The welfare of poultry at slaughter, including stunning methods, shackle hanging, and the welfare implications of different killing systems.
Poultry slaughter welfare involves some of the most numerically significant animal welfare decisions in the food system. The difference between conventional water bath stunning — which regularly fails to render birds unconscious before neck cutting — and controlled atmosphere stunning — which eliminates pre-slaughter consciousness — multiplied across 70 billion birds annually represents an almost incomprehensibly large amount of preventable suffering. The better methods exist, are commercially available, and are increasingly required by welfare-conscious buyers. The barrier to universal adoption is primarily economic: controlled atmosphere systems cost more than conventional stunning. This is a case where regulatory requirements rather than voluntary adoption are needed to drive the welfare improvement at scale.