Chickens are intelligent,
sensitive animals who deserve
humane treatment

Take action now to end the cruelty!

About 776 million chickens are raised for meat and eggs in Canada each year. Produced in factories like mere things, they live short, nightmarish lives. Do you know where your food comes from?

Two kinds of chickens raised on farms

Meat chickens

730,000,000 chickens in Canada are raised for meat each year a.k.a. "broiler chickens".

Raised in crowded, dark barns, meat chickens first see sunlight on the way to slaughter. Many die en route. Birds used for breeding live for about 1 year and endure stress, confinement, and deprivation. Their offspring is killed for meat at just over 1 month of age.

See how meat chickens live

Egg laying hens

26,000,000 chickens in Canada lay eggs for human consumption.

90% of egg laying hens in Canada live packed into rows of filthy "battery" cages. Forced to lay 20 times more eggs than their wild relatives, hens suffer severe injuries. After just 1 year of laying eggs, when aggressive egg production declines, the "spent" hens are killed.

See how egg laying hens live

The Five Freedoms

The Five Freedoms is a core concept in animal welfare that originated in a UK government report in 1965 and was then refined by the Farm Animal Welfare Council. It states that an animal’s primary welfare needs can be met by safeguarding the following five freedoms:

In both magnitude and severity, [chicken production is] the single most severe example of man’s inhumanity to another sentient animal.


See why birds may freeze during transport or get their wings broken during loading.

See stages of the slaughter process and learn how many chickens are killed each minute.

Download a printable PDF brochure about meat and laying chickens.

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