Highlights Report 2024

1. Freedom To Express Normal Behavior

An important part of our commitments to animal welfare is understanding what a chicken wants and letting chickens act naturally. It’s also important that our flock advisors — those who work mostly closely with our birds and the farmers who raise them — better understand a chicken’s normal behaviors. That’s why we’re building a Perdue Normal Behavior Library of videos for training purposes. Our normal behavior videos illustrate such things as dustbathing, foraging, perching, preening, resting, social pecking, stretching, and playing. 

As a companion to our normal behavior video library, we recognized that we also need to provide education on abnormal bird behavior. We created the first two piece of video content focus on feed management and water management quality issue, and plan to create more abnormal bird behavior content. 

Pasture-raised birds exhibit different behaviors than birds raised in other production systems. To attempt to quantitate this we compared pasture-raised birds to three other systems characterized as no windows/conventional house, windows/conventional house, and slow- growing Rebro bird/enriched housing. Each system was studied at ages 10, 18, 26, 32, and 42 days. Activities we looked for included drinking, resting, walking, foraging, preening, stretching, social pecking, playing, and dustbathing. Generally, pasture-raised birds were more active. That activity was predominately in the two behaviors: preening and playing. 

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2. Freedom From Pain, Injury and Disease

We remain committed to moving all our harvest operations from using electrical shocks to “stun” birds before harvest, to using a multi-stage, dual-gas technology Controlled Atmosphere Stunning (CAS) system to induce insensibility with minimal trauma. We started installation of our second chicken CAS system at our Dillon, South Carolina harvest operation but had to pause that project for financial reasons. We expect the system to be operational in November 2024. In November 2017, we successfully implemented our first CAS chicken system at our Milford, Delaware harvest plant. We installed CAS at our Washington, Indiana, turkey operation in 2012. 

We initiated a joint project with an animal advocacy group to identify the real costs and benefits beyond animal welfare of Controlled Atmosphere Stunning versus electrical stunning at our Milford, Delaware chicken harvest operation. The project was paused due to other priorities for both parties. We expect to resume this project as we implement CAS in Dillon, South Carolina. 

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3. Freedom From Hunger & Thirst and Discomfort

We are continuing to study the feasibility and potential benefit of On-Farm Hatching (OFH) to improve early chick care. We have conducted additional trails to determine whether taking chicks directly to the farm at 18 days of incubation and placing them directly on the litter to skip the stress of hatching and processing at the hatchery would be feasible. We remain enthusiastic about the viability of OFH and will continue our research.

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4. Freedom From Fear and Distress

We are conducting research to determine the relationship between specific farms and meat quality as it relates to muscle myopathies or “woody breast” syndrome. We learned we can now identify meat quality issues to specific farms. Through two-years of research, we found farms that were distinctly different in meat quality. Our next step is to understand why.

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