People in overcrowded jails or orphanages become aggressive towards each other. No privacy, boredom, tension, fear, bad food, constant pain and alien surroundings combine to produce violence. The same thing happens in poultries, piggeries and dairies where animals are squeezed into tiny spaces till they die.

Chickens love gathering food, dust bathing, exploring. When you crowd them into spaces in which they cannot move or lift their wings, they peck each other. A sensible way to deal with this would be to give the birds more natural room. But the poultry industry would rather cut off their beaks. Debeaking is very painful, for the beak is composed of a dense mixture of blood vessels, connective tissues and nerves. It has been proved that debeaking was extremely painful causing a hen's heart rate "to increase 100 beats per minute," and taking her heart "from six to 10 minutes" to calm down from the time of infliction. Horror stories have come out from labs in the USA and the UK where every possible hideous experiment was done on debeaking chicken.

The conclusion after recording the effect on the birds' behavior patterns, fearfulness, mortality, food intake and body weight is that the birds have chronic extreme pain throughout their lives and cannot eat, drink or clean their feathers normally.

There is more of this horror nightmare. Intensively raised chickens suffer agonizingly from heat in crowded buildings. Rather than improve their living conditions, poultry researchers are trying to engineer birds who can stand prolonged intense heat. Scientists at Alexandria University in Egypt put DNA from the heat-resistant bacteria Streptococcus agalactia into chicken eggs and then reared the chicks in a temperature of 25 degree C. Hitler's Dr. Mengele did something like this though nothing happened. We have never learnt.

In May 2002, Hebrew University announced the creation of a featherless chicken, eliminating the need for cooling systems in poultry dens. This is only one form of genetic engineering in chickens. There are hundreds of exercises going on by "scientists" to make the birds fit for poultry meat production demand — that is, more meat/eggs produced cheaply by making chickens who eat less. As one poultry science meeting proclaimed in 1992, "We are no longer selling chickens, we are selling pieces. Knowledge of how broilers become pieces is increasingly important."

The effort to identify economically important genes in poultry is coordinated by an International Poultry Genome Workshop. The labs call chickens "oviduct bioreactors" and "meat" birds with economically favorable "agronomic traits." This is the aim of bioengineering programmes.

The whole idea of meat production is to get the time from chick – to - market weight down from 42 days to as brief a time as technically feasible. The yearly average body weight of 18 – week - old males continued to rise from 1966 to 2001. Projecting this trend to 2010, they should easily achieve a live weight of over 35 pounds by 18 weeks of age.

How is this being achieved? Pharma giant Merck, which has units in India, has under the name Merial, largest shares of poultry breeding stock in the world. Merial scientists did something out of Terminator movies or Blade Runner — they put cow growth hormones into chickens. In the early 1990s, Merck filed for a European patent on a "Macro Chicken" for a "transgenic fowl expressing bovine growth hormone."

A fat - reducing gene is being isolated to insert into broiler chickens because their fast rapid growth has increased the number of fat cells in these birds. Genetic engineers want to make chickens grow larger, leaner and faster, and to change the shape and composition of their bodies to fit the "value - added," deboned chicken parts market overtaking the traditional sale of whole birds.

A solution to problems associated with crowding in poultry industry. Purdue University has suggested that chickens be blinded genetically as blind chickens "don't mind being crowded together so much as normal chickens do."

The next scenario is as macabre as anything thought up by a twisted mind. Ordinary looking men and women in lab coats are creating a humongous glob of meat with no head, no heart, no liver and no intestines but alive. Think of all those horror movies coming alive!

Once upon a time this blob used to be called a chicken. And once upon a time, it was free and happy as a chicken could be till man decided he would play god to feed his appetite.

Now do you still want that chicken burger?

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