"Ian Hoare" in ...
>> [Ken Blake wrote]
>> "Battery" chicken? "Battery" is a word I don't know
>> in this context, Ian. Can you elucidate?
>
> ...
> In the UK they talk about "Battery Farms". These are huge
> scale production facilities ...

Hi gentlemen. In the US this has been sometimes called a "chicken factory"
and was the subject of the cover story in the magazine _Scientific American_
circa 1966, which helped to widen familiarity with the practice, though
sharp criticism came later. The birds were shown as fed and watered
automatically, and they've also been described as constantly stumbling on
the wire-mesh floors which causes wing-flapping reflex and therefore
develops saleable Parts. They are also called battery chickens in the US
(analogously to more traditional batteries of cannon, voltaic cells,
experts, etc.) That term for them does seem to be more standard in the
English of the world outside the US.

This method of raising poultry is illegal in parts of the US including, I
understand, mine. (Spohn will surely assert that it is more so in his part
of Canada ...) Independent of that, I have always noticed than animals that
lived well tasted the best. Yet further, free-range or even "foraging"
chickens are much more expensive to raise and are easiest for people to
prefer, who have the means to do so. (As so often, there are trade-offs.)
Of course, as you all know, animals as food are "protein factories in
reverse" (Frances Moore Lappé); among land animals the smaller are least
inefficient, chickens requiring (if I recall) only three times the weight in
vegetable protein that they provide in animal protein. Rabbits are more
efficient still.

--M.