Compassion Over Killing > Compassionate Action #20: A New COK Investigation: Inside A Turkey Hatchery

COK’s undercover videofootage reveals shocking abuse at a North Carolina turkey hatchery that now supplies Butterball.

The Turkey Industry

Of the nearly 250 million turkeys slaughtered for food in the U.S. each year, roughly 42.5 million of these birds are raised in North Carolina, making it the nation’s second largest turkey producing state (Minnesota is the first). The turkey hatchery where COK’s investigator worked for nearly three weeks is owned by Goldsboro Milling Company, a company that recently announced its acquisition of 51% of the shares of Butterball, LLC, the industry’s most widely recognized brand name and now the nation’s largest producer of turkey products.

Every year in the United States, nearly 250 million turkeys are raised and killed for human consumption. While the abuses these birds endure on factory farms and in slaughterhouses have slowly been garnering the public’s attention in recent years, the treatment of newly-hatched chicks has been kept hidden behind closed doors—until COK’s groundbreaking investigation inside a hatchery.

For nearly three weeks during June and July of 2006, a COK investigator was employed at a turkey hatchery in North Carolina that now supplies Butterball. While there, the investigator witnessed and documented the hatchlings’ suffering as they began their short lives in the turkey industry.

What the video footage reveals is shocking: from the moment they’re hatched, these turkeys are submerged into a world of misery. Dumped out of metal trays and jostled onto conveyor belts after being mechanically separated from cracked egg shells, the newly-hatched turkeys are tossed around like inanimate objects—they are sorted, sexed, de-beaked, de-toed, and in some cases de-snooded before they are packed up and shipped off to a “grow out” confinement facility.

The video further shows that not all chicks survive this harsh process. Countless chicks become mangled from the machinery, are suffocated in plastic bags, or deemed “surplus” and dumped (along with injured chicks) into the same disposal system as the discarded egg shells they were separated from hours earlier.