The welfare challenges of transporting farm animals, including journey duration effects, vehicle design, thermal regulation, and evidence-based improvements to transport practice.
Farm animal transport is recognized as one of the highest-welfare-risk events in the lives of agricultural animals. Animals are loaded from familiar environments into vehicles, transported in close proximity to unfamiliar conspecifics or alone, exposed to novel sensory stimuli, unable to rest or feed normally, and frequently experience thermal extremes. The welfare impact accumulates over the journey duration — research consistently demonstrates dose-response relationships between transport duration and physiological stress markers, injury rates, and mortality. Live export — transport of animals across international borders, sometimes involving multiple-week sea voyages — represents the most severe transport welfare problem, involving conditions that are difficult to monitor and impossible to adequately manage. Welfare improvements to transport require multiple interventions: journey duration limits with meaningful enforcement, vehicle design standards ensuring adequate space and ventilation, positive reinforcement loading to replace electric goad use, thermal management technology, and expansion of mobile and local slaughter alternatives that eliminate long-distance transport entirely.