The story of one bird. One chicken bred for meat.
His name is Frankie. He hatched from his egg only four weeks ago, and already his body is getting too large for his legs to hold him up. He wasn’t hatched into his mother’s nest. He was hatched in an incubator and tipped into a shed with tens of thousands of others.
Since that first day, the litter hasn’t been changed. The air smells of ammonia. His legs and chest are raw and burning from sitting in the waste of thousands. He wants to stand. He wants to get outside. But his legs won’t carry him that far.
Frankie wasn’t just born broken. He was engineered to break down.
Free-range. SPCA Certified. Raised in New Zealand. The labels sound reassuring, but they don’t mean much when the bird’s body is a science experiment gone wrong. No label changes the breed. And the breed is the problem.
Frankie is one of 120 million chickens reared in New Zealand every year for meat. Dubbed the “Frankenchicken,” these chickens have been selectively bred to grow at an unnaturally fast rate. Their legs can collapse. Their hearts can fail. Their lungs struggle to keep up with their oversized bodies. This is a global problem of massive proportions.
To tell you the story of one chicken and then explain the whole problem was a deliberate choice. It’s a choice we make here at Animals Aotearoa, every day. We focus on one story, one company, one action, because that’s how change actually happens.
And one company that needs to make change is BurgerFuel.
You’ll probably know them as a company that markets themselves as gourmet and high quality, keen to promote their free-range chicken. But that’s not good enough.
Free-range means nothing if the bird can barely walk to the door. The breed is still the same unnaturally fast-growing breed – the key cause of this suffering. BurgerFuel knows this, and they’ve known for years.
Ever since Animals Aotearoa began, we’ve been reaching out to food brands, including BurgerFuel. For five years, they’ve had the chance to tell us whether they support the use of Frankenchickens or whether they intend to change. Unfortunately, it seems like they’re content with the cruel status quo.
So why BurgerFuel, and why now?
A similar fast food chain with real chops, HELL Pizza, just recently signed the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC), a set of science-backed welfare criteria that addresses the root of the problem: a shift away from these cruelly bred birds towards healthier, more natural breeds. That was a huge win for chickens, and it proved that nationally owned quick-service restaurants in New Zealand can and will step up to support a better future for chickens.
BurgerFuel is a nationally owned brand that has built its reputation on higher standards. They market themselves as the better option. It’s time for them to actually back that up.
Cruelty in supply chains isn’t something companies should turn away from. Yet BurgerFuel have so far refused to meet, since we most recently engaged with them again, to discuss signing the BCC. They refused, even after seeing investigation footage from inside SPCA Certified free-range farms. This footage demonstrated shocking levels of suffering. After careful consideration, we chose BurgerFuel as our next campaign target. In response to their inaction. Last weekend we started with a protest outside their Ponsonby store, parking a truck showing that investigation footage. We’re just getting warmed up.
Now it’s going digital, and we need your signature in support.
One chicken. One company. One thing you can do right now.