The final journey to slaughter is one of the most stressful and welfare-compromising experiences for livestock. Improving transport conditions for animals going to slaughter provides significant welfare benefit.
Livestock transport to slaughter represents a welfare endpoint where every improvement in handling quality, journey duration, and vehicle conditions reduces suffering at a critical and unavoidable stage of production animal lives. The closure of local abattoirs in many countries has forced longer journeys with welfare costs that are difficult to mitigate through other means. The welfare case for maintaining local slaughter infrastructure is therefore not merely nostalgic but genuinely welfare-positive. Mobile slaughter units for pigs and poultry offer a radical alternative that eliminates transport stress entirely by bringing slaughter to the farm. Whatever transport is necessary should apply minimum journey times, appropriate vehicle conditions, trained handlers, and pre-transport fitness assessment to exclude unfit animals.