Incorporating the pre-slaughter phase into chicken welfare monitoring and labeling schemes

Ideally, animal welfare labelling results in better informing stakeholders and improving the quality of the animals’ entire lifespan, including the last phase when they are being depopulated, transported and eventually slaughtered. In the poultry industry, this pre-slaughter phase is critical for both animal welfare and for preventing production losses (due to mortality, weight loss and carcass rejections). Recent and ongoing research will be presented to document which welfare problems occur during which part of the pre-slaughter phase, what the risk factors are for these welfare problems, and the pros and cons of different catching & crating methods (inverted manual, upright manual vs mechanical catching). Examples will be provided of cost-efficient manual or automated tools for large-scale monitoring of bird welfare during pre-slaughter. Monitoring data can subsequently be used to drive improvements in poultry welfare by a) providing feed-back (e.g. benchmarking) to responsible parties (farmer, catching team, transporter, slaughterhouse), b) a punishment or reward system depending on whether or not target values are met, and c) incorporating this information into a welfare label.