The transport of broiler chickens to slaughter is a significant welfare event affecting billions of birds annually. Thermal stress, trauma, and journey duration all contribute to mortality, injury, and suffering during transit.
Transport is one of the most acutely stressful events in a farmed chicken's life. The catching process alone — in which workers rapidly grab birds by legs and cram them into crates — causes a significant number of fractures and dislocations. Once in crates, birds are exposed to fluctuating temperatures, motion, noise, and the stress of confinement with unfamiliar individuals. Heat stress kills birds within hours in warm weather. Even well-managed transport causes measurable physiological stress responses. The scale of the problem — billions of birds transported annually — means that even modest improvements in catching technique, crate design, journey length, or temperature monitoring have welfare impact measured in hundreds of millions of individual animals.