The catching and loading of poultry before slaughter is one of the most welfare-impactful phases of production. Understanding industry standards and their enforcement helps advocate for improvement.
Catching represents a brief but acute welfare event that affects every single farmed chicken at the end of its life. The combination of being grabbed, inverted, carried by the legs, and loaded into transport modules causes acute stress and potential injury. Scale makes this significant — even a 1% injury rate across a billion birds represents 10 million welfare events annually. Better training, equipment, and monitoring could substantially reduce this injury burden.