds globally) makes this one of the largest sources of ongoing animal suffering in food production.