Transport of poultry to slaughter is a high-risk welfare period with temperature extremes, overcrowding, and duration limits determining mortality and suffering outcomes for billions of birds.
Poultry transport welfare represents a large-scale, routine source of animal suffering that receives insufficient regulatory attention given the billions of birds affected annually. The combination of rough catching methods causing physical injury, inadequate temperature management causing heat or cold stress, and journey durations that exceed physiological tolerance creates predictable, preventable suffering at an enormous scale. Transport mortality figures — while seemingly small percentages — represent tens of millions of individual animal deaths with associated suffering. Improved ventilation systems, journey time limits, and catching machine technology offer practical improvements to a welfare problem that is currently normalized by industry scale.