Europe’s chickens are all cooped up

Date: 24/02/05

Mass chicken rearing is the last major area of meat production on this continent to remain outside the regulators' purview. The European Commission has undertaken to remedy that shortcoming by proposing a law on chicken protection in the near future but animal welfare advocates fear it will not address the cruelty with which intensive farming has become synonymous.

According to a draft of the law obtained by European Voice, the EU executive is to recommend that chickens should be kept at a stocking density of not more than 38kg per square metre.

The group Compassion in World Farming estimates that the proposal would enable managers of chicken factories to keep 19-20 chickens per square metre.

In effect, this would do little to lessen the overcrowding problem in chicken factories, which has been blamed for such problems as a high prevalence of skin disease, heat-stress and a lameness caused by a lack of leg-room.

By opting for the 38kg limit, the Commission appears to have sidestepped its own scientific advice. In 2000 the EU's Scientific Committee on Animal Health and Animal Welfare (SCAHAW) concluded that serious problems were likely to arise when stocking density exceeded 30kg per square metre. SCAHAW found that typical stocking densities in Europe were 22-42 kg per square metre - or 11-25 birds.

In a new report, the UK's Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals points out that with the maximum stocking density envisaged in the draft law, a 2kg bird (a chicken's normal weight at slaughter) would have "considerably less [space] than the size of an A4 sheet of paper."

The Commission is likely to adopt its proposal in March or April, with Britain's forthcoming EU presidency expected to seek approval from EU governments by the end of this year.

Anti-cruelty advocates are perturbed, too, by signals that the Commission is unlikely to address what they consider the unnatural methods of rearing broiler chickens - the specialised type of chicken most common in supermarket meat stands.

Broilers, 5.2 billion of which are reared in the EU each year, have been bred to grow fast. As a result, the birds are reared twice as quickly as 30 years ago; today a broiler can normally reach its 2kg limit within just six weeks of its birth. Because breast meat is the most popular part of a chicken carcass for consumers in many countries, the birds' breast muscles have been designed to expand more than the rest of the animal. High levels of heart disease and painful leg conditions have been attributed to the fact that the birds' skeletal bodies cannot support their abnormally large breast muscles. Roughly 1% of all broilers in Europe die each week before they are slaughtered, often while they are still infants. This mortality rate is seven times higher than that of laying hens.

"There is a huge amount of pain in broiler chicken sheds," says Joyce D'Silva from Compassion in World Farming. "If you don't address the breeding of these birds you are not really dealing with it."

A handful of firms dominate the genetic programming of chickens. In Europe, the main one is Franco-American company Hubbard, which has a 13% share of the global market, making it the third largest player in the world.

Broiler rearing has seen the highest growth of any meat production in recent years. Such problems as the outbreak of avian flu in Asia have failed to impede the expansion and now some 46 billion chickens are consumed worldwide per year, twice as many as in 2000.

The developments in genetic programming have been cited as a key factor behind the industry's expansion. Chicken is cheaper to produce than most other types of meat - something that would more than likely change if new legislation on breeding came into place.

"We were told by the Commission that it will not do anything that will harm our industry," says Sonja Van Tichelen from the Eurogroup for Animal Welfare. "I find that very hard to take."

But Philip Todd, the Commission's spokesman on health and consumer protection, defends the initiative it is taking. "There is no EU legislation at the moment on chickens raised for meat production," he says. "So we are filling an important gap in the EU's animal welfare framework. This will improve animal welfare in many respects."

Only a coterie of EU countries have regulations on broiler chickens. Denmark and Sweden have legal limits on stocking density, while Britain and Germany merely have recommended limits.

Roxane Feller from the Committee of Agricultural Organisations in the European Union (COPA) says that she does not foresee any "radical change" to chicken production and its costs as a result of the Commission's proposal.

Article says that mass chicken rearing was the last major area of meat production in Europe to remain outside the regulators' purview. The European Commission undertook to remedy that shortcoming by proposing a law on chicken protection in the near future but animal welfare advocates feared it would not address the cruelty with which intensive farming has become synonymous.

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