Meat Industry Whistleblower Who Risked His Job Awarded by Local Philanthropist
For Immediate Release:
April 7, 2025
Contact:
Sara Groves 202-483-7382
Yesterday evening, at PETA’s “High Tea and Highballs” 45th-anniversary celebration at The Cocoplum on Sunset Drive, poultry industry whistleblower and “champion for chickens,” Jeremy Schmidt of Iowa, was presented with the 2025 Nanci Alexander Activist Award—one of PETA’s highest honors—by Alexander herself, a Fort Lauderdale powerhouse who founded the Animal Rights Foundation of Florida in 1989 when animal liberation was still a new idea to many. Photos from the event are available here.
Schmidt was recognized for risking his career to report Pure Prairie Poultry’s cruelty when it left its contract farms without feed for millions of chickens and for its decision to leave thousands of chickens on trucks for as long as five days with no food or water outside its now-shuttered slaughterhouse in Charles City, Iowa. The information Schmidt provided to authorities and the press helped prompt Iowa and Minnesota officials to feed millions of the starving birds and sparked an ongoing federal investigation.
“Jeremy Schmidt’s determination to sound the alarm that chickens had been abandoned to die slowly and badly has earned him one of PETA’s most distinguished awards, one reserved for heroes who help alleviate suffering, and to recognize that every animal is someone, not something,” says PETA Vice President Daniel Paden. “PETA urges everyone to follow in Jeremy’s and Nanci’s footsteps by never standing silently by should they see an animal in trouble.”
Nanci Alexander was among the first to spark debate over SeaWorld’s confinement of orcas and other marine animals and was behind Florida’s ban on pig gestation crates. PETA’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, The Nanci Alexander Center for Animal Rights, is named for her.
Chickens form complex social structures, dream when they sleep, and worry about the future, just as humans do, yet in the meat industry, they’re confined by the tens of thousands to severely crowded, filthy sheds and bred to grow such unnaturally large upper bodies that their legs often become crippled under the weight. Hens used for egg production are crammed together inside wire-floored cages where they don’t even have enough room to spread their wings. At slaughterhouses, mechanized blades slit their throats—often while they’re still conscious—and many are scalded to death in de-feathering tanks.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness and free vegan starter kits for anyone thinking of making the switch. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.
