35 days and they go to the slaughterhouse. Whether that changes will be up to the consumer, farmers say

“Are you a journalist? So we’ll shoot you right here and take you to the slaughterhouse,” jokes an elderly man in the administrative building of the poultry farm Semtěš near Čáslavi, which is part of the Rabbit agribusiness. The woman next to him sits down. “We don’t like you because you don’t write the truth. They say we torture chickens here,” he alludes to the fact that Seznam Správy had previously published secretly taken footage from large-scale chicken farms by the Defenders of Animals (IMAGE).

“But when the chickens eat, they have a greasy mouth, how good they are,” jokes the man who takes care of the local chickens.

“They are better off than us. They have heat, they have food, they have water, we have luxury there, so what are they missing in life?” he asks and immediately answers. “Just the short age – 35 days and they go for meat.”

His manager is also not happy about the journalist’s unannounced visit. Nevertheless, he willingly looks at the footage taken by the Animal Defenders and recognizes hall number four or five. He confirms that this is indeed how it usually looks in the hall before leaving for the slaughterhouse. But he emphasizes that everything is according to the applicable legislation.

I show him a table of standards for the gentler treatment of Beter Leven chickens, which breeders in the Netherlands or Belgium must comply with if they want to supply meat to the shelves of the local Albert chain. This means having a third less chickens in the hall, covering the ground with straw or grain, buying perches, letting at least a little natural light fall in there, and maybe even building an outdoor run for them.

“Nobody does that with normal chickens. That would ruin him. We will easily create it like in Holland, but no one will pay us for that,” he states dryly.

Then he calls the director and that’s the end of our conversation. “I’m going to show you out the door. You should send him questions by e-mail,” he says goodbye.

Beter Leven quality mark vs. Czechia

Rabbit company director Tomáš Fulín later confirms in an e-mail that the footage comes from a farm where conventional chickens are “produced”, which are processed in production plants and presented within the Czech Republic. He does not want to list which specific chains this meat travels to.

“It goes to all retail networks in the Czech Republic. We work with everyone. I won’t name them, but we work with the five or six major retail chains. Then we have another hundred of our stores and we also deliver to wholesalers and the independent market,” adds the director of the company, which is one of the top three largest suppliers of chicken meat in our country.

Veterinary administration: Images meet standards

“On the particular farm you mentioned, no offenses and violations of the applicable regulations governing the breeding of chickens for meat have been found in the last three years,” he argues, adding that the farm is regularly supervised by the Regional Veterinary Administration for the Central Bohemian Region.

“Questions and comparisons of ‘conventional’ chickens raised on said farm with ‘better’ standards for chicken farming such as Beter Leven are misleading and problematic as they compare a completely different breeding method and chicken genotype,” he writes regarding the double standard, when, for example, Albert abroad requires better treatment of chickens than in the Czech Republic.

The Albert CR retail chain reacts to the published videos as follows:

According to Tomáš Fulín, the demand should come from the consumer. In cooperation with Albert, they already offer Royal chickens (fattening time 56 days) and are testing a pilot project of free-range chicken breeding.

“We try to offer our customers a wide range of chicken products, where it is up to everyone to decide which product to give their consumer preference,” writes Rabbit’s director Trhový Štěpánov. He says that if there is a demand, he will comply, he summarizes at the end of the e-mail.

Albert: We are working on expanding the offer

Cooperative owners of Batelov u Jihlava. An associate of the Defenders of Animals broke in at the end of January and took footage in the only local poultry house, where they keep approximately 28,000 chickens.

“We’re such pushovers,” says the director of the cooperative, Roman Jakoubek, in his office. No email required, willing to answer any questions immediately. I can’t even go to the hall here, he argues with bird flu.

“The images are real, they correspond to Czech legislation, and you can see from them that we don’t treat those chickens badly. We have nothing to be ashamed of,” he watches the videos. It is said that if the cameraman had broken into the hall on the day of stocking, he would have seen those beautiful yellow chicks like in Albert’s commercial. But that was not the point of Animal Defenders. They wanted to show the life of fast-growing chickens before the so-called “destocking”, i.e. towards the end of their short lives.

“Frankly? I think that until the twenty-fifth day, the chickens in the hall enjoy it,” states Roman Jakoubek. But then things break down and the hall gets fuller day by day.

“You come one morning, then the next, and the hall is completely different. That’s where you can see the biggest increase in muscle mass. That’s 100-150 grams per day. And as those chickens start to grow really fast, they breathe more, there’s more moisture, and there’s more – pardon the pun – poop,” he explains. Space is running out, bedding is deteriorating.

“Their movement changes, the skeleton cannot support the muscles, and so their life is not satisfactory. I’m not saying it’s torture, but the last third of life is…” the agronomist searches for a suitable diplomatic word, “worse.” I show him the Beter Leven table too. They also wouldn’t meet a single star.

“We have about 18 to 20 chickens per square meter, no free range, no natural light, and we only keep fast-growing chickens. We only use straw, we would succeed there,” he says quite openly. If they were to cut production by a third, they would be at a loss.

“Even we farmers want the animals, even though they have such a short life, to enjoy it as comfortably as possible. The only question is how the legislation helps us to do this and how the economy of operation. We do it in order to be at zero or in the plus, that is, a smaller number of chickens per hall, yes, but the price must rise,” he says quite honestly and in his own way sympathizes with the Defenders of Animals.

“Now the purchase price of chickens is 27-28 crowns per kilogram. If someone comes and says that we should have 12 of them per square meter and that they will give me, I guess, I haven’t calculated it, but maybe 35 crowns per kilo, I will gladly do it. I don’t have a problem with that. On the contrary. I will gladly go against it,” adds Jakoubek.

On Friday afternoon, there is no one from the management in the poultry farm in the village of Slavětice near Týnu nad Vltavou. Admin only. They have five halls in which they raise 130,000 chickens. We agree with Jiří Kamarýt, director of the Pivkovice agricultural enterprise, that he will send a statement by e-mail.

“We wouldn’t get the Beter Leven star, because this trend is just coming to the Czech Republic, and according to my information, more than 95% of breedings are ‘conventional,'” he writes in his statement.

In Slavětice, they breed fast-growing conventional chickens because there is a demand for them. “If there are requests to change supplies, we will try to find a way and adapt to the requests,” he states. They stand behind their behavior, they say they have no wrongdoings, but they will not forgive the remark directed at the man who broke into their hall and took the footage.

“If illegal criminal activity like breaking into farms and collecting compromising material is the way to change, then it’s a sad picture of our society. Where are these “animal defenders” capable of going, he wonders.

The man in question has the answer. “It’s a relevant and legitimate way for customers to see what it’s like in fast-growing chicken farms. And in doing so, they created pressure for the cruelty of chicken farming to change,” he says.

Seznam Zprava also approached other important chains, i.e. Lidl, Kaufland, Penny, Billu and Tesco, with questions regarding the offered types of chickens and the requirements for their breeding. We will continue to address the topic.