The Power of Your Support
Because of support from generous donors like you, Mercy For Animals was able to send an undercover investigator into a chicken farm in Nebraska, exposing horrible suffering. At the farm, our investigator documented animals forced to live for weeks in their own waste. The chickens at this farm are bred to grow so large so fast that they often cannot support their weight. Birds struggle to walk, and many die from organ failure.
One of the most shocking things about this investigation—first covered by the New York Times—was that the farm supplies chickens to Costco, the first major retailer to set up its own vertically integrated chicken supply chain. The cruel practices seen in the footage stand in stark contrast to Costco’s claim that animal welfare is a “critical component that has been integrated into all aspects of the chicken supply chain.”
This farm supplies Lincoln Premium Poultry, the company set up and controlled by Costco to supply itself with many of the 100 million rotisserie chickens it sells a year. This means that Costco has the power to implement meaningful animal welfare requirements for its supplier farms.
We know these birds deserve better, so we didn’t stop at simply exposing this suffering. Thanks to our supporters, we were able to launch a massive campaign calling on Costco to reduce suffering for the birds in its supply chain. We also secured a highly visible billboard in Times Square, worked with celebrities like Woody Harrelson to spread the message even further, and called on attorney general offices across the country to investigate Costco. Two members of Congress even sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission urging the agency to “investigate Costco’s advertising and consumer deception.”
Your support via the Combined Federal Campaign means we can continue to expose terrible suffering at factory farms across the country and demand change for animals. It also means we can launch more hard-hitting campaigns against major corporations like Costco, help farmers move away from raising animals to growing sustainable crops, work with policymakers to ban cruel farming practices and make plant-based foods more accessible, and so much more.
Because of our supporters, every day, we get one step closer to a kinder food system.
We, and the animals, are eternally grateful.