Animal Justice just released secretly recorded footage from inside a Canadian slaughterhouse. The horrific footage shows pigs having their throats slit while still conscious, being kicked and hit, and more. This is the first footage from a pig slaughterhouse in Canadian history.
The footage was taken at Johnston’s Packers (also known as Johnston’s Meats or Johnston’s Pork), a provincially licensed slaughterhouse in Chilliwack, British Columbia. According to Animal Justice, many of the pigs slaughtered there come from “local family farms” that claim to have high animal welfare standards.
Despite being legally required to stun animals before slaughter, Animal Justice claims that workers regularly failed to do so before slitting pigs’ throats and hanging them to bleed out. The footage reveals pigs screaming and blinking while their throats are slit. Some conscious pigs were electrocuted more than once and even had their throats slit a second time.
The pigs were also killed in full view of one another—sometimes while they were beside or on top of other pigs. Animal Justice shared that some pigs “even showed signs of consciousness while being loaded into a scalding tank, where their bodies are submerged in boiling hot water before they are fully dismembered.”
Johnston’s commercials boast of “happy animals”—but does any of this look happy to you?
Labels Mean Nothing
The story is similar in the United States, where the National Pork Board oversees the Pork Quality Assurance (PQA) Plus certification program, which the pork industry uses to assure consumers that its certified meat is high-quality and safe.
However, in October of this year, Mercy For Animals released horrific undercover footage of a PQA-certified farm showing a pig repeatedly shot in the head with a defective captive-bolt gun, animals suffering from bloody prolapses, and more.
Pigs are playful, intelligent, unique individuals—yet they are routinely abused and deprived of basic freedoms at the industrial farms that are becoming the norm around the globe.
You can take a stand for farmed animals in your daily life simply by choosing more plant-based foods. Download our free How to Eat Veg guide to learn how.
Cover Photo Credit: Lukas Vincour / Zvířata Nejíme / We Animals