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 when they are sleep restricted.
Before capitalism, people used to only kill as many animals as were necessary to feed them, all while ensuring they don’t suffer needlessly and respecting their natural habitats.
Under capitalism, animals are just resources to be extracted and turned into products and profits. The conditions of this extraction may vary slightly, but ultimately this is never going to change under a system that fundamentally removes humans from nature, as well as focuses on accumulation of capital above all else.
Foie gras was developed like half a millenia ago… humans have always had the capacity for and willingness to be cruel for our own individual betterment. There was never any “before” time that we can go back to where there werent shitty people doing shitty things. We have been exploiting and exterminating animals for centuries and centuries, we just have the best tools to do it, that weve ever had now.
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.
Even humans are resources bro under capitalism.
I’ve always thought human resources was a creepy way to describe a group of people.