Naively, I would expect that suffering is extremely evolutionarily advantageous for chickens in factory farm conditions, so chickens that feel less suffering will not grow as much meat (or require more space/​resources). For example, based on my impression that broiler chickens are constantly hungry, I wouldn’t be surprised if they would try to eat themselves unless they felt pain when doing so. But this is a very uninformed take based on a vague understanding of what broiler chickens are optimized for, which might not be true in practice.
I think this idea might be more interesting to explore in less price-sensitive contexts, where there’s less evolutionary pressure and animals live in much better conditions, mostly animals used in scientific research. But of course it would help much fewer animals who usually suffer much less.
I think it is discussed every now and then, see e.g. comments here: New EA cause area: Breeding really dumb chickens and this comment
And note that the Better Chicken Commitment includes a policy of moving to higher welfare breeds.
Naively, I would expect that suffering is extremely evolutionarily advantageous for chickens in factory farm conditions, so chickens that feel less suffering will not grow as much meat (or require more space/​resources). For example, based on my impression that broiler chickens are constantly hungry, I wouldn’t be surprised if they would try to eat themselves unless they felt pain when doing so. But this is a very uninformed take based on a vague understanding of what broiler chickens are optimized for, which might not be true in practice.
I think this idea might be more interesting to explore in less price-sensitive contexts, where there’s less evolutionary pressure and animals live in much better conditions, mostly animals used in scientific research. But of course it would help much fewer animals who usually suffer much less.
adding on that wholefoods https://​​www.wholefoodsmarket.com/​​quality-standards/​​statement-on-broiler-chicken-welfare
has made some commitments to switching breeds, we discussed this briefly at a Chicago EA meeting. I didn’t get much info but they said that going and protesting/​spreading the word to whole foods managers to switch breeds showed some success.