US chicken companies pioneered restricting sleep to keep birds eating around the clock.
A new study (Li et al., 2026) recommends giving chickens just 2 hours of darkness nightly to maximize the time they spend eating. The study and photo are Chinese.
We know chickens have far better hapiness with 7–8 hours of darkness to sleep.
But they eat more and grow faster when they are sleep deprived.
There was still some time where pre-industrial husbandry including breeding of animals was a thing and capitalism didn’t exist in the form we criticise it now.
Capitalism wasn’t the cause of animal cruelty, no. You’re spot-on there. But OP is correct that there was a shift between ‘killing what was needed/could be stored’, to what we currently have which is ‘get as many animals through the process as quickly as possible for the sake of profit’. And now we have a problem of having so much food available for businesses and not enough available for individuals (or at least not for a comparable cost). Having worked in the food service industry for over a decade, being told to throw away pounds and pounds and pounds of perfectly good food every day, watching coworkers get punished for even ASKING if they could take any of it home, and constantly given some half-assed reasoning of “oh we wouldn’t want to be sued if someone claims they ate our food and got sick” (even though that would be the simplest court case possible, almost an automatic win for the business if it even got to that point) as the sole justification to why it was immediately trashed, I’m honestly just sick of all the bullshit.
Completely unrelated to food or animals, I personally also know this from the tech industry. Instead of giving away old devices to schools or for universities, you rather shredder them because support may be expensive, it may canibalize the sale of newer devices, etc. Millions of dollars just made to e-waste because the system is sick. I am sure every industry has these stories.