Laying hen mortality is a key welfare outcome measure that reveals management quality, disease pressure and housing conditions on farms — but remains inconsistently reported across the industry.
Mortality rate is the crudest but most reliable welfare indicator available to the egg industry. A farm with 15% annual mortality is experiencing a welfare failure affecting hundreds of thousands of birds — whether from poorly managed feather pecking, disease, or production-related cardiovascular failure. The challenge is that mortality recording is inconsistently performed and is not routinely audited or published. Farms that record mortality accurately and use the data to drive management improvement demonstrate both welfare commitment and business competence; farms that do not are blind to problems that affect millions of individual birds.