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Alternatively, we could treat fellow sentient beings with a bit of empathy and respect and not cram thousands of them into an artificial environment. Then we wouldn't have to cram them full of antibiotics, cut their beaks off and make them wear 'cute' glasses.

I love humanely and ethically raised chickens, but let's not pretend they aren't dumb as rocks. The happiest chickens in the world with all the pasture and food in the world will still fight each other for no other reason than "because". Admittedly a lot less but still happens

We don't live in a perfect world, and we never will. But that isn't a good excuse not to try to do better.

It’s not a refutation though. Dumb doesn’t seem to preclude suffering in humans; I’d assume chickens can still have a bad time.

Industrial farming often feels like it's trying to engineer around the symptoms of a problem it refuses to solve at the root

Don't buy eggs/chickens from companies that treat them like that. Buy from local farms or eggs labeled as pasture raised while grocery shopping. You're not supporting the awful conditions and also getting eggs that have more nutrition content/egg.

Maybe there's a negative I'm not aware of, but I personally look for pasture raised eggs that are certified by this organization: https://certifiedhumane.org/

I can often find them for only $2 more a dozen than the cheapest option.

Agreed, but the logical conclusion of that line of thought is veganism, which, ironically, would mean the extinction of farmed chickens entirely. (And I think most ethical vegans would be OK with that.)

This is an interesting comment! There are a few implications tucked together here that made me think.

Forgive me if I'm missing your intent(s) but the way I'm reading your comment it seems to be implying "the logical conclusion of that line of thinking is a worse situation so the logic is wrong or should be ignored".

Which implies that not being extinct is the most important thing even if life is completely suffering.

(It also implies a false dichotomy where the only two options are the horrible suffering of modern factory farming or extinction, with no options in between.)

I have an earnest question about your opinion, without casting any judgement or gotchas about any real world complicated situations:

In a hypothetical world where horrible factory farming is the only possible life for these chickens (the ONLY alternative is extinction) do you think it is worse to keep the system going than letting them go extinct? I think that's the intent in your comment and, if so, would you mind sharing a bit more about why you think that?

Yes, I think the subjective value of life for chickens in a factory farm is negative, so the most ethical outcome would be to stop breeding them, at which point they would presumably go extinct.

I’m not a vegan myself, but I have several vegans in my life, and I believe this is a common viewpoint in the vegan community.

I don't think so. You could simply mandate more space per chicken, access to natural light and other improvements. It would make chicken and eggs more expensive. But I am ok with that.

I don't think there's any version of factory farming that's consistent with your stated desire to treat chickens with empathy and respect. We'd have to revert to being an agrarian society.

There is a whole continuum between massive intensive factory farming and boutique organic farms.

The fact that this article doesn’t include any images of chickens wearing said goggles is an injustice.

https://www.lazerhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Cannib...

You almost want to laugh, but then you remember this was meant to fix a system that pushed animals so hard they turned on each other.

Looks cooler than I expected!

Dope drip. Missing a cigarette and a leather jacket.

this is a dapper looking chicken!

I had a theory, long supported by things like astatine, quantum computing or graphene, that if top-right Wikipedia image doesn't contain photo then the subject is either not real or not practical.

Neither “arithmetic” nor “algorithm” have photos.

Q. E. D.

And contact lenses too. A HBS case study I remember from grad school:

"Optical Distortion, Inc" A new product, contact lenses for chickens, is to be introduced by a small firm formed to market the product. An entry strategy must be planned including price, sales force, size, and location. Allows data for computation of economic benefit to farmers. Includes state-by-state chicken population data for planning a rollout sales program.

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=17120

Looks like he actually tried it:

  But some ideas cannot be crushed by bankruptcy and the dream of providing lenses to all of America’s hens was carried on by the son of one of Vision Control Inc.’s founders, a young Mr. Randall Wise. Wise, a Harvard Business school graduate and former nautical shipping consultant, used the millions he made from selling his software company to establish Animalens, Inc.

