The head of Australia's nine-million-bird-per-week chicken meat industry has defended his members' treatment of their feathered charges.
Australian Chicken Meat Federation executive director, Andreas Dubs, says while modern "meat chickens" had been bred to grow twice as fast as their backyard equivalents, it was not in the industry's interest to mistreat the birds.
"We are certainly not perfect but we are doing everything we can to keep the birds healthy and to keep them happy," Mr Dubs said.
He was responding to concerns of about 10 Animal Liberation protesters, who today staged a small, peaceful, but foul-smelling protest outside the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre, where the 23rd World Poultry Congress is underway.
Under the watchful eyes of eight armed tactical response police officers, the group pretended to feast on four newly deceased chickens they last night stole from a farm on the city's outskirts.
Animal Liberation spokesperson, Angie Stephenson, said the group had inspected 10 of the 50 or so chicken farms in the Redland Bay area, each of which farms about 150,000 chickens in seven or eight sheds.
Ms Stephenson said the protesters were shocked by the conditions in the 10 "broiler houses" they had observed over the past month.
"There were chickens which were not able to stand up because they have such underbuilt skeletal systems that they cannot carry the weight which these chickens have been genetically bred to produce in such a short time frame," Ms Stephenson said.
"What happens then is that if the chickens can't walk and get to their water then they slowly starve and die within the chicken shed."
Mr Dubs said it was normal for farmers to cull unwell chickens that could not be treated.
"We are growing something like nine million chickens a week (in Australia) so clearly out of the nine million chickens there will be some that will be sick or have a broken leg or whatever it may be," he said.
"The farmer goes through twice a day and checks the birds and essentially makes sure that any birds that are not fit and healthy get either treated or culled."
Mr Dubs also defended the industry's use of antibiotics in meat chickens, which he said did not cause accelerated growth.
"The real reason is selective breeding," he said.
"That process has been going on for 30 or 40 years in a very focused way and the end result is that now (commercially farmed) chickens grow...about twice as quickly.
"So they are actually about as big as they used to be at 60 days now in about 35 or 40 days."
Ms Stephenson said Animal Liberation had taken seven rescued chickens to a veterinarian and would present their medical reports to the RSPCA.
Consumers had a choice to make at their supermarket shelves, she said.
"I think if people were able to see these chickens that we've got there today, which were pulled out of a shed last night, just dead because of the way they grow, I don't see how people would be able to look at that and say 'Mmm I think that's tasty'."