The time chickens and turkeys spend at the slaughterhouse before killing is a critical welfare window. Low-stress lairage design and handling significantly reduces fear and injury rates.
Poultry pre-slaughter welfare represents a high-impact welfare window given the billions of birds processed annually. The shackling of conscious birds inverted on moving lines causes acute pain from leg restraint and distress from inversion. Controlled atmosphere killing systems avoid this entirely by rendering birds unconscious before any handling. The welfare case for CAK is supported by substantial evidence and its adoption is growing, though the majority of global poultry production still uses live shackling. Every improvement in pre-slaughter handling - from transport design to lairage environment to shackling alternatives - translates into welfare gains at enormous scale.