What Do Faster Line Speeds in Slaughterhouses Mean for Animals, Workers and Food Safety?

In the industrial meat system, animals are treated like any other product that comes out of a factory. From the moment animals arrive at a slaughterhouse, everything that happens to them — stunning, slaughtering, cleaning, breakdown and packaging — is on a tight, consistent schedule, much like an assembly line for other products. As meat production has increased over the years, the speed of those processing lines has crept faster and faster. And while that’s good for meatpacker’s profits, it’s bad news for animals, workers and consumers.

For now, most poultry plants move at a staggering rate of 140 birds per minute, just over two a second. Pork processing plants are allowed to slaughter up to 1,106 per hour. But in recent years, some plants have been granted waivers that allowed them to move even faster — up to 175 birds per minute in chicken, nearly three birds per second. In March, the Trump administration announced that they would extend this policy indefinitely until they could rewrite the rules to let all poultry and pork plants operate at higher speeds. But while the administration claims the goal is to cut “outdated administrative requirements that have slowed production and added unnecessary costs for American producers,” animal welfare advocates, workers’ unions and public health experts have all cautioned that the shift would remove vital safeguards for everyone.