United States: In 2021, about 556 million chickens in the U.S. died before reaching the slaughterhouse and all these chickens ended up in landfills, incinerators, compost heaps, or even pet food. 

Also, there are 41 million more chickens either died during transport to the slaughterhouse or were not safe to eat due to problems like tumors, bruising, or infections. 

This information comes from a report by the animal rights group Animal Equality. 

Chickens are America’s favorite animal to eat, but many are lost before they can even be used for food. 

In order to understand the scope of Animal Equality’s revelations, these 597 million non-eaten chickens are six percent of the 9.8 billion chickens suffered for meat every year in the US, more combined than the number of turkeys, pigs or cattle slaughtered for meat yearly. 

As reported by the Vox News, chickens the world over drop dead on farms at an unreasonably young age that a started developed a robot that picks the carcasses off the ground because it is part of business strategy. 

That number was cited by the National Chicken Council, the industry’s main trade group, that reported a 5.3% mortality rate – the share of birds that die prematurely in 2021, but this rate did not take into account chickens dying from predators.  

Animal Equality’s report gives other mortality rate that considers, deaths during the production line, including deaths of newly hatched chicks and born chickens at hatcheries where they are incubated, transported to farms, and the chickens that are processed and killed but do not end up being served. 

And yet still, the industry understands that a huge multitude — [nearly] 600 million animals — will die and as such they will still be making profits,” said Sean Thomas, Animal Equality’s international-director of investigations. 

 In all the undercover investigations conducted by the group across several factory farms, Thomas added ‘we never see veterinary attention for a single chicken that is diseased because that single chicken does not count in the industry.’ 

All these dead chickens constitute a form of hidden food waste that adds up to an unfathomable amount of suffering, as the birds perish from what have become features of American poultry farming: sickness and disease, strokes, heat prostration, thirst, hunger, and brutality. 

Moreover, about 20% of the poultry meat that is imported into the US food chain is wasted by grocers, restaurants, and home consumers.