Poultry slaughter practices affect billions of birds annually; innovation in stunning and killing methods is delivering significant welfare improvements across the industry.
Poultry slaughter is one of the most significant animal welfare issues by scale. Live-hang systems require conscious birds to be caught, inverted, and shackled before electrical stunning — each step causes fear and potential injury. Water-bath stunners do not always produce full insensibility before neck cutting. Controlled-atmosphere systems that stun birds in their transport crates before any handling are now the welfare gold standard. Multi-phase CAS using low-O2 inert gas mixtures produces insensibility without the aversive initial convulsive phase associated with high CO2. Many major food companies have committed to CAS through the Better Chicken Commitment, and uptake is accelerating.