“The 10 billion chickens you didn’t know were living in cages - and how we are starting to get them out” by Whitney Peng, Lily Tse

TL;DR Cage-free layer campaigns are one of the most celebrated success stories in animal welfare and in EA-aligned work, improving the lives of hundreds of millions of hens and reshaping entire global supply chains. But alongside that incredibly important work, few people realize that an even larger and far more neglected confinement system exists almost entirely out of sight: broiler (meat) chickens kept in stacked wire cages, primarily in China. Scale: China raises ~15 billion broiler chickens annually, and ~10 billion (60–70%) spend their lives in cramped cages with even less space than battery-caged layers. This is 2x the total number of caged laying hens worldwide, with severe welfare implications. Neglectedness: Despite the enormous scale, this issue has received virtually no attention from the animal-welfare or EA communities. Broiler cages in China were almost entirely unaddressed, with effectively no corporate commitments on record before this year. Tractability: This may be one of the most overlooked high-impact opportunities in farmed-animal welfare. Roughly half of major Chinese producers already offer cage-free broiler chicken. Cage-free broiler meat is at price parity with caged meat. Major restaurant and retail chains have already begun committing to cage-free sourcing. These conditions create a [...] ---Outline:(00:13) TL;DR(02:54) The Scale of the Problem(04:21) Why This Looks Unusually Tractable(04:32) 1. Cage-Free Broiler Chicken Is Widely Available(05:19) 2. Price Parity: Switching Costs Are Essentially Zero(06:35) 3. Early Market Momentum(07:57) Who We Are and What Additional Funding Would Enable --- First published: December 3rd, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yBBmb9J2uYyx8zjuv/the-10-billion-chickens-you-didn-t-know-were-living-in-cages --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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