Are Olymel Suppliers Roasting Pigs Alive? PETA Wants to Know

For Immediate Release:
August 12, 2021

Contact:
Nicole Meyer 202-483-7382

A whistleblower has reported to PETA that Olymel’s failure to resolve its local slaughterhouse strike has led farmers to dispose of pigs in the pork company’s backed-up supply chain by cutting off the sheds’ ventilation systems, causing thousands of pigs to die slowly from heatstroke and suffocation. PETA has fired off a letter today to Réjean Nadeau, Olymel’s president and CEO, and to David Duval, president of the Quebec pig-breeders association, calling on them to act immediately to prohibit the killing of pigs by any form of “ventilation shutdown.”

“PETA has been told that hundreds of thousands of other pigs are at risk of being roasted alive in stifling sheds,” says PETA Senior Vice President of Cruelty Investigations Daphna Nachminovitch. “After years of profiting from pigs’ misery, the least Olymel and its suppliers could do is give these animals the least painful and least cruel death possible—and if they’re not doing that, they need to be charged with cruelty to animals.”

In the meat industry, workers chop off piglets’ tails, cut their teeth with pliers, and castrate the males—all without any pain relief. At the slaughterhouse, workers hang pigs upside down, sometimes while they’re still conscious, and bleed them to death. As a vegan organization, PETA is opposed to slaughtering animals for food—but points out that piling one form of cruelty on top of another by subjecting pigs to slow, terrifying deaths is unacceptable.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.