How chickens and other poultry are killed commercially, the welfare problems with current methods, and improvements being implemented.
Poultry slaughter is one of the highest-volume animal welfare situations globally, with billions of birds killed each year. Conventional electrical water-bath stunning requires birds to be hung upside down while conscious - a distressing position - before receiving a potentially inadequate electrical stun. Gas stunning systems allow birds to lose consciousness before shackling but involve a phase during CO2 induction that birds find aversive. Improvements are available and increasingly adopted, but change is slow given the economic investment required in large-scale processing facilities.