The final minutes of farmed animals' lives involve handling, stunning, and killing processes whose welfare implications affect billions of individual animals annually - with enormous variation in practice quality.
The moments before slaughter represent a concentrated welfare opportunity or failure. Animals that arrive at slaughter facilities already stressed from transport then experience lairage, handling, and the slaughter process itself. Poorly designed facilities with inadequate stunning equipment, undertrained staff, and high throughput pressure create conditions where conscious animals experience fear, pain, and a prolonged death. Effective stunning followed by immediate sticking delivers a death that animals do not consciously experience. The gap between this ideal and reality in many commercial facilities represents preventable suffering at enormous scale. Temple Grandin's design work transforming lairage and handling has had perhaps the single largest positive impact on farmed animal welfare of any individual effort.