If nobody wants to be reminded that their chicken was slaughtered before arriving in the supermarket, then how can chicken producers advertise their new “humane” slaughtering process?

• Your typical chicken arrives at the slaughterhouse on a truck. It’s plucked from its cage and hung upside-down with its legs shackled to a rail that takes it first to an electrical stunner, and then to a machine that slits its throat and bleeds it to death.
• But electrical stunners aren’t perfect, and the ethics of hanging already-stressed live chickens upside-down for the last minutes of their lives are sketchy. So some producers are starting to use a gas-based alternative to the electrical stunner.
• You can call it “controlled atmosphere stunning,” “sedation stunning,” or “slow induction anesthesia,” but the new method uses a carbon dioxide gas chamber to knock the birds out before they’re slaughtered, vastly reducing the stress, pain, and suffering that come with traditional methods.

Facts & Figures

• Bell & Evans, one of the companies using the new gas-stunning method, “processes” 200,000 chickens a week.
• Tyson Foods, which uses electrical stunners, slaughters more than 1 million chickens per week.
• Companies in Britain and Nebraska that already use “controlled atmosphere stunning” tend not to advertise this fact on their product packaging.

Best Quote

“People don’t want to know too much. It’s hard to sell humane killing as a concept.” – Marc Cooper, Senior Scientific Manager in the Farm Animals Department of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, London