Smithfield’s Appalling Sanitation Record Revealed

Jun 12, 2023

Smithfield Foods has been on our radar for a long time—as the world’s largest killer of pigs, its despicable murder houses continue to profit from cruelty year after year. Last year, brave pig defenders rescued dying piglets and documented the deplorable conditions on a Smithfield farm, and just this month, we celebrated the shutdown of the company’s infamous Farmer John killing plant outside Los Angeles. Now PETA has jaw-dropping horrors to reveal about Smithfield’s Tar Heel, North Carolina, slaughterhouse, after reviewing a whopping 273 pages of reports from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), which inspectors of the facility wrote in just one year.

At the Tar Heel facility, the largest pig slaughterhouse in the world, workers kill up to 36,000 pigs in a single day. The sanitation and animal welfare violations in FSIS’ reports between December 2021 and December 2022 would make anyone sick:

In addition to these stomach-turning findings, conditions for live pigs at the slaughterhouse were horrific. In August 2022, a worker was caught trying to force three pigs who couldn’t walk—and two others with porcine stress syndrome, a debilitating disorder—toward a gas killing chamber, in violation of federal regulations. In May of that year, workers similarly attempted to force a pig with porcine stress syndrome, who was trembling, panting, and sitting down, into the facility to be killed. It’s worth noting that Smithfield’s use of gas chambers to stun pigs forces them to endure their last minutes suffocating in extreme pain, thrashing around and screaming, desperate to escape.

On October 31, 2022, an inspector found several pigs piled on top of one another in a truck and watched as many of them “slid and fell down” a ramp while workers offloaded them. Pigs already suffer tremendously in transport: According to a 2006 industry report, more than 1 million pigs die each year from transport alone. This pile of bodies and the immense suffering it caused for the pigs were avoidable with an updated truck design. Inexplicably, only some of Smithfield’s transport fleet had been modified with the “upgrades.”

These disgusting stories from Smithfield’s Tar Heel slaughterhouse are especially disturbing, but many of their details ring true of every slaughterhouse. There’s no such thing as “humane meat.”

For animals’ well-being and your own health, the most powerful action you can take is to go vegan. Each person who goes vegan saves nearly 200 animals per year. PETA’s got your back with a free vegan starter kit, with tips and delicious recipes to help get you on your way.

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