Mortality rates in livestock provide an objective, population-level welfare indicator that reflects the cumulative effect of disease management, nutrition, housing, and stockpersonship. Understanding mortality benchmarks helps identify and address welfare failures.
Livestock mortality data represents one of the most underutilized welfare monitoring tools in farming, partly because death is emotionally difficult to quantify and commercially uncomfortable to benchmark. Yet mortality is an objective measure that integrates the cumulative welfare impact of all management decisions: a farm with high mortality is failing animals through some combination of disease management, nutrition, housing comfort, handling quality, or biosecurity. The variation between farms operating under nominally similar conditions is substantial and informative: broiler farms with sub-1% mortality and farms with 5-6% mortality represent genuinely different welfare realities, not random variation. Mortality benchmarking — comparing individual farm rates against sector distributions rather than absolute standards — provides the comparative context that motivates improvement. A farm that considers 4% mortality normal because it matches the sector average is not incentivized to reduce it; a farm shown that the best-performing 25% of comparable farms consistently achieve under 2% mortality has a concrete performance gap to close. The welfare aspiration is not accepting sector average as a standard but understanding what the achievable minimum actually is and investing in reaching it.