Environmental enrichment in broiler chicken housing can significantly improve welfare by enabling natural behaviours, reducing leg problems, and improving physiological indicators of positive states.
Environmental enrichment for broiler chickens addresses a fundamental welfare deficit in conventional systems: birds that cannot perform natural behaviours due to genetic limitations, barren environments, and physiological constraints. Even relatively simple enrichments - straw bales for pecking and perching, hanging objects for environmental novelty, better litter for dustbathing - produce measurable welfare improvements. The evidence is clear that enrichment improves both behaviour and physiology. The challenge is that many enrichments have small or uncertain effects in isolation, while the combination of better breeds, lower stocking density, enrichment, and outdoor access produces substantial cumulative welfare gains.