Unimaginable pain for billions of animals

Image credit: Farm Transparency Project

From painful mutilations, early weaning and poor air quality to unnatural feeding regimes, rough handling, long-distance transport and ultimately slaughter at a young age – animals on factory farms suffer on many levels.

Within the harsh confinements of factory farms, animals are painfully mutilated and kept in cramped, barren cages, pens, and sheds. It is impossible for them to fulfil their hardwired instincts to forage or perch, build nests, and interact with one another in comfort. This, in turn, causes them severe stress, injuries, ailments, hunger, and social deprivation.

The demand for cheap meat is equating to more animals being churned through factory farms like cogs in a machine. It is inhumane to treat animals like pigs, chickens, cows and many others like commodities when they are living beings who feel complex emotions such as pain, joy, and fear – just like us.

Image credit: World Animal Protection / Tracks Investigations

Chickens are only rationed an area the size of an iPad

They are sensitive, with distinct personalities and so intelligent they can tell between people they know and strangers. Sadly, they are not treated as living beings with feelings but as cogs in a machine – experiencing pain and suffering at every stage of their short lives.

Every year, over 700 million hens are raised for slaughter in Australia's intensive farms, often with little natural light or fresh air, unable to peck or spread their wings. They are bred to grow unnaturally large and at an unhealthy rate so they often suffer from painful lameness, overworked hearts and lungs, and wounds like skin sores and burns.

The ANZ Better Chicken Commitment 

The ANZ Better Chicken Commitment (BCC) is a leading set of science-based standards to improve the lives of chickens across the food industry in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. 

The policy addresses some of the biggest causes of suffering on chicken farms by creating standards that aim to provide chickens with more room to move and express their natural behaviours, more natural light, air quality, the inclusion of enrichments such as perches and less suffering at slaughter. 

Most importantly, the BCC bans the use of unnaturally fast-growing chicken breeds who are slaughtered in just five to six short weeks. 

Chickens who are farmed for their meat often live short and painful lives as their rapid growth causes them to suffer various ailments including lameness and chronic heart and lung conditions. Baby chickens may sometimes suffer organ failure weeks after they hatch. 

In order to ensure no chicken ever endures such a horrific fate,  the New Zealand Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), Animals Aotearoa and The Humane League with support from World Animal Protection and eight other global animal welfare organisations including Compassion in World Farming, developed an Australia and New Zealand version of the Better Chicken Commitment that is used in Europe and North America. 

By making the commitment, food businesses and restaurant chains in Australia can show their consumers that they care about giving meat chickens in their supply chains better lives.  

Domino’s was the first company in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand that was moved to sign this commitment. Today, eight more have joined in to give their chickens lives worth living. 

Our 2024 report ‘Fast Food, Slow Progress’ found that there have been over 600 commitments by food companies around the globe but only one commitment in Australia so far. It also found that while KFC in the UK and six other countries across Europe have adopted the BCC, KFC in Australia has so far declined to do so. The same can be said for Hungry Jacks, Starbucks, Subway, Nando’s and Pizza Hut who have not even taken the first step to protect chickens in their Australian supply chain from the suffering caused by unnatural growth.

With your support, we will continue calling on more companies to commit to the humane treatment of chickens. 

Pigs live in horrifying conditions on factory farms

Pigs are intelligent, curious and empathetic animals. Given a choice, they would spend their days socialising, rooting for food and resting on comfortable beds.

Yet, pigs farmed for meat will never get to show off their intelligence or follow their instinctive curiosity as they are confined to barren, small steel cages on factory farms with uncomfortable flooring, which cause them to suffer painful skin lesions and diseases. Mother pigs have it especially bad as they are inseminated in a cage no bigger than an average household refrigerator, with barely enough room to move. While most are then moved into group housing, about 20% of mother pigs in Australia are still confined to sow stalls for most of their pregnancy.

In the first week of a baby pig’s life, his or her teeth are clipped or ground, the tail is cut, and males can be castrated, often without pain relief. 

With your help, we work to push for pigs to have the opportunity to express natural behaviour and socialise, free from cages and painful mutilations. Let's call on the industry to make a change and give pigs a life worth living.

Beef labels in Australia: What do they really mean?

Right now, beef producers in Australia are not required to specify on their labels if their product comes from a feedlot, which can limit a consumer’s ability to make informed choices about animal welfare. Instead, they may use terms such as “grain-fed” and “grain-finished” - all of which are unclear ways of saying that the animal has spent time on a feedlot. A majority of beef products labelled "Wagyu" also come from feedlots.

No living being deserves to endure such misery for the profit of others. In order to create a more humane future, it’s up to governments, investors, food retailers, and consumers to take steps that will create better animal welfare conditions and humane alternatives to feedlots.

With you by our side, we can expose the cruelty behind beef cattle feedlots and take the ‘factory’ out of ‘farming’.