Auditing stunning effectiveness in poultry slaughterhouses reveals significant compliance gaps that result in conscious birds entering scalding tanks, representing a preventable welfare failure.
Poultry stunning audit reveals the gap between regulatory standards and actual welfare outcomes on the processing line. Incomplete stunning means birds that experience scalding tanks while conscious, a severe welfare failure that occurs at industrial scale when systems malfunction or are improperly set. Water bath systems depend on individual bird contact with electrified water, which varies with wing position, making them inherently variable. Controlled atmosphere systems provide more reliable unconsciousness before any physical contact. The audit imperative is that good welfare intentions at the policy level require robust verification at the point of implementation.