“It is now clear that [chickens] have cognitive capacities equivalent to those of mammals, even primates.”
—Dr Lesley Rogers, professor of Neuroscience and Animal Behaviour, University of New England.

Chickens are actually not the bird brains many people think they are. They can recognise over 100 individuals’ faces, learn from watching each other and worry about the future. They also have over 30 distinct calls, including separate alarm calls depending on whether a predator is travelling by land or air.

Chickens are highly social animals and spend much of their time in the company of friends pecking and scratching for food. Their beaks are highly sensitive to help them find food. They also enjoy cleaning themselves with a dust bath and lying in the sun.

In nature, a mother hen will build a private nest to lay her eggs, and will even go without food or water if it means she can have a private nest to protect her babies. Even before they hatch a mother hen will cluck to her chicks, and from inside their egg they cluck in response. Once hatched, she teaches her chicks what is safe to eat and what to avoid.

Chicken Meat

Roughly half a billion chickens are killed for their flesh in Australia every year. The majority are crammed into overcrowded sheds, where they are unable to express the simplest of natural behaviours.

Birds are selectively bred to grow much faster than their bodies can cope. And at just 5-7 weeks of age, the survivors are grabbed by the legs and shoved into cages to be trucked to slaughter.

At the slaughterhouse, birds are shackled upside down by their legs, are electrically stunned, have their throat slit by a motorised blade and then pass through a chamber full of jets of boiling water to remove their feathers. Some unlucky birds may not get properly stunned and on occasions may face the motorised blade and even the scolding chamber fully conscious.

Is the taste of flesh really worth all this suffering and death? Imagine if they were dogs or cats in these conditions. How would that make you feel? Do our feathery friends a favour. Give meat the flick, because wings are for flying, not frying!

Chicken Eggs

Eggs aren’t really all they're cracked up to be either. In fact, the egg industry is a life sentence for hens and a death sentence for male chicks in hatcheries.

In Australia, around 12 million hens are locked in tiny wire cages (called battery cages) with up to 5 other birds. Meanwhile ‘barn laid’ laying hens are forced to live in windowless sheds with tens of thousands of other birds.

On battery farms, ‘barn laid’ farms, and even some ‘free-range’ farms birds have the tips of their beaks cut off with a hot blade. This painful mutilation is done without pain relief.

No matter what the egg system, at about 18 months of age, hens slow in their egg production. These ‘spent hens’ are no longer seen as profitable and are roughly removed, transported and killed, to be replaced by 4 month old hens, who in 14 months will face the same fate.

At hatcheries, where egg laying hens are bred, the male chicks are not 'profitable'. Their very short lives end almost as soon as they begin, when they are gassed or ground up alive (called a macerator).

To make things worse, pellets fed to chickens often contain meat. So the shredded remains of male chicks may even be fed to their sisters and mothers. Sound like something out of a horror movie?

While organic and free-range egg systems provide birds with more space, and no organic farmers debeak, the fact remains all egg systems end up killing animals. ‘Spent hens’ and male chicks are the overlooked victims of a profit driven egg industry.

You can help make chickens as ‘free as a bird’. It’s easy—simply don’t eat eggs. Not only is this an eggcelent way to help chickens, you’ll be setting a great eggsample for others. Besides, there’s no eggscuse for animal cruelty!*

*Apologies for the eggcessive use of puns.

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