According to a new commentary paper in the journal Nature Food, some of the worst animal suffering in the world can be prevented at a rate of just a couple of pennies per hour: the extreme pain experienced by chickens raised for meat.

Over the last 75 years, chickens have been bred to grow incredibly large and incredibly fast. Their rapid growth rate has made chicken the most affordable and plentiful meat in the US, where over 9 billion are raised and slaughtered annually.

But it’s come at the cost of making chickens suffer terribly throughout their short lives from a range of health and welfare issues, like heat stress, heart failure, and lameness — difficulty walking — which can be so severe that chickens die of dehydration or starvation because they can’t even stand and move to get water and food.

It’s arguably the largest form of systematized animal cruelty humans have ever invented.

Despite the scale and cruelty of conventional chicken farming — and other forms of livestock production — animal welfare has largely been left out of food policy discussions. The nonprofit Welfare Footprint Institute, composed of a team of animal welfare researchers that led the Nature Food paper, is looking to change that by putting a cost on preventing animal pain.

The group looks at how animals are bred, the conditions in which they’re raised, and the prevalence and frequency of problems like injury and disease in those systems to determine how many hours of certain types of pain they experience. Scientific research on animal welfare — using behavioral observations, neurophysiological markers, and response to pain-relieving drugs — informs WFI’s work, and the group’s population-level estimates try to account for differences in individual animals’ experiences.

According to their research, the average factory-farmed chicken........

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