Graphic hidden-camera footage showing animal abuses at Maple Lodge Farms, Canada’s largest poultry producer, has prompted calls for a boycott of the company from Mercy for Animals Canada (MFAC).
Undercover film obtained by the group and leaked late last week, was scheduled to be officially released at press conferences in Toronto and Montreal this morning (Monday, March 30). The video shows chickens trucked in sub-zero temperatures arriving frozen solid at Maple Lodge’s Brampton facility, and workers violently slamming chickens upside down into shackles on the slaughter line, breaking their legs and wings. In one clip, a Maple Lodge supervisor is heard saying it’s okay to hang severely injured animals on the slaughter line.
Back in 2014, Maple Lodge was found guilty of two charges under the Health of Animals Act after some 2,000 chickens froze to death while being transported. The company was fined $80,000. Maple Lodge pleaded guilty to 18 other offences under the Act, but sentencing on those was suspended pending completion of a three-year probation during which the company was ordered to spend $1-million to modify it’s transport trucks.
Conditions of the probation included that Maple Lodge establish “policies, standards and procedures to reduce the likelihood of… committing a subsequent offence.”
Maple Lodge CEO Michael Burrows was quick to respond to MFAC’s video, which he described as “unauthorized,” with a video message of his own. In it, Burrows, who is reading from a prepared statement, says Maple Lodge has “taken immediate steps to verify the facts [and] ensure any potential violations of our animal care practices and policies are dealt with and to implement any changes needed so that incidents like this don’t happen again.”
Burrows says the company has a “zero tolerance policy for any violation of our animal welfare policies.” And that anyone found violating them could be disciplined or dismissed.
The Maple Lodge CEO says the humane treatment of birds in Maple Lodge’s care “is a very high priority and a moral responsibility that we take seriously.”
But a year after the company’s convictions, the cruelty seemingly continues.
“Maple Lodge Farms has been illegally torturing animals for far too long,” says MFAC founder Nathan Runkle in a statement. “Compassionate companies would be wise to boycott this unethical corporation.”
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