“What we’re asking is to raise the baseline . . . and the criteria is based around what can make the most impact now,” said Vicky Bond, a veterinarian and animal welfare specialist at the Humane League. Bond said changing processing systems that are stressful for chickens and sometimes result in the animals being conscious at the time of slaughter is key. “[CAS] is overall a much better and more reliable system for more humane slaughter,” she said.
Bruce Stewart-Brown is the senior vice president of technical services and innovation at Perdue, one of the main suppliers for companies looking to adopt the BCC. He agreed that CAS is a more humane system for processing for multiple reasons but said it’s also the biggest barrier to a greater percentage of the company’s chicken supply meeting the standards.
“It’s expensive, and there is a limitation on the number of systems that can [be installed at processing plants] in any given year. There are maybe three different companies making CAS systems,” said Stewart-Brown. Currently, he added, only 10 percent of Perdue’s chicken supply comes from birds slaughtered using CAS.
The other component that would represent a significant change for industrial chicken producers is the gradual move away from fast-growing breeds. Fast growth and enlarged breasts in today’s commercial chickens are linked to decreased mobility, skeletal abnormalities, skin lesions, and higher mortality rates. But animal welfare advocates don’t necessarily agree among themselves as to what constitutes a “higher welfare” breed.
Farm Forward and associated farmer Frank Reese advocate for turning back the clock to before the industry began using hybrid breeding techniques altogether. They believe that standard bred and heritage chickens, which live active lives outdoors and reach a smaller market weight over about 16 weeks, compared to the commercial industry average of six to seven weeks, should be the baseline all breeds are compared to.
“We must eliminate hybrid genetics that cause animals to grow too big too quickly or lay too many eggs, in favor of animals bred in accordance with Dr. Bernard Rollin’s Principle of Conservation of Welfare: newer breeds should have at least the same level of welfare as previous breeds,” Farm Forward executive director Andrew deCoriolis wrote in a 2020 blog post. “Until industry takes these steps, Farm Forward calls upon people to divest from this corrupt industry by refusing to buy its products.”
But heritage chickens are expensive to produce and are raised on pasture in non-industrial systems, and the groups aligned with the BCC believe advocates should try to introduce improvements that the dominant system will be willing to adopt.
GAP’s five-tier certification system already includes requirements related to space and enrichments for chickens at every level, but in the past only required slower-growing breeds at top tiers, in pastured systems. Over the last five years, it has been working to update the standards to include slower-growing breeds across the board.
“It became very apparent that while there were bits and pieces of science out there, putting all of the bits together was going to be really difficult,” said Anne Malleau, GAP’s executive director.
To get clearer answers, the organization funded a study at the University of Guelph in Ontario in which researchers compared 16 different breeds with varying growth rates on outcomes including mobility, physiology, and mortality. GAP then assembled a multidisciplinary technical working group to develop a high-welfare breed protocol using the results of the study. “Our first list will be breeds from the study,” she explained, and then companies and producers that want their breeds approved for use in GAP-certified systems will be able to apply for their breed to be evaluated using the new protocol.