Slower-growing chickens could cut welfare pain at pennies per hour, study says

A new commentary in the journal Nature Food argues that some of the worst animal suffering in meat production could be reduced at a cost of only pennies per hour per chicken. The authors note that over roughly the last 75 years, chickens have been bred to grow unusually large and fast, making chicken the most affordable and abundant meat in the United States. About 9 billion broilers are raised and slaughtered annually in the U.S. The rapid growth, the authors contend, has come at a steep welfare cost, with a range of health and welfare issues such as heat stress, heart failure, and lameness that can be so severe that birds may perish from dehydration or starvation because they cannot stand or reach water and food. The paper frames this as a large, systematized form of animal suffering within contemporary farming.

The Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI), the non profit behind the study and a coalition of animal welfare researchers, argues that the public, policymakers, and investors should be able to quantify the welfare burden much as carbon footprints are used to measure environmental impact. WFI researchers describe a population-level approach that accounts for how animals are bred, the conditions in which they’re raised, and the prevalence and severity of problems such as injury and disease. Their estimates are intended to reflect differences between individual animals and to translate complex welfare outcomes into a comparable metric. The authors say the comparison to carbon accounting is intentional: if society can price environmental harms, it stands to reason that animal suffering could also be priced and addressed through policy and industry action.

![Chickens in a farm](https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/Kenny_Vox_ChickenSize_-3.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2400