Raven Rain

Denmark is moving to ban Frankenchickens — the first country in the world to do so. What we’ve done to chickens is the largest genetic experiment ever run on any animal, and one of the most troubling. Geneticists took a scrawny bird and engineered an obese meat machine. The chickens we eat today grow four times faster than chickens did in 1957. But their bodies are not four times stronger. By just six weeks old, many will suffer ailments of old age — heart failure, organ colapse — while one in four will become lame (Knowles et al., 2008). In studies, lame birds will choose feed laced with painkillers — a sign of chronic pain (Danbury et al., 2000). Their parents meanwhile are kept on starvation rations. Birds engineered to grow this fast would otherwise eat themselves to death before laying a single egg. We now breed over 70 billion of these birds a year. Denmark is acting to reverse this giant genetic experiment. The rest of the world should follow suit.