Slaughter welfare for chickens and turkeys has significant room for improvement, with controlled atmosphere killing and individual electrical stunning offering better welfare outcomes than current industry standards.
Conventional poultry slaughter involves multiple welfare-compromising steps before death. Catching crews handling birds in darkness cause fear, pain from wing and leg fractures, and physiological stress. Live shackling — suspending conscious birds upside down on moving lines — causes pain from inversion and injury. Water bath stunning often fails to achieve adequate stun depth in all birds simultaneously. Death from blood loss may occur in inadequately stunned birds. Controlled atmosphere killing, while requiring capital investment, eliminates the shackling and live handling steps that cause acute suffering, providing unconsciousness in the transport container before any handling for slaughter. The welfare improvement from industry-wide adoption of better stunning and killing systems would affect tens of billions of animals annually — among the highest-impact welfare interventions available in food system reform.