"Re/Thinking Chickens: The Discourse around Chicken Farming in British Newspapers and Campaigners’ Magazines, 1982–2016" has major social relevance as it focuses on one of the most forgotten and yet most exploited farmed animals, chickens, who now have a combined mass exceeding that of all other birds on Earth. Dr Elena Lazutkaitė demonstrates that the planet’s most numerous birds, with a population of 23 billion at any one time, are trivialised in public discourse.

This book applies the analytical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis in combination with corpus linguistics tools to present a detailed empirical case study. In total, the study corpus comprises 1754 texts published over the period of 34 years in broadsheets The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, tabloids the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail (including their Sunday editions Sunday Mirror and Mail on Sunday) and magazines produced by animal advocacy groups Compassion In World Farming and Animal Aid.

This book will be of particular interest to university students of critical animal studies, human-animal studies, discourse studies, cultural studies, communication studies, sociology, (eco)linguistics, in addition to animal advocacy groups and media practitioners.

List of figures
List of tables
List of acronyms and abbreviations

Preface
Judith Still
University of Nottingham

1. Introduction
1.1 Author’s perspective and vocabulary
1.2 Research questions and the structure of this book
1.3 Chicken farming between 1982 and 2016

2. Theoretical background: discursive representation of animals
2.1 Species discrimination
2.2 Analysis of objectifying language
2.3 Media representations
2.4 Campaigners’ rhetoric
2.5 Shortcomings

3. Sources of data, analytical framework and methodology
3.1 Newspapers: tabloid vs broadsheet journalism
3.2 Campaigners
3.3 Critical Discourse Analysis

4. Newspapers
4.1 Overview of the newspapers’ corpora
4.2 The Guardian
4.3 The Mirror
4.4 The Telegraph
4.5 The Mail

5. Campaigners
5.1 Overview of the campaigners’ corpora
5.2 Intensive farming
5.3 “Higher welfare”
5.4 Challenges to “higher welfare”
5.5 Harm to humans
5.6 The government and political action
5.7 Chickens as agents
5.8 Visual representation
5.9 Summary and discussion

6. Conclusions
6.1 Unremarked violence
6.2 Inoculation, trivialisation and alibi
6.3 Happy chickens
6.4 Veganism. Intersection with the environment
6.5 Campaigners’ pragmatism
6.6 The Guardian opinion (best practice)
6.7 Present and future

References
Appendix F
Appendix G
Index

Dr Elena Lazutkaitė is a transdisciplinary researcher and communicator committed to social change. Her passion for animals and nature motivated her to obtain a BSc in Veterinary Science and an MSc in Animal Welfare and Conservation. In 2014, Elena was awarded a PhD studentship in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her PhD thesis was a part of the interdisciplinary Cultural and Scientific Perceptions of Human-Chicken Interactions project, which brought together six universities and researchers from a wide range of countries and disciplines to examine the social, cultural, and environmental impact of this important but under-researched species.

Dr Lazutkaitė’s current and most recent work revolves around the increasingly visible connections between human, other animal, and ecological health. In her book Re/Thinking Chickens: The Discourse around Chicken Farming in British Newspapers and Campaigners’ Magazines, 1982–2016, Dr Lazutkaitė eloquently combines the knowledge from veterinary and animal sciences with critical animal studies to examine media’s construction of chicken farming.

Author's article “Earth Day 2020, a moment to choose the future”
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Author's article “COVID-19, the climate crisis and the sixth mass extinction – how did we get here?"
“COVID-19, the climate crisis and the sixth mass extinction – how did we get here?” argues that from malaria-spreading mosquitos in tropical regions to tick-borne Lyme disease in Lithuania, human encroachment on nature raises risks across the globe.

Website "Animal and Media"
Media scholars Carrie P. Freeman and Debra Merskin produce a concrete tool for improvement, notably detailed guidelines for media professionals reporting on nonhuman animals.

Website "Scicultchickens"
Chickens (also known as 'domestic fowl') are native to South East Asia but, today, they have a worldwide distribution. Their diffusion is almost entirely due to human-assisted transportation and, as such, their natural history is a reflection of human history.

Critical animal studies, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, chicken farming, meat production, chicken meat production, egg production, newspapers, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Daily Mirror, Mail on Sunday, Sunday Mirror, Compassion in World Farming, Animal Aid, animal welfare, animal rights, discourse, discursive representation, human-animal studies, critical theory, campaigning, animal activism, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jamie Oliver, higher welfare farming, free-range farming, organic farming, factory farming, journalism, rhetoric, avian influenza, bird flu, zoonotic diseases