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 and grow faster when they are sleep deprived.
I’m not sure where this 6 to 7 hours for sleep figure comes from. And I’m not saying that to push any agenda. I have birbs for pets and I’m actually rather specifically interested in avian biology. As far as I’m aware birds don’t sleep in standard sleep cycles like mammalian animals. They sleep in small bursts that last only a few minutes but they do it hundreds of times a day.