1. Introduction

In February 2008, Tesco caused an outrage amongst the animal welfare campaigners for selling chicken for as little as £1.99 each because it increases the pressure on the poultry industry and makes it harder to improve welfare standards of the chicken reared on the factory farms.
Tesco reduced the price of chicken by 60% to £1.99 in a week long campaign in order to make chicken more affordable for families with low income.
Animal welfare group Compassion In World Farming representative Lesley Lambert stated that the farmers only earned 2p per chicken at that such discounts will put a strain on British farmers. Tesco should be cutting the price of higher welfare chickens instead. Heavy discounting of standard chicken began weeks after a week long “Hugh’s Chicken Run” campaign by a celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall that was aimed improving consumers’ knowledge about the welfare standards on the chicken factory farms. (The Independent Online, 2008)
The National Farmers' Union said that the move was” extremely ill-judged and short sighted" and that Tesco is devaluing the price of chicken at the same time as it is rising. The price is not sustainable unless Tesco subsidizes it. (BBC News Online, 2008)
An RSPCA representative stated that the customer has the strength to change the supermarket policy and should refrain from purchasing cheap chicken. Assured Chicken Production (ACP) guidelines, regulating body for standard reared chicken, permit 19 birds per one squared meter whereas higher welfare such as RSPCA Freedom Food allows maximum of 15 birds per one square meter. A government founded study has shown that each year 220 million chickens live in pain each year due to cramped and poor living conditions in the factory farms. (Daily Mail Online, 2008) A study founded by Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA)found that at around 40 days old 27.6% of the 51,000 chickens that were studied exhibited "poor locomotion" and