Today’s post is about another news article, titled “‘Planet of the chickens’: How the bird took over the world.” This was published on BBC News by Helen Briggs on December 12, 2018.

I decided to look at this article because of the amount of documentaries I watched that either focused mainly on chickens or included portions of their documentary based about chickens. Based on that, and the information presented in this article, the importance of chickens is huge and constantly growing.

Some statistics from the article:

• 65.8 billion chickens were slaughtered in 2014 (in comparison to 1.5 billion pigs and 0.3 billion cattle)
• 25,500 stores in the world selling popular brands of fried chicken
• 70% of broiler chickens are intensively reared
• Broiler chickens live around five to seven weeks

In the 1950s, producing bigger birds was the focus. The idea of creating larger and larger birds has continued into today. These birds are part of the largest industry in the world.

These ideals have been found across each of the documentaries I have watched. They are only going to continue creating larger and larger birds. This will likely be detrimental to these animals.