Photo: screenshot from the Mercy For Animals video
Back in 2013, a proposed law that would have criminalized the act of secretly videotaping abuses on livestock farms—known by critics as an “ag gag” bill—failed in Tennessee. A least one of the state’s chicken operations has reason to lament that defeat. An undercover investigator with the animal-welfare group Mercy For Animals managed to record the above footage at T&S Farm in Dukedom, Tennessee, which supplies chickens for slaughter to poultry-processing giant Tyson—which in turn supplies chicken meat for McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets.
For those too squeamish to watch, the video opens with a worker saying, “You don’t work for PETA, do you?,” before proceeding to pummel a sickly bird to death with a long stick—which, for good measure, is outfitted with a nasty-looking spike attached to its business end. More beatings of sickly birds proceed from there.
Both the poultry giant and the fast-food giant quickly cut ties with the exposed Tennessee poultry farm, The Wall Street Journal reports.
