Goldsboro Milling Company Turkey Hatchery Investigation

Cruelty Exposed at Goldsboro Milling Company Turkey Hatchery

In June and July of 2006, an Animal Outlook investigator was employed for nearly three weeks at a North Carolina turkey hatchery that now supplies Butterball. While there, he witnessed and documented the misery endured by newly-hatched chicks as they began their short lives in the turkey industry.

As the investigation video shows, from the moment they’re hatched, these turkeys enter 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. The video also reveals that not all chicks survive this harsh process. Countless chicks are mangled by the machinery, 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. Those who survive the rough handling of the hatchery processing are packed up and shipped off to “grow out” confinement facilities where most of them will never set foot outside.

Turkeys are typically slaughtered for food when they are just five months old, meaning that the birds filmed during our investigation in June and July were being raised for Thanksgiving dinner tables.

READ OUR REPORT: Animal Suffering in the Turkey Farming Industry