A shocking investigation by Animal Equality: Italian industrial chicken farms like concentration camps, straight out of a horror film. The video is not suitable for sensitive viewers.
Deformed little creatures, in intolerable conditions, slaughtered after just a few weeks of life. A shocking investigation by Animal Equality conducted in Italy reveals the atrocious living conditions of animals on the farms and in the slaughterhouses that supply the largest chicken meat producers in Italy.
Following a summer of scandals (the Fipronil eggs) caused precisely by the need to disinfect those horrific sheds in some way, the images appearing in the video — produced after months of undercover investigations — remain deeply shocking, and are therefore not suitable for sensitive viewers or those already familiar with this reality.
The footage was gathered across Emilia Romagna and Lombardy, in intensive farms and slaughterhouses that supply the sector's leading companies, and it shows a reality very different from the one portrayed in the advertising of major brands.
This is how one of the most widely consumed food products comes into being. Chicken meat. And, alongside it, eggs from non-organic farms — from industrial facilities that are, as is well known, nightmarish places.
The images, gathered also with the use of drones, depict the living conditions of 95 per cent of the chickens that end up on the plates of those who eat chicken every year, and they show living beings:
The latest available data — from last year — show that poultry meat has overtaken beef, with consumption settling at around 20 kg per person per year, compared with 17.4 kg for red meat, from cattle and calves.
Almost half a billion chickens are slaughtered in Italy every year. And while fifty years ago every Italian ate around 120 eggs, today per capita consumption has reached 220 eggs, of which 142 are eaten as they are and the remainder consumed in the form of pasta, sweets and other food preparations.
Today's chickens are larger — even four times the size — compared with those of fifty years ago. Despite this, in current industrial farms, each chicken lives in a space smaller than an A4 sheet of paper (21 × 29.7 cm); it is as if we were to spend our entire lives standing crammed onto a half-metre tile. Debeaked, sick, exposed to artificial light, fed a mash containing their own excrement. A hell, a nightmare.
After a few weeks of captivity, the chickens are roughly grabbed by workers and hung upside down on hooks (as seen in the photographs) to be taken for slaughter. Struggling frantically, the animals often escape stunning, so much so that every day thousands of them are slaughtered while still conscious. "The conditions in which 500 million chickens are born and made to 'live' every year in Italy are wretched," declared Matteo Cupi, director of Animal Equality Italia. "The poultry meat industry cannot continue to make fools of consumers with misleading advertising, which is why we have decided to set the record straight. Radical change is needed, and that is what we are calling on Italian producers to bring about."
The investigation promotes a petition at www.polloitaliano.it addressed to Unaitalia, the trade association representing 90 per cent of the entire national poultry and rabbit supply chain, calling on it to enter into dialogue as soon as possible with the largest chicken meat producers — in particular Aia, Amadori and Fileni — so that they adopt policies aimed at reducing animal suffering at the earliest opportunity.