Chicken: The Industrial Chicken

The urbanization of the population in America in the late nineteenth century led to “improvements” in the production of birds for meat and eggs. With every American consuming an average of eighty pounds of chicken per year, with an estimated total value of $40 billion, the chicken industry became more centralized and vastly more efficient. Hens, in the twenty-first century, can be housed in buildings containing 250,000 birds. In many cases the buildings have no windows, so the birds are denied the pleasure of even a bit of sunlight. Each hen shares a cage with six or seven others. The cages, themselves, are stacked six to seven on top of each other, and each is so scandalously small that a hen cannot do that most natural act in the class Aves—spread her wings, flutter them a bit, and relax contentedly.