Key Issues
Lack of bathing water
The increasingly popular cold barn systems often deny ducks access to water for bathing. Meanwhile, less modern systems with bathing water may not implement sufficient water quality and disease control measures.
The denial of access to bathing prevents ducks from expressing their most natural behaviors - it prevents ducks from being able to be ducks in the most basic sense.
Without open water access, ducks face multiple welfare challenges: they cannot properly maintain their eyes, nostrils, and feathers through natural cleaning behaviors, they can develop painful foot pad conditions, and they experience frustration due to their inability to perform their most natural behaviours.
Hard and abrasive flooring
Ducks have webbed feet that are adapted for swimming and walking on soft surfaces.
Even in less intensive farms, ducks often live in barns with wire-mesh or hard metallic/plastic flooring. Prolonged exposure to such hard or abrasive flooring leads ducks to develop painful lesions on their foot pads.
Cruel slaughter methods
It is common for ducks to be slaughtered live at traditional wet markets, like other poultry birds. Modern centralised slaughterhouses are also not commonly used. Instead, small-scale, manual and often unlicensed slaughterhouses are scattered across many areas. These facilities are not inspected and controlled by veterinary agencies meaning there is little compliance to any hygiene or food safety regulations.
With lack of sufficient equipment, ducks at these small facilities and wet markets are not stunned before being slaughtered. They remain fully conscious during neck cutting or decapitation, leading to horrifically intense and acute pain before death.
(Phuong, 2024)
Poor & overcrowded transportation
It is common practice amongst smaller players to overcrowd live birds on extremely small vehicles, including motorbikes. Even larger trucks designed for transportation of poultry are extremely cramped, unhygienic and do not provide ducks with feed or water, which can lead to high levels of psychological and heat stress.
Possible adoption of battery cages in the future
Battery cages are a looming threat as the industry grows rapidly and tries to adopt modern large-scale practices. Although they have not been adopted in Vietnam yet, several countries have already seen the rise of battery cages in duck egg farms. The Taiwanese duck industry was widely using battery cages until the government faced pressure from European markets to outlaw such practices.
There has also been rapidly increasing production and use of battery cage systems for ducks in China, which could set a precedent for industries abroad as well. This is something that our organisation plans to monitor and mitigate as much as possible.
(Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals)