The catching and pre-slaughter stunning of broiler chickens is a critical welfare point where large numbers of birds experience fear, pain, and injury within a short timeframe.
Catching and stunning represent a welfare bottleneck where the cumulative suffering of billions of individual birds occurs. Each bird experiences the same sequence: capture by human hands, inversion, transport in crates, shackling alive onto a moving line, and immersion in an electrified water bath. Any step that goes wrong — a failed stun, an escaped shackle, a wing caught — causes acute pain. The speed of industrial slaughter lines makes individual monitoring impossible. Controlled atmosphere killing, where birds are rendered unconscious before any handling on the slaughter line, avoids the shackling step entirely. The gap between current practice and what welfare science recommends is large and primarily driven by cost and processing speed rather than technical infeasibility.