Imagine a farm. You probably picture sunny fields; a big green tractor; a ruddy, good humoured farmer; a trusty sheepdog. To most people, this is not an unpalatable scene. It is to this image that people appeal when they say that ‘one bad day’ ain’t so bad for the animal. You wouldn’t feel so hard done by wondering around a nice field all day, pecking at grass, hanging out with your chicken buddies, until one day you quickly and painlessly stop existing, and end up served for Sunday lunch.

To be honest, those chickens wouldn’t have too much to grumble about, if they could grumble. They certainly have fewer worries than wild birds: they’ve got a warm dry bed, protection from predators, and all the food they could want. It is these chickens you probably think about when tucking in to a roast, or a chicken pie, especially if you’ve gone out of your way to by ‘uncaged’ or Red Tractor meat.

Now I know that people don’t need to be told how unpleasant factory farming can be. I know the eye-rolls, I know it is something that not many people want to really think about, but I think they should.

Before I continue, I want to add in some caveats. I know that many low income families depend on cheap meat for meals, and that ‘ethical’ meat is not something everyone can afford. I also know that, however great lentils and beans are, and however cheap they may be, they aren’t much fun to live on full time, and plant-based meat substitutes are relatively expensive. I think this is an important point to think about when considering the problem of factory farming, but this is a problem that would take more time than there is room for here, and so I want to put a pin in it for now and come back to in a later post.

I have also made an effort to cite as balanced a range of sources as possible – none of the references here come from ‘radical’ animal rights organizations. I don’t want to mislead anyone: the truth is persuasive enough.

So, with that out of the way, lets get to the point: the vast majority of animal products that we consume come from animals that had far more than one bad day. I’m going to take chickens as the example in this article, as chicken is the most commonly consumed meat in the UK. It is important to bear in mind, however, that the pork industry is showing similar trends both within and without the UK, and the pig-based products sold in British supermarkets are increasingly imported from the mega farms abroad – Danish farms in particular. Find out more about intensive pig farming here.

Nearly 1 billion chickens are slaughtered for meat each year in the UK, 94% of which come from intensive farms. These farms typically consist of one or more vast sheds, in which thousands of chickens are kept. To count as intensive a farm, your flock must have more than 40,000 individuals, more than 126,000 and you’ve got yourself a megafarm. A chicken in one of these places would feel considerably more hard done by than those happy chickens pecking about on the free range farm. It lives in its own waste; its chicken buddies peck its feathers out because the a4 sized rectangle of space they have been allocated is too small; the intensive selective breeding make its legs ill-equipped to support its own weight, and its heart and bones are unable to keep up with the rapid increase in bulk that occurs over the course of its wretched two months of life. Many don’t even make it to slaughter. And then when you get to the slaughterhouse, chances are it won’t be quick or painless.

Loathe as I am to anthropomorphise, I don’t think it is controversial to say that the life of an intensively farmed chicken is full of pain, even if you think they are stupider than a sack of potatoes (a popular opinion but contrary to the scientific literature on the subject). I am also sick of the oft-voiced opinion that animal welfare is some kind of non-issue and the preserve of PETA nutters: if I saw my next-door neighbour keeping a pet chicken in these conditions I would report them to the RSPCA. I think animal welfare is important. There, I said it.

But lets say, for whatever reason, you’re not too bothered about this – maybe you have some long-running feud with chickenkind after too many lie-ins cut short by early rising cockrels— there are a lot of reasons why you might want to avoid intensively farmed chicken anyway.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a life lived among faeces and corpses does not make for the cleanest of chickens. As such, 92% of chicken meat on sale in the UK is contaminated with faecal matter.  In and of itself this fact probably has more shock value than real meaning. The problem, however are all of the pathogens that like to hang out in faeces such as campylobacter and E.coli. Of course you can just make sure to thoroughly cook any chicken you eat (generally-speaking good advice anyway), but the prevalence of these bacteria is still quite unappetising in my book. Regardless, not everyone successfully succeeds in this – a quarter of a million britons every year contract food poisoning from chicken meat (in case you’re worried that the Guardian is a little too far to one side of the political spectrum here is the Daily Mail saying the same thing).

