Stress pre-slaughter is a critical period into the productive chain that promotes live animal weight loss, yield and meat quality, and loss of animal welfare due to failure of homeostasis of the organism by exposure to stressful situations. In the current review, we identify and describe stressors factors reports at the last 5 years such as main causes of meat quality, that include handling activities of animals by farm or plant staff (transportation, load and unload at the slaughterhouse), environmental conditions (temperature, vibrations), lairage time previous to slaughter and group mixing, fasting time of water and food, and fatigue states as well as routinely used biomarkers to study of conditions associated to stress. Although research about the subject is large, it is not clear the biochemical mechanisms involved in some orgnoleptic characteristics of meat associated with stress levels and individual observable variations in different groups of animals, it is required more research on stress biomarkers that allow a more specific, effective and non-invasive identification and measumerent