A B S T R A C TPre-slaughter stress is well-known to affect meat quality of beef carcasses and methods have been developed toassess this stress. However, development of more practical and less invasive methods are required in order toassess the response of cattle to pre-slaughter stressors, which will potentially also assist with the prediction ofbeef quality. This review outlines the importance of pre-slaughter stress as well as existing and emergingtechnologies for quantification of the pre-slaughter stress. The review includes; i) indicators of meat quality andhow they are affected by pre-slaughter stress in cattle, ii) contact techniques that have been commonly used tomeasure stress indicators in animals, iii) remotely sensed imagery techniques recently used as non-invasivemethods to monitor physiological and behavioural parameters and iv) potential implementation of remotelysensed imagery data to perform contactless assessment of physiological measurements, which could be related tothe pre-slaughter stress, as well as to the indicators of beef quality. Relevance to industry, conclusions andrecommendations for research are included.