Horrific Exposé Prompts JBS to Ban Farm From Supply Chain Permanently

PETA Shares New Eyewitness Video, Heartbreaking Letter Calling On Authorities to Help Mother Pigs and Piglets Left to Die at East Fork Farms

For Immediate Release:
November 11, 2019

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

After PETA sent JBS USA more of an anonymous whistleblower’s never-before-seen footage showing injured pigs abandoned to suffer in filth, dead piglets rotting on the floor, and a trash can teeming with maggots and overflowing with piglets’ bodies at East Fork Farms—which previously supplied the company’s Louisville slaughterhouse—JBS confirmed that it has permanently banned the farm from its supply chain.

The release of the new footage comes just weeks after a PETA exposé of the facility near Brownstown, Indiana. In a letter that accompanied the new footage, the anonymous videographer—who identified themselves as a U.S. government official—charges the Indiana State Police to do what’s right by the animals suffering on the farm, reiterating that the footage was all recorded at East Fork Farms. The whistleblower describes the facility as a “horrid dungeon” where the barns are full of billions of maggots and cockroaches, emaciated pigs are left without access to food or water, animals were found struggling to stay afloat in the barn’s manure pit, and mother pigs are forced to “watch their piglets die and decompose in front of them.”

“From down the street, you can hear the screams echo in the wind. It is like the worst horror film screams you have ever heard,” the whistleblower writes. “If the standard practice is intentionally causing pain, then the standard needs to change instead of protecting it further from any scrutiny …. So I personally charge [Indiana State Police] Sgt. Stephen Wheeles to look at the truth instead of trying to defend the lies.”

“This horrific new footage shows one piglet shrieking while pinned against the bars of a crate, others lying twitching and convulsing on the floor, and a trash can overflowing with corpses and maggots,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “There’s cruelty to sensitive pigs behind every bite of pork, ham, or bacon, and PETA urges everyone to help animals by going vegan.”

JBS USA markets pig flesh branded as Swift Premium Dry Rubbed Pork, All Natural Pork, and Fresh Pork and Swift La Herencia Pork. Following the release of PETA’s exposé, JBS announced that it had “immediately and indefinitely” banned East Fork Farms from its supply chain—a decision that the company now says is permanent.

A broadcast-quality version of the new footage is available for download here. PETA’s original exposé is available here, and photos are available here.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat or abuse in any other way”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.