While I can’t attest to the veracity of this website, and my objection to the practice of raising chickens for meat has more to do with treatment than anything else, this website gives common reasons why the modern broiler chicken is an unhealthy breed
A good place to start is by changing consumption levels as not doing doing so would make things much harder. It’d be difficult to maintain current consumption levels with slow-growing birds as it’d require a much larger number of chickens to be slaughtered
Maintaining this level of consumption entirely with a slower-growing breed would require a 44.6%–86.8% larger population of chickens and a 19.2%–27.2% higher annual slaughter rate, relative to the current demographics of primarily ‘Ross 308’ chickens that are slaughtered at a rate of 9.25 billion per year.
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In sum, without a drastic reduction in consumption, switching to alternative breeds will lead to a substantial increase in the number of individuals killed each year, an untenable increase in land use, and a possible decrease in aggregate chicken welfare at the country-level scale
https://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/broiler-chickens-health-issues-ze0z1802zmos/
While I can’t attest to the veracity of this website, and my objection to the practice of raising chickens for meat has more to do with treatment than anything else, this website gives common reasons why the modern broiler chicken is an unhealthy breed
Gotcha. Thanks!
I hope the situation will improve with more regulations or pressure. Or maybe if we try to only buy better breeds.
A good place to start is by changing consumption levels as not doing doing so would make things much harder. It’d be difficult to maintain current consumption levels with slow-growing birds as it’d require a much larger number of chickens to be slaughtered
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.210478#d1e265