Poultry Transport Welfare | Animal Welfare Hub

Transporting poultry from farm to slaughterhouse exposes birds to crowding, temperature extremes, and physical injury. Transport is one of the highest-risk periods for poultry welfare.

Key Facts

Billions of chickens and turkeys are transported to slaughter each year in conditions that frequently compromise welfare.
Dead on arrival (DOA) rates provide a crude welfare indicator — rates above 0.1% suggest significant transport problems.
Birds experience fear, physical trauma from catching and crating, dehydration, and temperature stress during transport.
EU regulations limit transport time to 12 hours for most poultry (with water provided for longer journeys).
Night transport reduces thermal stress and fear responses in some studies.
Catching method (manual vs. mechanical) significantly affects injury rates during loading.

Welfare Considerations

Poultry transport condenses multiple serious welfare harms into a short timeframe: rough catching and crating, crowded containers, unfamiliar motion, extreme temperature sensitivity, and social disruption. Heat stress in summer and hypothermia in winter both kill birds and cause serious suffering before death. Improving transport welfare requires better catching methods, crate design, journey duration limits, thermal management, and faster lairage times at the slaughterhouse. Transport welfare is sometimes dismissed as a minor issue compared to farm conditions, but its frequency and intensity make it a high-priority concern.

What You Can Do

Support welfare standards that include maximum journey times and thermal management for poultry.
Advocate for transport welfare monitoring through dead-on-arrival data collection and reporting.
Choose poultry certified by schemes with explicit transport welfare requirements.
Encourage retailers to require transport welfare data from their poultry suppliers.
Learn how slaughterhouse location relative to farms affects transport distance and duration.