A critical evaluation of current poultry slaughter welfare standards and the gap between best practice and common practice.
Poultry slaughter welfare represents one of the largest welfare issues by individual animal numbers in the food system. The scale — tens of billions of birds annually — means that even small improvements in stunning reliability or reduction of pre-stun handling distress translate to enormous numbers of animals with improved welfare at death. Current conventional systems have documented failure points: water bath stunning with suboptimal parameters fails to render all birds insensible, shackling causes pain, and live birds can enter scalding tanks after incorrect or failed stunning. Controlled atmosphere systems using appropriate gas mixtures avoid shackling and provide more reliable insensibility but have higher capital costs. The welfare case for transitioning to best-practice slaughter systems is strong and the economic barriers, while real, are not insurmountable given the scale of existing infrastructure investment.