Do you care about chicken welfare? No you don't

Why is less than 3 per cent of all the chicken we eat free-range, and yet 72 per cent of the eggs we eat free-range?

Standard chickens in the UK are raised in barns of 30,000 birds typically

Here’s a statistic that surprises me, considering a generation of consumers has now grown up with Jamie Oliver shedding tears over the plight of supermarket chickens (remember that?) and with vegans telling us – non stop – what miserable lives factory-farmed fowls face:

• Just 3 per cent of all the chickens that we eat in the UK are free range, another 1 per cent are organic.

This means that 96 per cent of all the chickens we buy from Tesco or Nando’s or KFC or even Waitrose are barn-reared birds, with no access to outdoor space. If you think you are buying a better bird by buying Red Tractor, a British farming assurance scheme, think again. A basic bird has a stocking density of 39kg m2. This means you can fit 18 adult birds into 1m2, the size of the floor of red telephone box. A Red Tractor chicken has a stocking density of 38kg m2. This translates into 17 birds.

For comparison’s sake a free range bird, when in a barn (and they do spend a lot of time in barns, at night or when it rains or when they don’t want to go outside) has a stocking density of 27kg m2, or 12 birds in a telephone box. Organic, which comes with pretty high welfare standards, has a stocking density of 21kg m2, or 9 birds or so.

This week, I have discussed chickens and chicken welfare on The Times’s The Story podcast – available wherever you get your podcasts! Do tune in…

Why do so few consumers want to buy free range? Well, the most obvious answer is price. At Aldi a large chicken – which comes with a slightly vague promise of ‘Room to Thrive’, so better than basic – costs £2.59 a kilo. A free range bird from Aldi costs £5.49 a kilo. You are paying more than double for a free range bird. Want an organic one? Well, Aldi won’t sell you one, but Asda will and it costs £9 a kilo. That is a huge, huge premium for higher welfare meat.

There are two things, however, worth considering. The first is that consumers do happily pay a premium for higher welfare eggs. This is a curious conundrum. While free range makes up a mere 3 per cent of meat, 74 per cent of all the eggs we eat are free range. This figure has shot up amazingly quickly; it was 32 per cent 20 years ago, and in the 1980s it was as low as 1 per cent. Free range eggs are now the norm.

But, here, the welfare premium is not so stark. A box of six medium Big & Fresh barn eggs at Asda costs £1.50. A box of six medium free range eggs from Asda costs £1.65.

Marks and Spencer switched to only stocking free range eggs twenty years ago

The other reason free range eggs have become the norm is that most supermarkets, slowly, have stopped stocking eggs from caged hens (we can not longer say battery, but it’s more or less the same thing). Way back in 2002, Marks and Spencer made a commitment it would no longer stock caged eggs — not just on shelves, but as an ingredient in quiches, pasta and the like. At the time, M&S was a fairly small grocery chain, but then Sainsbury’s, the second biggest supermarket, followed in 2009. If a large chunk of the market refuses to stock lower-welfare eggs, lower-welfare eggs just become uneconomic to farm. Farmers slowly switched to free range.

So something similar needs to happen to broiler chickens. And this week, Waitrose announced all its chicken meat – not just whole birds, but poultry meat used on pizzas, ready meals, frozen dishes – would be part of the Better Chicken Commitment. What’s that? It’s a cross-industry agreement, pioneered by Compassion in World Farming, with buy-in from not just M&S and Waitrose but also Greggs, Burger King, Pret, Nando’s and KFC to improve the lives of chickens. Slightly. It is not free range, just to be clear. But those who sign up to it make various promises about giving chickens in barns more light, more air, more ability to perch (a key attribute of a wild chicken), more space – the stocking density is 30kg m2, or 14 birds per telephone box. Not as good as free range, but better than Red Tractor.

And…there’s a final, crucial improvement: slower-grown birds. I’ve written extensively in the past about the rise and rise of chicken as a protein that has taken over the world – notably, in a long Sunday Times Magazine article on fried chicken shops. The reason is, partly The Chicken of Tomorrow contest organised by the US Department of Agriculture in 1948. This was an attempt to breed a bird that could, on a ounce-per-dollar basis, compete with pork and beef. Previously, chickens had been farmed primarily to lay eggs. The Chicken of Tomorrow contest had a profound effect on the poultry industry — creating a bigger, cheaper and more profitable bird with larger breasts and one that could be slaughtered after six weeks rather than twelve. Nearly all chicken we eat are fast-reared birds, who owe their origins to this contest. Most barn reared birds in the UK are slaughtered at 5 weeks, or 35 days. Some are killed after a mere 28 days, having reached slaughter weight of 2.2kg. This makes it a very cheap protein to rear.

Back in 1974, the year I was born, the average British adult ate 189g of beef or veal a week and 115g of chicken. Now, it is 85g of beef and veal and 193g of chicken. Chicken is now Britain’s number one protein.

Companies that sign up to the Better Chicken Commitment promise to use slower-grown birds, ones that will only reach slaughter weight at 56 days or more. Various studies suggest that with a few more weeks on this planet, and fed less aggressively, these slower-bred birds suffer from less disease and have happier lives.

It’s a small step, but if it becomes the industry norm (as free range eggs did), standards will improve.