Brian's Poultry Services Investigation

Two former employees of Brian’s Poultry Services, Ltd., based in Mildmay, Ontario, have come forward with shocking eyewitness accounts of cruelty that took place during “catching” efforts on two farms where thousands of birds were violently gathered manually by workers and carried upside-down to the truck that would take them to the slaughterhouse. The whistleblowers saw chickens crushed to death by heavy objects, bashed in the head, stepped on, and kicked and others with their legs and wings broken and their joints dislocated. Many were left to suffer slow and agonizing deaths next to the truck. After one day of work, Chad and Sally were so outraged and distressed by the treatment of these animals that they decided to contact PETA and speak out.

One of the whistleblowers described her thoughts on the way home from the nightmare: “[T]he biggest shock came when I realized that the catchers do this every day and have been doing it for years …. The brutality that these people inflict on animals shocked me. Ever since that day, my boyfriend and I have sworn off meat. Most people don’t know what happens to animals in the meat industry, but now, you know that there is a fate worse than death for these chickens—their journey to slaughter.”

Excerpts from their statements:

• “The heavy gates [used to corral chickens in the barns] were thrown around the barn to trap the chickens so that they would be easier to catch. … [T]he catchers threw the gates around without regard for the chickens’ safety, crushing and trapping many of them beneath the gates. If the gates were not even with the ground, the catchers would lean all their weight on the gates and force them to the floor, crushing the live chickens who were caught below.”
• “[W]e held four [chickens]—each by one leg—in each hand. … Carrying four chickens in each hand puts a lot of pressure on certain chickens, causing their legs to pop out of joint or their bodies to crush under the weight of the other chickens. [When birds were loaded onto transport vehicles,] the swinging motion that was used to lift the chickens up to the loaders caused the most damage because the pressure of the swing and the weight of the other chickens pushing down on the leg of the chicken on the end caused the leg to shatter or pop.”
• “Around the loading doors, there were a lot of injured chickens, lingering in pain on the ground. These chickens had either been dropped by the loaders or were left behind in the catching and loading frenzy. Many of these chickens couldn’t walk properly and, therefore, could not move themselves out from under our feet, so they were injured and crushed. In all the barns … I witnessed chickens who wandered out into the open being kicked and stepped on by workers, then left to die with damaged legs and broken wings.”
• “The chickens tried to huddle in groups, but occasionally, one would stray into the middle of the floor and get stepped on and kicked around.”
• On one farm, a worker was assigned to kill underweight birds “by smash[ing] the skulls of the ‘runts’ until they were dead” in order to “get a higher weight in the truck [because] they wanted to load only the big chickens and kill the smaller ones.”