 Instead of pecking at each other (success!), the hens were now pecking at the air, rubbing their eyes repeatedly on their wings, and suffering from corneal ulcers and ruptured eyes.

The idea that we once mass-produced rose-tinted chicken glasses to curb pecking violence is peak “solutions in search of a problem” energy - but also a fascinating glimpse into pre-industrial animal welfare hacks.

We owned this game growing up: https://magisterrex.wordpress.com/2010/04/13/the-best-classi...

It has those goggles in it. Still remember fondly to this day (not the game, the chicken goggles).

Nowadays they do the same using red lights in industrial egg production, if pecking becomes a problem in a flock.

The article talks in the past tense, but doesn't mention what it got replaced with.

Searching for it reveals pink plastic chicken glasses for sale today, so they still seem to exist. Or maybe those are blinders instead

A friend had a job in the 70's at a research lab, and one of their duties was to use a hot iron to curl the beaks of each incoming batch of chicks, to help prevent pecking. They called the tasking "giving the chickens lips". I like the glasses solution a bit better.

I looked this up after hearing about them on ABC's If You're Listening podcast: https://abc.net.au/listen/programs/if-youre-listening/skunk-...

Well, I know more about abnormal injurious behavior in birds than I did an hour ago

I remember these! A board game I played as a kid in the 1970s, "The Inventors," had chicken eyewear protection as an invention.

Pic available at: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/817261/the-inventors

Chickens are hilarious and surprisingly adorable. All plans of eating ours went right out the window when I brought home the first wave of day-old chicks.

They can be very mean to each other. “Pecking order” is literally true and the results can be heartbreaking. Ours have never pecked each other’s eyes, thank heaven, but I’m guessing most of that is from the roosters, not the hens. Roosters can get disgustingly rapey and have to be separated from the hens, who can get seriously injured during the mating process.

I heard from someone who raised chicken that they are way more agressive towards each other when their diet lacks adequate proteins.

Low Protein intake => low neurotransmitter levels => lower emotional balance / control is a causal chain I've learned about a few years ago from a therapist named Julia Ross who treated thousands of patients with this insight and published three books about it, the most recent one (The craving cure) being a comprehensive practical resource about this phenomenon. It seems to be a major factor in depression, addiction, obesity, and dysfunctional social behaviour.. and little surprise it affects chicken, too.

In my view, we have massive problems (child brain development, social problems) in the world because of protein scarcity, as capitalism excels providing everyone with ample cheap carbs but cheap sustainable protein, not so much. I dream of open source bioreactors for algae (spirulina etc) too boost availability of Protein & Omega 3 (which is another hugely undersupplied nutrient, esp. in non-coastal regions and as appetite for sunflower-fried batter goes up, because Omega 6 cancels out 3).. here in Dresden, we have a small start-up https://algenwerk.de that is trying to commercialize it but the cost really has to be brought down a lot, rn one jar is about 8€ for some green goo that tastes like nothing, but it has potential and they are a talented team.

I'm no dietitian, but for the "cheap, broadly available protien" I think beans and lentils fit the bill. I do not know if they are sustainable, which you mention as a requirement in your post, but surely plant based is more sustainable than meat.

> Chickens are hilarious and surprisingly adorable.

They are, but also extremely dumb. I always think of Herzog's rant about chickens and their stupidity.

As they are literal dinosaurs, the terrifying aspect of gigantic carnivore sauropods with the "intelligence" of a chicken has never been properly depicted in movies.

>disgustingly rapey

This anthromorphization is deeply annoying. What next? Turtles don’t care about age of consent?

I was a tourist in Athens once. Adjacent to the Presidential Mansion is the National Garden, quite lovely. At the time it had a miserable little zoo. In one of the cages was a pair of bedraggled hens. Their backs were entirely bare of any feathers. The reason they were bedraggled and bare was because they were locked in with a rooster. That rooster would mount and rut with them every four seconds or so, all day long, every day. It was one of the most cruel and grotesque tableus I've ever seen.

