What do faster line speeds in slaughterhouses mean for animals, workers and food safety?

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 But while the administration claims the goal is to cut “outdated administrative requirements that have slowed production and added unnecessary costs for American producers,” animal welfare advocates, workers’ unions and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.

Line speeds and animal welfare

Slaughterhouses have never been humane for animals, but faster line speeds mean that even the minimal safeguards to protect animals from excessive suffering don’t work as intended.

As the Humane League, an animal welfare organization working to end the abuses of the factory farm system, details, the main slaughter line in meatpacking — dubbed the evisceration line — is largely automated today. Chickens are normally shackled upside down to a conveyor belt that drags them through an electrified bath, stunning them before their throats are cut. Their carcasses are then submerged in boiling water to remove feathers. It’s a gruesome process, but speeding it up makes it worse: Hastily shackled chickens can be dragged by broken legs, miss the stun bath and have their throats cut while fully conscious, or miss the blade and be submerged in boiling water alive.

For pigs, which walk into the slaughterhouse on their own, faster line speeds mean electric prods or strikes from handlers trying to coerce them to move faster. Like chickens, pigs can also suffer from improperly performed stunning, botched slaughter and live submersion into boiling water, issues that become more frequent at higher speeds.

Line speeds and workers

There aren’t a lot of jobs in meatpacking that are easy or safe: Workers are handling frightened live animals, moving heavy carcasses and equipment and using sharp tools. As you can imagine, these tasks don’t get easier or safer when you do them faster. But that’s only part of the problem when it comes to increased line speeds. Because of the assembly-line nature of modern meat processing, workers are also performing a single task thousands of times in a single eight-hour shift, often for months or even years at a time. Speeding up the production line multiplies the number of times workers are performing those motions, and that puts them at serious risk of developing carpal tunnel syndrome, tendonitis and more serious forms of chronic musculoskeletal injury.

The meat industry has argued that because the most hands-on parts of meatpacking (like preparing different cuts out of the carcass) technically don’t happen on the automated evisceration line, increasing line speeds doesn’t increase chronic injury rates. As proof, they’ve pointed to recent U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) studies on poultry and pork plants running at higher speeds that didn’t find a direct association between evisceration line speeds and higher worker injury rates.

Raw meat can carry and transmit a number of dangerous bacteria. Contamination risks multiply if it isn’t handled and inspected carefully during every step of slaughter and processing. Those bacteria can end up on meat through poor hygiene practices anywhere in a meatpacking plant, but the most common points of contamination are the slaughter and evisceration processes. If an animal’s guts are punctured or torn as they’re removed, feces and any bacteria they contain are transferred with them. E.coli, salmonella, campylobacter and several other disease-causing bacteria can be spread in this way.

Intuitively, faster line speeds make this kind of accident more likely. They also make it less likely to get noticed: USDA inspectors are required in meat plants, and they already struggle to keep up with the speed of the slaughter lines. This gives them inadequate time to make sure carcasses are clean and free of contaminants. That doesn’t just include feces — hair, nails, and other animal parts can also end up in finished meat products when inspectors can’t do their jobs.

Inspectors have sounded the alarm in the past, with whistleblowers announcing on NBC in 2019 that between higher line speeds and reductions in the number of inspectors, they didn’t feel that they could trust the safety of U.S. pork anymore.

Nevertheless, meatpackers claim nothing has gone wrong, citing a lack of evidence directly linking foodborne illness outbreaks to the pork and poultry plants that have been granted waivers to operate faster. But this is a shaky statement. Foodborne illnesses often go unreported, and even when they are reported, it’s hard to trace them back to the source given the opacity of most supply chains.

When it comes to food safety, common sense and an abundance of caution should triumph over processing more carcasses per minute. Given the second Trump administration’s staffing reductions across the patchwork of agencies that coordinate the country’s food safety efforts, it’s an especially bad time to be further lowering food-safety standards at meatpacking plants.

Beyond line speeds: Salmonella in poultry

When it comes to salmonella in poultry, line speeds aren’t the only concern. Salmonella spreads freely in the cramped and unsanitary environment of a standard poultry barn, meaning that birds enter the slaughter line with salmonella bacteria already on their skin and feathers; this adds yet another transmission vector beyond the one presented by ruptured guts. Industry sources have trumpeted a study showing line speeds had little impact on salmonella prevalence, presenting that as evidence that faster line speeds are a good thing. But that’s sort of like saying it didn’t rain because the ocean didn’t get wet: Salmonella is common enough in meatpacking plants that line speeds had no impact on its ubiquity. That’s not exactly a point in the industry’s favor.

Still, meat processors can take several measures to cut back on salmonella in meatpacking plants; for example, steps like dry chilling can effectively reduce salmonella below safe levels or eliminate it entirely. These steps are already standard in the EU and several other countries, along with on-farm salmonella reductions that make raw poultry far safer. Proposed Biden-era rules would have set limits on salmonella bacteria and deemed some strains of the bacteria adulterants, a designation that would make meat contaminated with them illegal to sell. Much of the raw poultry that’s currently deemed safe would have been rendered ineligible for sale as a result, forcing producers to adopt those extra steps.