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.
I don’t really have an ethical problem with it, unless we all want to hunt for our own meat then the way we grow and harvest stock is what it is. But the quality of chicken has decreased over the past decade. That’s what I take issue with.