Slaughter is a critical welfare moment for broiler chickens, and the shift away from live-shackle systems is an important but incomplete welfare advance.
Chicken slaughter welfare is a combination of engineering, regulation, and cultural practice that determines the quality of the final minutes of life for billions of individual birds. Live-shackling causes pain before stunning in most systems. The shift to controlled atmosphere systems is the most significant available welfare improvement — birds lose consciousness without having experienced the pain and stress of inverted shackling. Consumer and retailer pressure has driven some adoption of CAK systems, but cost differentials mean adoption is far from universal. The welfare case for transitioning the entire industry to gas stunning systems is clear, and the gap between what is technically possible and what is standard practice represents a welfare failure at enormous scale.