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’s truth to your argument in a vacuum, but like they say, there is no humane way to butcher an animal. Ultimately they go to the same slaughterhouses, which if you go to the link I commented, are awful places for both the animals being slaughtered, and the people who routinely develop ptsd and are often in circumstances where they are all but forced to work at such places.
Plus there’s a reason factory farms are the way they are: that’s what’s necessary to keep up with the demand for animal products. So-called “happy farms” are not scalable.
It’s really not an improvement at all.
You’ve moved from simple reasonable steps to wanting an overnight lifestyle change.
Local farms with local butchers are leaps and bounds better than factory farming. If we can agree on that, what is the problem with someone moving to utilizing those services if that is as far as they are willing to go at the start?