That's normal rooster behaviour even when free range. Farmers separate them most of the time.

nature is cruel.

if you think about it, most animals die fucked up deaths and end up starving, injured, or being torn apart by a predator.

That was not nature. That was a human who made the decision to keep those birds penned up together.

We have indoor rabbits and our boy rabbit often mounts the female one (they are both neutered). What else is there to call it but rape? He mounts her, she rejects it and runs away, he insists, eventually she has enough and they have a fight. It’s basically impossible to not call it rape

It's a loaded word though, with psychological and social implications that far exceed the simple description of the act. Absent the psychology and society, what is it? Obnoxious dominant behavior, maybe.

But in context, is it even obnoxious or is that just humans having opinions again? The hens don't appear to love it, but they don't like being rained on either. And just like being caught in a rainstorm, they shake themselves off, and get on with their day. Is this OK? I don't know, but it's thoroughly normal and necessary for species survival. Hens do not go into heat or have sex drives, so the hen will never initiate or encourage sex. So all chicken mating is nonconsensual. What does consent even mean here? Yet they survive as a (now domesticated) species.

Similarly, is it "murder" when a coyote eats a chicken? Maybe, but only if we're anthropomorphizing. Really it's just predation. It sets off our moral triggers, but it's an essential function of life -- and for that matter, we do it too and rarely feel bad about it.

It’s mating behavior. The don't have the concept of rape. They don’t have peers who punish them for this behavior. It all instinct and nothing else.

It doesn't matter if they have a concept of it, I'm talking about our concept of it, and their behaviour accords to that concept

Zero chickens are aware of human concepts of order.

You might as well rail against clouds for forming, or rain for falling.

Agreed, of course

I don't get it though - how does this help prevent pecking? The only reasoning seems to be in the 1911 article, where it suggests they're made to protect the chickens' eyes.

end of the first paragraph

> the coloring was thought to prevent a chicken wearing them from recognizing blood on other chickens, which may increase the tendency for abnormal injurious behavior

> One variety used rose-colored lenses, as the coloring was thought to prevent a chicken wearing them from recognizing blood on other chickens

So that's only relevant tot the rose-colored variant.

I think the answer lies in this quote right above it:

> They differ from blinders in that they allow the bird to see forward, whereas blinders do not.

Where "blinders" is a hyperlink to an article concerning blinders for chickens.

That article has a piece comparing blinders to spectacles:

> Blinders work by reducing the accuracy of pecking at the feathers or body of another bird, rather than spectacles which have coloured lenses and allow the bird to see forwards but alter the perceived colour, particularly of blood.

But this again only refers to the coloured lenses, which in the article was said to be a variant.

So my understanding is that both blinders and spectacles work by restricting the vision of the bird but the spectactles additionally had a rose-colored variant.

You must have missed this in the wikipedia page, but they're hinged.

So when they look down (which for a chicken means bending their neck), they can see the ground and their feed.

When looking ahead, their vision is obscured and blurry, opaque, so they won't attack or eat other chickens.

(the red is an additional option)

Ah, interesting!

Is the driver of behaviour having too many chickens packed in too small space?

No. Chickens have a tendency to gang up on sick and injured chickens and quite literally peck them to death.

This has been observed long before we started cramming them into tiny spaces, but it certainly doesn't help.

As a rural guy can confirm.

Also, the males, become quite agressive past 4 months of age. They also grow sizeable spurs hard as nails, usually these are trimmed if you have more than one rooster. Roosters will attempt to kill chicks occasionally, although they usually do a great job protecting them from predators. They are able to scare foxes sometimes :)

I can not find pictures of chicken wearing those particular glasses depicted in this Wikipedia article.

This made my day.

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In this case, the source was a podcast, as I pointed out when I posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44244706

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