Why did the chicken cross the road? To get away from the bargain-hunt­er in the supermarket. Now priced as low as £1.99, this once noble bird has good reason to avoid the cheap-cheap of mass sales and factory farming.

Crammed into windowless sheds, the modern chicken has genetics that are turbo-charged to flesh their skeletons to an unsustainable extent. They suffer high mortality rates and more than a quarter of the birds can suffer leg injuries. Standard chicken production is an everyday obscenity on a vast scale.

Can we afford higher welfare in a time of tight finances? It does seem that once we know the facts, we act on more than just price. Following campaigns for better birds, sales of higher welfare chicken went up by 42 per cent last year, and major supermarkets — M&S, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s and the Co-op — have pledged to sell only happier chickens as whole birds and this is meant to be spreading to the other chicken they sell.

But ‘happier’ does not necessarily mean free-range. And what about all the other sales, not least cheap restaurants and take-aways? Chicken is the protein of fast food and convenience.

As consumers shift to better welfare, a new EU directive allows more chickens to be crammed into the sheds than the industry currently allows in the UK. Welfare is not a legal barrier to trade. Are we set to see yet more cheap imported meat of a lower quality? And will our own standards drop?

Compassion in World Farming: www.ciwf.org.uk

Chicken Out!: www.chickenout.tv