Modern broiler chickens grow so fast that their legs, hearts, and lungs struggle to support them. The Better Chicken Commitment and breed welfare standards are driving industry change.
Broiler chicken welfare presents one of the largest scale welfare challenges in agriculture. The genetic selection for extreme growth rates has created animals whose bodies are fundamentally mismatched with their physiology - hearts and lungs cannot keep pace with muscle growth, and legs fail under the body weight they carry. This is not a management problem that better housing alone can solve: it requires changing the birds themselves. The Better Chicken Commitment's requirement for slower-growing breeds addresses the root cause rather than managing symptoms. At 70+ billion birds annually, even modest improvements in individual bird welfare translate into enormous aggregate welfare gains.