Monitoring the effectiveness of stunning in poultry slaughter is critical for preventing conscious slaughter and remains a significant welfare challenge across the industry.
The goal of pre-slaughter stunning is to ensure birds are unconscious before the killing cut, preventing the experience of slaughter. When stunning fails - whether from equipment malfunction, incorrect parameters, or animal variation - the welfare consequences are severe: birds experience the pain of neck cutting while conscious. Monitoring systems that detect and respond to stunning failures in real time are a critical welfare tool. However, the most effective solution may be to transition to intrinsically better stunning methods that are inherently less prone to failure than water bath systems.