A committed free-range enthusiast, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall investigates intensive chicken farming on the Channel 4 series, 'Hugh's Chicken Run'. In the programme, Hugh investigates intensive chicken farming and is driven to quite astonishing lengths to demonstrate what he strongly believes is the cruelty involved. Here, Hugh reveals how he’s beginning to win this battle.
Absolutely - it's called Chicken Out. We want to change the way chicken is produced in Britain. We think the more people understand, the more they'll be inclined to upgrade the welfare of the birds that they buy. We're leading with a call for free range, but we're also putting a lot of pressure on supermarkets and the industry to raise the basic standards of indoor, intensive production as well, so that even if more people choose free range, the standards for intensive farming will improve as well.
Chickens were the first ever livestock that I raised at River Cottage. They've been giving me eggs and meat all my life, and now I rear my own, for both eggs and meat. And I think they're the front line of animal welfare in this country, and the way in which they're farmed is something to which the public are denied access. You've got chicken farms with barbed wire all around them, which is not necessary to keep the birds in. I particularly target the supermarkets because they sell so much cheap chicken - it's right at the heart of their price wars with each other, and they use it to try and gain market share.
We tried to get access to the industry but approaches were shut down pretty quickly. I really wanted people to understand how this was done, and indeed if I wanted to understand it fully myself, I had to raise at least one crop of standard birds according to industry regulations. It was in a scaled down experiment. Mostly there's between 20,000 and 40,000 birds in a shed. We scaled that down to ten per cent - we raised 2,500 birds.
At the heart of the problem is a bird which is now more or less a genetic freak. It takes half the time to raise a bird to market weight of two kilos that it did 30 years ago. It's gone down from about 80 days to less than 40 days. And, in order to do that, you need very specialised conditions. They are not the natural conditions that any edible or any fowl should be raised in. They are indoors, without natural light, the period of darkness they're given may be as little as one hour in 24, so that they are constantly feeding. They can't move very far, all they can really do is feed and rest and feed and rest, and put on this extraordinary unnatural weight. To raise a free range alternative to the same weight takes anything up to twice as long. The minimum is 56 days, but often it takes 70 or 80 days.
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