Thanks to Mercy for Animals’s undercover investigation, six Butterball employees are facing criminal charges, reports ABC News:
Six workers at a Butterball turkey farm in North Carolina face criminal charges after an undercover video revealed alleged animal abuse, and a state employee who tipped off Butterball before a police raid on the farm has pled guilty to obstruction of justice.
Three workers have been arrested, according to Hoke County officials. Terry Johnson has been charged with misdemeanor cruelty to animals, Ruben Mendoza has been charged with animal cruelty and felony identity theft, and Jose Garcia has been charged with felony identity theft. Three other workers are being sought on animal cruelty charges.
I strongly suggest you read the entire ABC News story for the full details.
The arrests and the increase in public awareness of Butterball cruelty are huge steps in the right direction. But we still have two outstandingly awful things happening here: one, of course, is needless cruelty to turkeys, and the other is a state government-employed VETERINARIAN tipping off Butterball about a raid. I’m always flabbergasted by the INSANE hypocrisy of vets who, for example, love parrots but eat chickens. But enabling gratuitous stomping, beating, and otherwise torturing of birds at a factory that rips apart tens of millions of them each year? This person’s license to practice medicine on animals should be revoked and she should be jailed, but instead she’ll be required to take two ethics courses. Whose idea of ethics she’ll be learning about, I don’t know.
This sort of thing reinforces for me in a painfully direct way how important it is to support organizations like MFA who do the very difficult work of confronting animal cruelty head-on every day while I’m sitting at a desk making books. If, like me, it nags at you that you’re not on the front lines, come with me to MFA’s site and make a donation, if you can. Organizations like this need contributions in the form of help AND money.
