Animated Graph Shows Chickens’ Unnatural Growth

It’s no secret that the hormones and antibiotics administered to factory farm chickens make them grow unnaturally large, but now people can visualize how much the animal industry is altering Mother Nature in an animated graph created by countinganimals.com. The graph shows how the average lifespan of a chicken has been significantly shortened since the 1950s while their average weight has increased exponentially. According to countinganimals.com, in 1920, a chicken was slaughtered at about 112 days, weighing in at approximately 2.2 pounds, but today, the animals are killed at approximately 47 days old, and they weigh 5.89 pounds. The site reports that this rapid growth rate is equivalent to a child weighing 500 pounds by his or her tenth birthday.