Providing environmental enrichment for broiler chickens improves welfare by enabling natural behaviors including perching, foraging, and dustbathing in intensive production systems.
Broiler chickens, despite their rapid growth orientation, retain fundamental behavioral needs including perching, foraging, and exploratory behavior. Conventional bare concrete systems frustrate all of these needs. Environmental enrichment - even simple additions like straw bales for climbing, hanging objects for pecking, and platforms for perching - significantly improves positive welfare indicators and reduces lameness, lesions, and damaging behaviors. The welfare value of enrichment is well-established across decades of poultry research. The barrier to adoption is primarily economic inertia and the perceived cost to producers, but consumer-driven certification schemes are accelerating enrichment adoption.