Lewis Bollard

This is what you see with the history of breeding these chickens to be the kind of mutants they are today, where they've achieved a 4x gain in growth rates since the 1950s.

That has led to a 2x drop in price, and that has led to a 3x increase in consumption.

And because consumption has gone up so dramatically, and the suffering per bird has gone up so dramatically, that has outweighed the benefits of these birds being bigger.

No, no.

So I think there is an in-between ground solution now, which is the higher welfare breeds that we are advocating for producers to adopt are

are not 1950s growth levels.

They grow almost at 2025 growth levels, scaled back slightly in a way that enables much larger welfare improvements.

And so I think you don't have to go backwards to the level of these incredibly slow-growing animals.

Some people will want that.

I mean, there'll be a market for heritage chickens and people who are willing to pay for these extremely slow-growing animals.

But the more realistic thing at scale is going to be these ones who still grow fast and still get big, but do so in a way that doesn't totally destroy their bodies and cause them to suffer so much.

I agree.

I mean, this is the story of the chicken meat industry is they have just bred and bred.

So these animals suffer more and more.

And I'll give you another example of that, which is the breeding birds.

So the birds that they have have that are raised for meat are optimized to only survive until about seven or eight weeks of age.

And even by that age, a lot of them are keeling over, getting lame, collapsing.

But they're not at puberty yet.

So they need to raise some of these birds past puberty to raise the next generation of birds.

For those birds to not totally collapse under their genetics, they have to starve them.