Broiler breeder chickens face extreme feed restriction to prevent obesity from their fast-growing genetics, causing chronic hunger and behavioral distress.
Broiler breeder welfare presents one of the starkest welfare dilemmas in agriculture - chronic hunger caused deliberately as a harm-reduction strategy for a different welfare problem. The chronic hunger experienced by hundreds of millions of breeder birds annually causes persistent suffering that is widely acknowledged by the scientific community. The solution - transitioning parent stock to slower-growing genetics - would eliminate this dilemma but has not been adopted at scale due to cost.