Imagine finding a bird with a broken wing on your front lawn. Most of us would be prompted to take some action to alleviate its suffering, at the very least calling the local wildlife rescue group. People care about injured wildlife.

But what if the bird is not wild and what if it isn’t on your front lawn? What if it’s a chicken with a broken wing, shackled upside down on a conveyor belt in a slaughterhouse? Does anyone care?

For some, the answer is simple: No, it’s just a chicken. Embedded in this reaction is the belief that because an animal is used for food its intrinsic value and status are automatically lowered.

Chickens in particular seem to attract less empathy than other animals. They lack the charisma of wild birds or the cuteness of pets. They are historically portrayed as comically unintelligent and cowardly. Say the word chicken and most people don’t even think of the animal. They think KFC.

Yet, whatever status we accord chickens, they feel the same pain as the injured bird on your front lawn. Just because we stick labels on animals like wildlife, pet or livestock, it makes no difference to them or their capacity for suffering. A broken wing is a broken wing.

No one who watched the CTV television coverage of a recent undercover investigation of a poultry slaughterhouse run by Maple Lodge Farms could deny that animals were suffering.

The investigation, by Mercy for Animals Canada, revealed chickens with visibly broken bones being hung upside down on a fast moving line dragging them to slaughter. According to the investigator, some were hung by one leg (in violation of federal humane slaughter policy) by workers under pressure to process 20 birds per minute. Video footage showed chickens crammed into crates being roughly thrown and dropped onto conveyor belts on arrival at the facility. A poultry scientist interviewed by CTV said many of the practices depicted were “unacceptable.”

But perhaps just as disturbing are the practices that are currently considered “acceptable” in Canada. Chickens raised for meat are now bred to grow so fast they are crippled by their own weight, leading to heart attacks, skeletal disorders and lameness. They are transported to slaughterhouses in unheated trucks with limited ventilation in all weather, during which time they can legally be deprived of water, food and rest for up to 36 hours. After short lives of deprivation, stress and pain, more than 600 million chickens are shackled upside-down and slaughtered in Canada each year.

This built-in cruelty exists because industrialized animal agriculture is about profitably producing masses of cheap meat — a priority that cannot help but conflict with animal welfare.

Only pressure from Canadian consumers can make producers change their methods. Some consumers have decided to buy outside the factory farm system, turning to non-intensive, traditional producers. Others have turned against animal agriculture altogether as the quality, selection and convenience of vegetarian and vegan food rapidly improves. If one can eat well without cruelty or slaughter, why not?

If there was enough public outrage, the industry could be forced to use more humane slaughter methods such as gas. Transport times without food and water could be lowered. Trucks could be weatherproofed.

But for any of this to happen, Canadians need to care about chickens. Perhaps the latest science, which shows they are sentient, curious, social animals with far more intelligence than previously thought, would make a difference.

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But is elevating the lowly status of chickens really necessary to end the cruelty that is systematically inflicted on them? They may never attract the admiration we have for eagles or the affection we have for kittens, but that shouldn’t matter. Only their capacity to suffer should — and as the horrific scenes at Maple Lodge Farms showed, that capacity is undeniable.