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TRIPLE A: Animal Awareness & Action | aWISH Articles

Pig Transportation by Truck: Welfare Challenges and Slaughterhouse Relevance

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Context of the Problem
Transport from farm to slaughterhouse is one of the most stressful stages in a pig’s life. Stress begins during loading, when pigs leave their familiar barn environment. Additionally, steep ramps, overcrowding, rough handling or lack of staff training can cause fear, injuries and exhaustion. During transit, pigs may be exposed to a number of stressors such as heat or cold stress, poor ventilation, mixing with unfamiliar conspecifics and limited space. Vehicle design, ventilation efficiency and journey duration strongly influence animal welfare. At unloading, additional risks arise if handling is rushed or poorly managed. Welfare consequences include aggression after mixing of unfamiliar pigs, injuries, fatigue and even animal deaths. From an economic perspective, transport stress may lead to pale, soft, exudative (PSE) or dark, firm, dry (DFD) meat and thus can reduce carcass quality. Dead on arrival (DOA) represent both a major welfare concern as well as a financial loss.

Monitoring and aWISH Project
Slaughterhouses provide a central checkpoint for assessing transport outcomes, since the effects of transport are directly visible upon arrival. Indicators include DOA rates, signs of fatigue and the prevalence of injuries and other health issues. Monitoring at this stage is essential because it objectively reflects loading, vehicle and journey conditions. Within the aWISH project, digital monitoring technologies are being developed, such as camera-based systems, sound analysis and automated DOA registration, as well as lesion scoring tools. These innovations allow systematic data collection, feedback to transporters and farms, and benchmarking to improve welfare standards across the supply chain.

Best Practices
Mitigation requires attention at all stages of transport. Proper vehicle design with adequate ventilation, optimised stocking densities and gentle handling during loading and unloading are essential to minimize stress. Transport during extreme temperatures has to be avoided, and journeys should be well planned to limit duration and waiting times. Slaughterhouse monitoring data should be used proactively to identify recurring issues and trigger reviews with transport companies and farms. Close collaboration between slaughterhouses, transporters and farms enables early interventions improving both welfare outcomes and operational efficiency.

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1.1 What is the aWISH project about?

In the EU, a challenge that still remains is to reconcile the social and moral demand for a high level of animal welfare with other pillars of sustainable livestock production. Indeed, 82% of Europeans believe that farm animals should be better protected than they currently are. A broad definition of animal welfare refers to the feelings and physical well-being of an individual animal. Broilers and pigs are the farm animals EU citizens care most about, and they are also the most important meat-producing animals in the EU and worldwide. Both pigs and broilers have significant welfare problems at all stages of production (on-farm, loading and transport, unloading and slaughter), leading a growing number of citizens to question the social license to produce. Ambitious and effective, but also practical and efficient solutions are needed. This is where the aWISH project comes in to fill this gap! The aim of aWISH is to develop and provide a cost-effective solution for assessing and improving the welfare of meat-producing livestock in Europe. The aWISH solution is based on the automatic monitoring of animal-related indicators at slaughter. The necessary technologies will also be developed to collect complementary data on farm or during transport. Pilot and development activities will be carried out in 6 broiler and fattening pig production chains across Europe using a lean multi-actor approach to test and validate the project results. A catalogue of animal welfare indicators will disseminate all validated indicators and standardised data collection methods. Best practice guides will be developed to improve key aspects of animal welfare in pigs and broilers and to help external stakeholders use aWISH technologies and tools. In this context, the aWISH project will set up expert panels that will be composed of representatives of actors from the entire farm to fork value chain across the EU. The expert panels will have the function to retrieve and share feedback on technology, processes, farming practices, industry, sector regulation and markets, as well as society and perceptions. In this way, stakeholder participation in expert panels could help initiate interdisciplinary dialogue, promote interaction with target groups and associations, and strengthen trust between different actors.

2. Useful Information

2.1 Is my participation voluntary and what does it involve?

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2.2 Purpose of personal data collection

As mentioned above, the expert panel will have the function to retrieve and share feedback on technology, processes, farming practices, industry, sector regulation and markets, as well as society and perceptions. In order to do this effectively, we need to process some of your personal data:
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  • Personal opinions on the subject

2.3 What we will do with your data

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4. Contact Information

Partner name: WHITE RESEARCH SRL
e-mail: akyriakidis@white-research.eu

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6. Declaration of Acceptance

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