The live transport of farm animals across borders is one of the most welfare-significant and contested practices in animal agriculture. Long journey times cause documented suffering across multiple species.
Long-distance live animal transport imposes a cumulative burden of stressors that welfare science has documented extensively: loading stress, unfamiliar conspecifics causing aggression, thermal extremes in poorly ventilated vehicles, feed and water deprivation on long journeys, and unloading into unfamiliar environments. Each stressor is manageable in isolation; combined over 20-30 hours, they produce severe welfare impacts including elevated cortisol, immune suppression, physical injury, and death. The justification — typically economic advantage of live trade over carcass trade — reflects market structures rather than animal welfare considerations. The campaign for replacing live export with carcass and chilled meat trade has made legislative progress in the UK (which banned long-distance live export post-Brexit) and in some EU member states.