It's a short life for a meat chicken

This seems a long time ago now

Six months does not seem a long time for a table bird to live before it makes the journey into the freezer. Before I became a smallholder I definitely would have questioned why a bird couldn't enjoy a longer life before that life was taken for our culinary pleasure.
That was until I finally plucked up the courage to dispatch some of our older cockerels. They were tough as boot leather!
Add to that the fact that cockerels if let grow too long will become aggressive to each other and ungentlemanly to the hens.

Suddenly a touch of reality strikes home. These birds are not pets. They will live for six months and that's it. So the best I can do is give them a good life.

Three Ixworths and a Muscovy duck

Until this year our meat birds have been Ixworth chickens, a traditional breed, and Muscovy ducks. We didn't feed them any different to the other birds, for they all lived together. The Muscovies grew to a good size but the Ixworths were mostly leg with slithers for breasts.

The Ixworth trio when we had them.

Smart birds, but not a lot of breast.

But it gets more complicated. Six month old birds would be considered slow-grown. Commercial hens will be ready in 6 weeks. Over the years this age has come down dramatically. At the same time slaughter weight has risen equally dramatically. Since the 1940s, slaughter weight has doubled while slaughter age has halved.

Graph taken from Compassion in World Farming document

Now there is so much that I find abhorrent about intensive poultry farming. But the age of the birds is, as I have discovered, not quite so straightforward. The birds probably have no expectations of how long they will live, but would certainly prefer to have space and freedom while they are alive.

We recently reared some chicks taken out of a highly intensive system. Their rate of growth was astonishing, as was their ability to eat and drink vast quantities. But at least these birds were able to live the life of a truly free range chicken until they reached slaughter weight. I would genuinely say that it wasn't overly cruel, though they were abnormally big-breasted and by ten weeks old some were quite waddly. None went off their legs, though they would have if left to grow even heavier. A couple spent some time apparently gasping as they got older. Maybe this was indicative of heart problems or being just too big and misshapen.

Anyway, my conclusion was that provided they were slaughtered before they got too heavy, although their life would be short we could offer them a reasonable life. But I did feel that genetic 'improvement' had gone a little too far.

Our next meat birds, the ones we have just slaughtered, came to us as one day old commercial broiler chicks. They come through a friend and don't even have a breed name. In fact they are a bit of a mish-mash. Most pure white with thick yellow legs and bright red combs, but some clearly mixed with traditional brown hens and a couple specked with rogue black feathers.
They grew much quicker than I had anticipated and took me unawares as they suddenly reached a good weight. I had to hurriedly take them off growers pellets and put them onto finishers (for growers pellets contain medication so require a withdrawal period). They were ready for slaughter at 12 weeks or 84 days. I was very happy with these birds. They did not seem out of proportion. They were healthy birds, it's just that they grew much more quickly than the traditional breeds we had previously tried to rear for meat.

And so I feel we have found our meat chickens. Their short life is nevertheless a good one, far removed from most of their cousins in intensive systems (and I include minimum standard so-called free-range in that).
There are some big benefits to them having a short life too. Feed costs are lower, there is less demand on housing and the ground can be rested more. But there are limits.
The European organic standard gives a minimum slaughter age of 81 days, which I would say is about right for today's fast growing birds. Anything which reaches table weight considerably before that is probably too genetically manipulated to have a comfortable life, not to mention the conditions it is kept in to maximise profit and the expense of welfare and taste.