Backpack-Wearing Chickens Are Helping Change The Way We Study Animal Welfare

By Mary Baxter

The chicken sheds I conduct research in are enormous—over three-quarters the length of a football field and 20 meters wide. In each house, around 28,000 near-identical broiler chickens, which are the type we use for meat, are reared in six-week production cycles.

My research helps farms find ways to improve the welfare of these birds. This might involve adjusting their lighting, improving the design of perches or seeing how different breeds compare. With so many animals per house, it makes sense to consider how any change affects the flock as a whole.

Thinking about broilers as a group also makes sense because they are considered to be a pretty homogeneous bunch. One effect of selectively breeding these animals to maximize how much meat they produce is that they all reach slaughter weight at the same time and all look very similar. So, short of dispatching a student with very good eyesight to follow a single chicken around for weeks, monitoring an individual broiler under commercial conditions is impossible.

Researchers get around this by either monitoring 100 birds and assuming they represent the 28,000 or keeping 100 broilers in a pen, applying a change to them and hoping it is similar enough to commercial conditions to get valid results.

But what if we want to know how individual broilers experience their environment? My colleagues and I in the Animal Welfare Unit at Queen's University Belfast turned to developments in indoor tracking technology for help.

Along with Icelandic software company Locatify, we have been working to adapt a commercial system that can show where individual chickens are in the house in real-time. By attaching backpacks to chickens, we discovered just how different each bird is—and it could help us learn to meet their needs better. Our latest research is published in Scientific Reports.