The majority of chickens don't get to live out their full, natural lifespans. Instead, the factory farm industry cuts their lives short.
Chickens are gentle, intelligent birds. They love to spend their days foraging in the grass for insects and seeds, taking dust baths to keep themselves clean, and creating and protecting nests when they become doting parents.
But the majority of chickens don’t get to live this natural and happy life. The majority of these sweet animals are used and abused for profit, their natural lifespans cut short by injury, disease and slaughter.
How Long Do Chickens Live in the Wild?
The chickens we commonly see in advertisements, on packaging in our supermarkets, or at petting farms, tend to represent only a handful of breeds. They could be white birds with red combs and wattles, brown-feathered birds with speckles of white, or brown roosters with long, iridescent green tails.
The truth is that there are hundreds of different breeds of chickens around the world—so many that the real number isn’t even known!
Because of this immense diversity, it’s difficult to say how long chickens live on average. Generally, most wild chicken breeds can enjoy lifespans between three and seven years, and sometimes longer.
Despite the challenges of living in the wild, including the risk of predators, these animals have longer lifespans than most chickens throughout the world. What’s more, these lucky individuals get to roam free in the great outdoors, spend time with their families and friends, and raise their young themselves.
This life of freedom is far different from what the majority of chickens experience.
How Long Do Backyard Chickens Live?
Some people keep small flocks of chickens in their gardens so they can eat their eggs. Usually, these flocks consist entirely of layer hens—the female birds who produce the eggs, as well as a rooster or two in order to maintain the population.
Here, chickens are kept in coops or cages which prevent them from ever leaving the backyard they are confined to. This is a far cry from freedom, although it is still much better than the life many other chickens live, as we’ll soon see.
In backyard flocks, humans protect chickens from predators, ensure they always have enough food, and shelter them from bad weather. This can extend the life of chickens, with many living a decade or more.
What Do Chickens Usually Die From?
It might surprise you to know that, in the UK alone, over a billion chickens live and die every year. Virtually none of them are wild, and a very small percentage of the chickens are in backyard flocks. The vast majority are kept on intensive agriculture operations known as factory farms, where they are raised and slaughtered for eggs or meat.
This means that, the number one cause of death for chickens in the UK is, unquestionably, human beings.
How Long Do Chickens Live Before Slaughter?
Most chickens in the UK live on large-scale factory farms and are raised for either meat or eggs. What they are used for affects how long they live, although both egg-laying hens and broiler chickens who are raised for meat face abnormally shortened lifespans.
Layer hens—those who are bred and forced to lay large quantities of eggs—live to be about 18 to 24 months old before being sent for slaughter. Broiler chickens, or chickens raised for meat, live to be about 47 days old before they meet their violent end.
What Factors Affect a Chicken’s Lifespan?
A factory-farmed chicken begins their life in a sterile hatchery, where they emerge from their egg along with thousands of other chicks. Many of these chicks will go on to experience a brief, misery-filled life—but for some chicks, life is about to come to an abrupt, horrifying end even sooner.
Gender
Broiler chicks of both sexes will live to be the same age since both genders are used to make breasts, nuggets, and other chicken products eaten by people.
In global egg production, however, there is a huge difference when it comes to the lifespan of male and female chicks. Since males are unable to produce eggs, __they are considered entirely useless by this heartless industry. __
Shortly after they hatch—often when they are only a few hours old—male chicks can be sent down a conveyor belt that leads them to a macerating machine. Here, these chicks are ground up alive. Some facilities gas the chicks to death instead, while others may choose to cram chicks into huge plastic bags where they will be crushed to death or suffocated.
For male chicks on egg factory farms, life amounts to only a few short, and brutal, hours.
Housing
For those chicks who make it past the hatchery, a life of misery awaits. On many commercial egg farms, layer hens are stuffed into cages. These hens can’t follow any of their natural instincts, never able to dig in the earth, peck at the ground, perch, or make nests.
Broiler barns are not much better. These crowded spaces prevent birds from getting appropriate exercise, leading to muscle and skeletal conditions that can be fatal.
Chickens are also forced to live on the ground that is covered with their own excrement. These filthy environments can be fatal to birds, with risks coming from bacteria growth as well as ammonia from the feces that can cause respiratory issues.
Breed
Breed plays a big role in shortening the lifespans of chickens on both egg and meat factory farms.
Broiler chickens have been selectively bred to grow much faster than they ordinarily would. Their bodies have been forced to grow much more muscle than nature intended in order to produce more meat to sell.
Known as ‘rapid growth’ breeds, these chickens are so prone to skeletal and other health problems that they would soon die even if they weren’t slaughtered at about six weeks of age.
Layer hens, on the other hand, are bred so that they produce extremely high volumes of eggs— about one per day—versus the roughly twelve or so each year that wild chickens might produce. This demand on hens’ bodies can cause horrifically painful conditions including drooping organs known as prolapses, calcium depletion that can lead to broken bones, and ovarian cancer.
Disease
In the wild, chickens regularly encounter pathogens that can make them sick. But on factory farms, the conditions are so terrible that disease is essentially a given. This is why chicken farms tend to liberally give antibiotic treatments to chickens as a preventative measure.
Diseases, including cancer, Mycoplasma gallisepticum, and Blackhead and Marek’s diseases, can all pose serious health risks to chickens and contribute towards shorter lifespans. But why is disease so common in chickens raised for food?
Factory farms prevent chickens from enjoying the great outdoors, and these densely packed indoor sheds deny them the ability to perch, fly, or socialise as they would naturally.
As a result, chickens can become chronically stressed, which in turn depresses their immune systems’ ability to fight off disease. This is especially problematic when we see that factory farm environments are riddled with feces, providing an ideal breeding ground for viruses and bacteria.
These factors, coupled with the fact that chickens are forced to produce more eggs and meat than is natural, clearly shows why chickens can be so afflicted with illness.
Veterinary Care
Veterinary care should be administered to any farmed animal who is suffering. But on chicken factory farms, where often hundreds of thousands of birds are confined together, there are simply not enough vets to go around and deliver necessary care.
The number of animals on factory farms makes it difficult, if not impossible, for farmworkers to even observe instances of illness. As a result, medical treatment often doesn’t arrive, leaving chickens to die and rot in their cages or barns.
Slaughter
Slaughter is the number one factor affecting the lifespans of chickens, be it on egg or meat factory farms. This happens long before the natural lifespan would end. Indeed, in the wild chickens that are raised for meat would still be with their mothers at the time they are slaughtered.
Which Chicken Holds the World Record for the Longest Life Span?
As you can probably guess, the record for the world’s oldest chicken did not come from a factory farm. Matilda was an Old English Game breed kept as a companion bird and lived to the remarkable age of 16. She never produced any eggs, which may have contributed to her long lifespan.
Compare Matilda’s long life with the two-year lifespan of a layer hen, or the under two-month lifespan of a broiler chicken, and the cruelty of these industries becomes all the more obvious.
What Can You Do?
Whether their lives are short, or long, chickens—just like our dogs and cats—deserve to live better lives. Join us, on their behalf, to tell some of the world’s biggest corporations it’s time they treat chickens better.