An investigator from Essere Animali worked undercover in chicken loading operations. The reportage reveals the conditions and suffering of the animals, as well as the exploitation of workers within the livestock supply chain.
Loading and transport to the slaughterhouse can cause stress and suffering to animals. Even the European Commission acknowledges this, having drawn up guidelines stating that chickens should be picked up and placed in cages gently, one at a time. The video obtained with a hidden camera by our undercover investigator and released exclusively to Internazionale reveals a reality that is worlds apart. At a farm belonging to a major Italian company, chickens are subjected to every kind of mistreatment. Workers roughly grab four animals at a time and throw them into cages. Some kick them; others clutch them as if to cradle them, only to then hurl them forcefully to the ground.
This is not the first time our investigative team has documented violence against animals on Italian farms. Several factors contribute to triggering these actions, but they are rarely the result of deliberately cruel behaviour. The root causes lie in the production of cheap food — a system that, while presenting itself as social protection for consumers, can conceal mechanisms of exploitation of the workers employed in the supply chain.
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Together with a team of eight people, our undercover investigator had to load approximately 48,000 chickens destined to become meat sold for a few euros. In other words, this means picking up and caging around 100 chickens every minute for 8 consecutive hours, inside sheds where the air is unbreathable due to the fumes from the excrement of thousands of animals.
Subjected to gruelling shifts, lacking the mandatory training required by law that would at least teach them to handle animals in a way that reduces their suffering, and instead desensitised by tasks that force them to treat animals as objects, the workers take out their frustration on the chickens.
Worker exploitation is an issue that extends beyond the meat industry and can take root wherever food is sold off cheaply. Recent news, for example, has reported numerous cases of agricultural labourers working in conditions that fall entirely outside the bounds of any regulation or basic human dignity. It is important to be informed about what we buy, favouring ethical and organic supply chains wherever possible.
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By moving towards a plant-based diet, we also distance ourselves from violence against animals. This is not solely a matter of mistreatment carried out by workers who are themselves exploited, but of cruelty inherent in the production system itself.
99 per cent of chickens farmed in Italy come from overcrowded sheds where the density can reach 20 animals per square metre. Respiratory and cardiovascular problems, as well as leg deformities, are the consequences of the genetic selection they have been subjected to in order to make them fatten more quickly.
These farming conditions also contribute to keeping low the cost of the meat we find on sale. But, as we have seen, the more we save, the more it comes at the expense of animals and of vulnerable and marginalised categories of workers.