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Beans are cheaper and don't require killing a sentient creature.
Very true. Downside is you have to eat beans instead of chicken.
Beans are delicious.
They sure are. Just not as delicious as some of the other foods.
Oh fuck off.
What I said was 100% factual.
What a rebuttal!
Sentient is a bit of a stretch for chickens.
Same for most humans, and we don't eat them
Because we have enough chickens
OK... A creature that can feel physical pain and experience emotional distress. A creature that can experience happiness and curiosity.
What do you think sentient means?
No one knows. It's not something that any two philosophers agree on. You having a definition which includes chickens is just as much a matter of opinion and belief as the person you're replying to having a definition that doesn't.
Do you think the definitions are different enough that chickens don't fall under the majority of them?
As far as I understand it, there are three broad buckets on the spectrum of what is considered sentience:
On the most open end (call it 0) it's the ability to experience sensation (this might be the original definition, but language evolves); literally just being able to process and react to input by some mechanism. By the broadest, most open interpretation of this idea, even plants are sentient. Certainly chickens are, to say nothing of dogs and cats, and of course humans.
More toward the middle (5) is the capability for experience and intent; not simply to sense and react, but to recognize a feeling and make a choice, however dimly, to pursue a course of action as a result. You might get higher-order emotions like love as a requirement for sentience with this definition. Here, plants are clearly not sentient; their reactions are simply the result of chemical processes. Chickens are on the line; I'm not an expert on chicken neurology, but as a person who lived in a rural area growing up, I think I could pretty well make a case on either side. Dogs and cats seem to certainly be sentient by this interpretation, and humans are as well.
On the most restrictive end of the spectrum (10) is something more like human-level consciousness; tough to define without using fuzzy words like "feel" and "think," but being able to reason and plan for the future in some way is one part. Another part I've seen a lot that seems like it's in this bucket is being able to choose to follow or eschew raw impulses. This is the end of the spectrum that most sci-fi leans on when they discuss "sentience." Chickens are probably not sentient by this measure, but dogs and cats may be. Humans are, as the prototype of our understanding of the term.
So, to answer your question, I'd say that chickens seem to be the midpoint of the spectrum. There are probably about as many definitions which include them as don't include them. A manosphere meatfluencer would probably put sentience at a 9 or 10 on this spectrum, while some religious traditions might put it at a 1 or 2, or even as low as 0 in some cases.
The concept seems pretty clear to me from a quick look on wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience
Also further down:
And if you don't like wikipedia here is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy