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Undercover audio of a Tyson employee reveals "free-range" chicken is meaningless
Last fall, an undercover investigator worked for two months at a Virginia farm outside Richmond that raises chickens on contract for Tyson Foods, America’s largest chicken company. During their short stint on behalf of the Washington, DC-based animal rights group Animal Outlook, the investigator documented hours upon hours of the typical horrors found on chicken factory farms: tens of thousands of birds stuffed into dark warehouse-sized barns, many of them severely injured with gruesome lesions, injuries, and deformities. At more than one point, birds are deprived of feed or water, and there was also a rat infestation and footage of bugs crawling in the chickens’ feed.
The conditions are visibly at odds with Tyson’s advertising claims that it treats animals humanely and raises “happy” and “healthy” chickens.
“It’s just a living nightmare,” the investigator, who requested anonymity due to the covert nature of undercover investigations, told Vox. “A video just does not do it any justice.”
The conditions are visibly at odds with Tyson’s advertising claims that it treats animals humanely and raises “happy” and “healthy” chickens.
“It’s just a living nightmare,” the investigator, who requested anonymity due to the covert nature of undercover investigations, told Vox. “A video just does not do it any justice.”
Despite the horrific findings, they’re not all that different from the conditions documented at other farms that raise chickens for Tyson and Tyson’s competitors. But the investigation’s most revealing finding had nothing to do with the conditions of the estimated 750,000 chickens raised annually at the Jetersville, Virginia, facility. Instead, it emerged from a surprisingly candid conversation the investigator secretly recorded between the farm manager and a Tyson Foods “broiler technician advisor,” who worked with Tyson chicken farms in the area. In the video recording, the technician freely acknowledged that the chicken industry’s “free-range” labels were essentially meaningless — a rare instance of an industry insider saying the quiet part out loud.
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