Feds Cite 8 Pilgrim’s Pride Slaughterhouses After Birds Are Thrown, Drowned

For Immediate Release:
April 14, 2021

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

PETA has just obtained damning U.S. Department of Agriculture reports revealing 12 violations of federal law in less than four months at eight Pilgrim’s Pride slaughterhouses across the country. Federal inspectors saw chickens who were scalded to death and/or drowned, found a live chicken in a barrel of dead birds, and discovered chickens caught in transport cages, including one who died after being caught by the head.

At a slaughterhouse in Georgia, a worker “forcefully” threw a live chicken into a barrier, causing the bird to fall and “gasp for air” before dying—prompting PETA to send a letter this morning to the local district attorney asking her to review the matter and, as appropriate, file criminal cruelty-to-animals charges against the worker.

“These reports reveal that birds were plunged into scalding-hot water, hurled to their death, and discarded in a pile of bodies under the watch of the second-largest chicken-slaughtering company in the country,” says PETA Senior Vice President Daphna Nachminovitch. “PETA urges anyone who still eats chickens to remember these birds’ painful, terrifying deaths—and opt for a vegan meal instead.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview—obtained the records through a Freedom of Information Act request. The violations occurred at slaughterhouses in Alabama, Georgia, Minnesota, Texas, and West Virginia.

For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.