You wake to the stench of ammonia. It burns your nostrils. The area you’re being kept in is dark, barren and filthy. You’re surrounded by tens of thousands of others just like you, who’ve never felt the sun on their skin or felt grass underneath them. Instead, you’re kept in cages so small you can barely move. 

Dawn has already come and gone, but you don’t wake when the sun rises as you would do naturally. You might be lucky enough to be kept in a barn rather than in a cage, but even so, these industrial sheds have no windows. Instead, artificial lights are kept on for hours longer than natural day length, making proper rest difficult to come by. 

The food you’re given makes you grow much faster than you should, so that you can be stacked on supermarket shelves as soon as possible. Barely a month after hatching, you are almost full sized, but your legs struggle to keep up with the weight of your body. Some of the chickens around you have already collapsed due to their quick weight gain and will never walk again.

You try to forage for food like insects or seeds, a natural instinct, but there are 40,000 other chickens surrounding you. Instead, you must go to crowded food and water stations and wait your turn to try and curb your hunger.  

The barn is barren – there is nothing to do and no room to perform natural behaviours. You see your flock mates start to peck at one another aggressively, causing injuries and lesions. If there weren’t so many of you and you had some way to fill your days of boredom and stress, this likely wouldn’t happen.

The shed is hot, and the air is thick. Your heavy body hurts. You try and get some rest ready for another identical day tomorrow, where you will again wake to the stench of ammonia burning your nostrils.

This sounds like a nightmare – but this is the horrific reality for hundreds of millions of chickens kept on factory farms every day in the UK. 

It doesn’t have to be like this.  

By supporting higher welfare farming methods and buying higher quality, local animal products, we can show changemakers across the UK that the public no longer supports these horrifically cruel factory farms. Instead, we are demanding a shift to more sustainable, animal-friendly farming practices.