The chicken (Gallus gallus) is a type of domesticated fowl, believed to be descended from the wild Indian and south-east Asian Red Junglefowl.The chicken is one of the most common and wide-spread domestic animals. With a population of more than 24 billion in 2003, there are more chickens in the world than any other bird. Humans keep chickens primarily as a source of food, from both their meat and their eggs.

LAST Friday, in front of 4 million television viewers and a studio audience, the chef Jamie Oliver killed a chicken. Having recently obtained a United Kingdom slaughterman’s license, Mr. Oliver staged a “gala dinner,” in fact a kind of avian snuff film, to awaken British consumers to the high costs of cheap chicken.

A guy in the UK wanted to do a documentary on factory farm conditions there - but the supermarkets and farmers are not so keen on the idea, of course, so are not cooperating. As a result, he's building his own so he can showcase conditions...

Production of '2 for a fiver' chicken is disgusting. Hugh form River Cottage has a fantastic TV programme highlighting the cruelty incurred in the production of cheap food. Bargain foods that the UK's major supermarkets are fighting over to push down our throats. This campaign now gives us enough knowledge to make a decision on what to buy...

We are living in the era of cheap food, when you can pick up a chicken in the supermarket for less than the price of a pint of beer. But there is a hidden cost: of the 850 million birds reared in Britain every year, only five per cent have had anything approaching a comfortable life. The vast majority are intensively reared, in prison-camp...

A covertly filmed video of factory-farmed chickens struggling to walk and enduring distressing and unnatural conditions is set to ignite a growing campaign to improve the lives of Britain's 800 million "broiler" chickens.