There has been a large controversy in the health and diet community about the treatment of chickens raised for consumption and how the different breeding methods may effect the product that they bring to us. The conventional way that chickens have been brought up in the past several decades is a mass farming operation in which they are barely given enough space to move and the hens are injected with so many hormones that their breasts become so large they can barely walk. Outside of the obvious human rights abuses there has also been a question raised as to whether this effects the quality of the chicken that is being produced. The answer to this question seems to be that there are significant health differences between free-range chickens and those who have been raised in captivity with no ability to move around. The study found that mass farmed birds in cages were more likely to carry diseases and did not produce the highest quality of meat, compared to those who were raised as free-range who produced higher quality meat and also were less likely to suffer from disease or corruption of their meat. One way that mass-producers have attempted to get around this impending disaster is to claim that they allow the chickens they have to move around more, but not go outside, thus denying them key nutrients from the sun. The simply consensus seems to be that free-chickens tend to produce a higher quality product than those who are clamped into a desolate cage. This would make sense just following basic humane treatment ideals, but money is a much more powerful force than that unfortunately.
Read more: Free-Range Chicken Benefits vs. Conventional Chicken Dangers