Ok, so you’ve managed to dodge the bugs so far, intensive farming raises broader issues than just individual sickness. Antibiotics are broadly used in farm animals world wide, this is not only to prevent animals from getting sick, but also on account of the fact that it makes them grow much more quickly. Although antibiotic use for non-medical reasons has been banned in the EU since 2006, because they are kept in such cramped conditions, animals in intensive farms get sick quite a bit. For example, the Red Tractor guidelines consider the deaths of up to 300 chickens per 100,000 in a 24 hour period to be acceptable mortality levels for intensively farmed chickens.

Outside of the EU, the story is much bleaker. A recent article published in Lancet Infectious diseases found that in China, even those antibiotics never used in people that have designated as the last line of defence against antibiotic resistant bacteria are losing their potency. E.coli bacteria resistant to the antibiotic Colistin was found on (15%) of 523 samples of raw meat, 166 (21%) of 804 animals, and 16 (1%) of 1,322 samples from hospital inpatients with infection. In the US, there exists no federal legislation against the use of antibiotics in agriculture, and the FDA deemed it the onus of meat producers to voluntarily stop using antibiotics. Funnily enough, they haven’t, and 80% of antibiotics used in the US are still used on farm animals.

The final problem with intensive farming that i’m going to discuss here is something previously alluded to: as the common adage goes ‘everybody shits’, chickens are no exception. An average chicken will produce 40g of poop per day, that is just short of one small dairy milk chocolate bar. So lets just think about that, if you take the 173 million chickens that are alive at any one time in the UK, that is 6920 metric tonnes, which, the internet tells me, is roughly the same weight as 49 adult blue whales per day.

Now, I urge you to cast your minds back to high school biology. Bird poop, you might recall, is not just any old poop. Birds do not wee, and as such their poo contains ‘wee’ also (in case you were wondering, thats what the white bits are in bird poop). This means that their poop is extra concentrated. Don’t get me wrong, this poop can be useful as fertiliser, but only after a it has been composted (the chemicals in ‘raw’ chicken poop are so concentrated that they kill plants) and even if chicken poop was used to make industrial fertiliser (which it isn’t generally speaking), there is still way too much produced than we know what to do with, and chicken poop that is not handled properly is a major pollutant.

It is the unfortunate truth that if you don’t know where the chicken you are eating came from, chances are that chicken never had the chance to peck happily around a barnyard. What is even more galling, is that the organizations that brand themselves as benchmarks for ‘ethical’ meat, often aren’t telling you as much as you might assume. Red Tractor endorses intensive farms and intensive farming practices, and explicitly allow in its guidelines moderate levels of injury sustained from factory practices (‘only’ 15% of a chickens legs can be covered with ‘hock burns’ from too much sitting down). I know I sound mental, like I’m some stereotyped vegan, but it is the sad truth that intensive farming has steadily and quietly entrenched itself in Britain today, with many people none the wiser.

It is important to bear in mind that Britain has some of the best animal welfare regulation in the world, and that we still come up drastically short. These practices are only getting more prevalent as the architects of the US mega farm move across to Europe and the rest of the world, and as the demand for cheap meat grows ever higher. In my home county of Herefordshire there are now 200 ‘megafarms’. There is one planned for two miles down the road from the house where I grew up. These mega farms price local, more humane farmers out of the market, and in doing so harm rural communities.

Changing the way we eat is tough: it’s really hard to care all the time. But intensive farming is an evil which has crept up on us behind closed doors. I think that people have the right to know where their food comes from, and I think most people are (although sometimes willfully) misled. ‘Ethical’ chicken, for the most part, is a fantasy. Britons are eating more and more meat than they used to, and are expecting to pay less and less for it – a price that is payed by the environment, public health, independent farmers and the chickens themselves.