New Whistleblower Footage and Testimony Reveals New Horrors on Local Farm
PETA Shares Witness’s Heartbreaking Letter Calling On Authorities to Help Neglected Pigs and Piglets Left to Die at East Fork Farms
For Immediate Release:
November 6, 2019
Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382
Only a few weeks after a PETA exposé revealed that pigs had bloody open sores and a worker cut off piglets’ tails without any pain relief at East Fork Farms, an anonymous whistleblower has provided additional never-before-seen footage. It shows injured pigs abandoned to suffer in filth, dead piglets rotting on the floor, and a trash can teeming with maggots and overflowing with piglets’ bodies.
In a letter that accompanies the new footage, the videographer writes that they are a U.S. government official and charges the Indiana State Police to do what’s right by the animals suffering on the farm, reiterating that the footage was all recorded at East Fork Farms. The whistleblower describes the facility as a “horrid dungeon” where the barns are full of billions of maggots and cockroaches, emaciated pigs are left without access to food or water, animals were found struggling to stay afloat in the barn’s manure pit, and mother pigs are forced to “watch their piglets die and decompose in front of them.”
“From down the street, you can hear the screams echo in the wind. It is like the worst horror film screams you have ever heard,” the whistleblower writes. “If the standard practice is intentionally causing pain, then the standard needs to change instead of protecting it further from any scrutiny …. So I personally charge [Indiana State Police] Sgt. Stephen Wheeles to look at the truth instead of trying to defend the lies.”
“This horrific new footage shows one piglet shrieking while pinned against the bars of a crate, others lying twitching and convulsing on the floor, and a trash can overflowing with corpses and maggots,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA urges authorities to heed this whistleblower’s calls to take immediate action against this facility, for these pigs’ sake.”
East Fork Farms previously supplied the Louisville, Kentucky, slaughterhouse of JBS USA, which markets pig flesh branded as Swift Premium Dry Rubbed Pork, All Natural Pork, and Fresh Pork and Swift La Herencia Pork. Following the release of PETA’s exposé, JBS announced that it had “immediately and indefinitely” banned East Fork Farms from its supply chain.
A broadcast-quality version of the new footage is available for download here. PETA’s original exposé is available here, and photos are available here.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat or abuse in any other way”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.
