Slaughter is the final welfare event for pigs — ensuring effective stunning and rapid death is a moral obligation of the highest order given the scale of pig production.
Pig slaughter welfare is complicated by the scale of the industry and the limitations of available stunning methods. CO2 gas chambers, used in most large pork processing facilities, cause 20-30 seconds of acute aversion and panic before unconsciousness — pigs visibly struggle and vocalize. This is the same gas humans experience as suffocation. Inert gas mixtures (argon, nitrogen) can induce unconsciousness more gently but require higher infrastructure investment. Electrical stunning is effective but requires precise application. Given 1.4 billion pigs slaughtered annually, any improvement in stunning welfare translates into enormous aggregate benefit.