Behind Raising Cane’s Chicken: Drownings, Scaldings, and Neglect

Raising Cane’s built its brand around “One Love,” but newly compiled federal records suggest that love doesn’t extend to chickens.

What inspectors found at Raising Cane’s supplier Bachoco OK Foods should turn anyone off to ever ordering chicken fingers again. The records reveal six years of horrific cruelty to animals, a pattern of suffering at the supplier’s slaughterhouses that went far beyond isolated incidents. The reports describe workers leaving chickens to die in dumpsters, violently handling them, and subjecting them to terrifying failures in the slaughter process.

Raising Cane’s Supplier Reportedly Tormented Chickens

Chickens are curious and social individuals. They love to forage for food with their families, dream when they sleep, and chirp to their babies before they hatch.

But the meat industry treats them as objects. Workers pack them by the tens of thousands into severely crowded, filthy sheds. Companies breed them to grow so unnaturally large, so quickly that many birds’ legs can’t support their own bodies. At slaughterhouses like those operated by Bachoco OK Foods, workers shackle birds upside-down before mechanized blades cut their throats.

The federal records show that some birds suffer fates far more horrific than even what birds raised for their flesh are typically forced to endure.

At Bachoco’s Oklahoma slaughterhouse, inspectors reported:

• Finding live chickens piled in a dumpster under the bodies of those who had died during transport
• Workers “repeatedly using excessive force” and “slamming” birds into metal shackles.
• Conscious birds being conveyed into defeathering tanks filled with scalding water.
• “Numerous” chickens who died after workers left them on a trailer in freezing temperatures for nearly 18 hours without food or water.
• A truck full of chickens (likely thousands of individuals) was left completely without care for at least 37 hours. No food, water, or relief of any kind.

At Bachoco’s Arkansas, slaughterhouse, 19 chickens drowned when a line stoppage left them dangling from shackles and submerged in a tank of water for 26 minutes. Federal inspectors also documented workers kicking a live bird and throwing them onto conveyor belts, including by their wings.

Every Chicken Is Someone

Raising Cane’s is named after the founder’s beloved dog, Cane. Anyone who has lived with a dog knows that each one is a unique individual with preferences, fears, routines, and relationships.

Chickens are individuals, too. They recognize their human guardians, learn from one another, form friendships, and feel pain, fear, comfort, and joy. Some chickens even run to greet their guardians when they come home from work or school.

Every animal is someone. Chickens don’t want to be crammed into trucks, shackled upside down, drowned, scalded, or killed for a fast-food meal. If you wouldn’t eat a dog, don’t eat the chickens sold at places like Raising Cane’s.The best way to help chickens is to stop eating them.

You know it’s the right thing to do, so start today!