Update: Plainville Farms Stalls in Response to PETA Exposé

For Immediate Release:
August 17, 2021

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

After PETA exposed that Plainville Farms workers kicked, stomped on, and beat turkeys with a heavy rod—including ones so lame that they couldn’t move—and that a worker pretended to masturbate with a dying female bird, the company has claimed through its attorney that it cannot take “corrective measures” unless PETA provides, among other things, the names of the employees shown abusing the birds. However, as PETA’s general counsel points out in a letter sent to the company’s attorney, Plainville already knows the identities of those who worked on crews with PETA’s investigator, each one of whom was implicated in the abuse—and further details are with the state police, who are investigating. PETA suggests that if Plainville wants to identify more abusers on its crews, it is fully equipped to conduct its own investigation, carry out surprise inspections, and even install a video monitoring system.

“Not a single supervisor did anything to stop workers from kicking vulnerable turkeys around like footballs—in fact, one of the supervisors joined in,” says PETA Senior Vice President Daphna Nachminovitch. “Plainville needs to stop pretending this is a shock and end the abuse, starting with a top-to-bottom audit of all its crews and supervisors.”

PETA also noted in its letter that the abuse captured on camera was only a sample of the rampant cruelty the crews engaged in. One farmer even asked for the abusive workers seen in PETA’s video to be the ones to load turkeys from his sheds, lamenting that another crew had turned the birds “into hamburger before they [were] even on the trucks.”

Plainville Farms, a supplier to Whole Foods, Publix, Harris Teeter, and other top grocers, is certified by Global Animal Partnership and makes claims via deliberately deceitful labels that the turkeys it exploits are “humanely raised.”

Broadcast-quality video footage is available here. PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat or abuse in any other way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.