Whistleblower: Ducks Ground Up, Buried Alive at Supplier to Winn-Dixie’s Parent Company

PETA Says Shoppers Should Stay Away, Grocers Should Reconsider Relationship

For Immediate Release:
February 16, 2022

Contact:
Nicole Meyer 202-483-7382

Today, PETA sent a letter to Anthony Hucker, president and CEO of locally based Southeastern Grocers (parent company of Winn-Dixie and other chains), asking him to reexamine the company’s relationship with duck supplier Culver Duck Farms—the second-largest duck slaughterer in the country, which boasts that it’s the only one that’s “Amercian Humane Certified”—in light of a whistleblower’s photos, video footage, and an affidavit detailing how ducks’ throats were slit while they were conscious and how live birds were tossed into grinders every day and were buried under a mountain of feed. The whistleblower reports that so many males were confined to the crowded sheds that female ducks were “gang raped” and left bloody and covered with scabs—and a supervisor admitted that a broken water line at a contract farm had caused 40 ducks to die of dehydration.

“This whistleblower paints a picture of unabated suffering at this duck farm, with birds smothered to death and ground up alive,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “As PETA urges Culver Duck Farms’ customers to reexamine their ties to this company, we remind the public that the only humane meal is a vegan one.”

After a 2016 PETA undercover investigation into Culver revealed birds bludgeoned, decapitated, and kept in ammonia-ridden sheds, Harris Teeter dropped the company as a supplier. But Culver’s products are still sold elsewhere, with labels claiming that ducks are “raised in free to roam barns,” and Culver’s website still touts that its ducks are “humanely raised.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.