PETA Showed Whole Foods Customers Footage From Sham ‘Animal Welfare Certified’ Farms—This Was Their Reaction
“I don’t want to see any more.” That’s one grocery shopper’s reaction to footage that exposes practices allowed at the farms and slaughterhouses behind those “animal welfare certified” labels found at Whole Foods.
The footage shows that workers kicked birds and forced screaming pigs into gas chambers. Some of the footage comes from past PETA investigations inside formerly GAP-certified facilities. Take a look:
PETA’s new video spares viewers from the graphic imagery, but shows Whole Foods customers wincing, turning away, and refusing to look as they’re shown shots of terrified pigs crammed into filthy sheds, injured and dying chickens, workers forcibly impregnating cows, and other horrors.
PETA’s consumer reaction video is airing on TV stations in New York—where the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) is headquartered—as well as DC and Austin. The organization props up inherently cruel factory farms by sitting on the board of the Global Animal Partnership—the humane-washing group behind bogus “animal welfare” certifications.
“I don’t think that they should be putting an animal welfare certified label when they’re treating animals horribly,” says one shopper. “It might be the best to just switch to a plant-based diet,” acknowledges another.
The Global Animal Partnership allows meat, egg, and dairy companies to slap misleading “animal welfare certified” labels on their “products”—even though PETA investigators have documented widespread and systemic cruelty and suffering at all 12 certified facilities they visited.
PETA’s investigation into Plainville Farms—which at the time was Global Animal Partnership–certified—documented that workers kicked, beat, and threw turkeys and left sick and injured birds to suffer without treatment. One worker held a turkey by her injured neck, mimicked masturbation, dropped her on the floor, kicked her, and left her to die. As a result of the investigation, former workers at Plainville Farms were charged with six felonies and a total of 141 counts of cruelty to animals—the largest number in any factory-farmed animal case in U.S. history—and 10 workers have been convicted so far.
At Sweet Stem Farm, which was also certified by Global Animal Partnership at the time of our investigation, PETA’s eyewitnesses revealed that pigs were crammed into severely crowded sheds on concrete floors and had painful, bloody rectal prolapses as large as an orange that were left untreated. One pig ran a fever intermittently for up to a month before a worker shot them in the head.
PETA’s ad is also airing in Washington near the headquarters of the Humane World for Animals (formerly Humane Society of the United States)—which also sits on the board of the deceptive certification program—and in Austin, Texas, the home of Whole Foods, which peddles “animal welfare certified” flesh.
The Only True Certified Humane Foods Are Vegan
Chickens are social, inquisitive animals who, in nature, live in complex social hierarchies known as “pecking orders.” Turkeys are devoted parents who spend their days nurturing their young, building nests, and taking dust baths. Cows are gentle animals who grieve for their lost loved ones. Pigs are playful, intelligent, and empathetic. All of these animals have feelings and unique personalities. They all suffer when humans exploit and slaughter them.
No matter what a sham certification says, animals’ flesh, milk, and eggs belong to them—there is no such thing as a “humane” animal-based product.
Here’s What You Can Do
Learn more about how the Humane World for Animals, the ASPCA, and Compassion In World Farming are betraying animals by visiting peta.org/GAP. Join PETA in urging these organizations to stop supporting factory farms and start telling consumers the truth: eating our fellow animals is never humane.
