The final hours of a farm animal's life are among the most welfare-significant. Pre-slaughter handling, lairage conditions, and stunning methods all determine the quality of death.
Slaughter welfare improvements represent some of the most cost-effective interventions in farm animal welfare because they affect every animal in the food system. The evidence is clear that better training, supervision, and facility design significantly reduce suffering in the final hours of an animal's life. While the ideal outcome would be the elimination of factory farming, ensuring that existing slaughter is as humane as possible is an important interim goal that saves enormous amounts of suffering.