Everyone knows you don’t play with your food and you never choke your chicken at work. Apparently these Tyson employees didn’t get the memo. New video footage has been uncovered that shows them beating, throwing, kicking and of course choking chickens.
An animal rights group released the graphic video and it appears to show serious mistreatment of chickens by Tyson Foods employees in a Virginia plant. These actions have led to at least two Animal Control investigations.
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Compassion Over Killing, an animal-advocacy organization, said the videos were recorded by an undercover investigator who represented the group. The videos were taken at four different facilities where Tyson workers process chickens.
Specifically the video depicts Tyson employees sticking plastic rods through their beaks in a process known as “boning.” Workers also were caught wringing birds’ necks, running them over with forklifts and putting injured birds together in “dead piles,” as the video’s narrator puts it, leaving them to die.
In the video you can see one employee standing on a chicken’s head, suffocating it until it dies. Then you’ll hear him say that you can’t let anyone see you do that because if caught on tape it looks bad. He further goes on to mention that you never know who is “undercover” working for the Animal Rights people.
Of course any animal rights group would want answers but specifically Compassion Over Killing does, after all they made the discovery.
“This level of violence and abuse is so egregious, it violates Virginia state animal protection laws,” Erica Meier, the organization’s executive director, said in a statement. “The company should be held accountable — and consumers deserve to know the truth about the horrors inflicted upon these animals.” She added: “Tyson, the titan of this industry, is literally crushing the life out of birds.”
Tyson, the largest chicken-processing company in the United States, issued a statement calling the behavior: “inexcusable” and said that it fired the 10 workers of the crew depicted in the video. The company also mentioned it has discontinued the process of “boning” which was described as “a historical way the industry uses to keep males from eating food intended for females.”
A Tyson representative went on to comment that those employees were trained on the proper way to handle animals but chose not to follow guidelines. The spokesperson stated that all animals under their care deserve to be treated humanely.
Compassion Over Killing still stresses that the company’s processing facilities play a huge role in a system that desensitizes people to animal suffering and they want consumers to know the truth.
I don’t know about you but that video gave me chills. I thought the new episode of MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch had been released and it was Jigsaw versus Foghorn Leghorn.