ATLANTA, Nov. 19, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Chick-fil-A is in hot water over new hidden-camera video exposing workers kicking chickens like footballs and scalding them alive in water at a supplier factory farm and slaughterhouse.

New covert video, recorded by undercover investigators with Mercy For Animals, shows workers carelessly grabbing birds and violently slamming them into transport crates and chickens hastily shackled upside down before having their throats, wings, and chests sliced open while still conscious. Mercy For Animals is now demanding that Chick-fil-A adopt strict new animal welfare standards to prevent future abuse.

Narrated by The Simpsons co-creator Sam Simon, the disturbing video footage was taken at a chicken factory farm in Puckett, Mississippi, and a poultry slaughterhouse in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Both facilities are owned by Chicago-based Koch Foods—a major supplier to Atlanta-based Chick-fil-A, the highest-selling quick-service chicken restaurant chain in the country.

Mercy For Animals is now calling on Chick-fil-A to implement meaningful animal welfare requirements for its suppliers, including shifting to slower-growing breeds to prevent obesity-related health problems in birds, providing birds with more space, clean litter, access to natural light, and environmental enrichments, and requiring suppliers to switch to less cruel controlled atmosphere killing (CAK) systems using inert gas to render animals unconscious prior to unloading and slaughter.

In addition to protecting animals from malicious cruelty and violence on factory farms, MFA's proposed animal welfare improvements would prevent animals from being scalded alive in hot water tanks at the slaughterhouse. Shockingly, the USDA estimates that as many as one million birds are scalded alive every year in this country. And despite the fact that poultry make up more than 90 percent of the animals killed for food each year in the U.S., they are excluded from the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, making extreme animal abuse and suffering commonplace at poultry slaughterhouses nationwide.

"Chickens are literally tortured to death before ending up in Chick-fil-A restaurants. They are crowded into filthy sheds, thrown and kicked by workers, and have their throats slit while fully conscious at the slaughterhouse. This is sickening abuse no company with morals should support," said MFA's president, Nathan Runkle. "Chick-fil-A has not only the power, but also the ethical responsibility, to end the worst forms of cruelty to animals in its supply chain."

To view the undercover video, visit www.ChickfilaCruelty.com.  

SOURCE Mercy For Animals

Related Links

http://www.mercyforanimals.org