Moy Park

Moy Park packs its vast sheds with tens of thousands of animals,¹³ making individual care completely impossible.

An investigation found that many of the birds were so lame they could not stand, while others were found to be panting or suffering with raw, inflamed skin.¹⁴

It also found that some of Moy Park’s birds were unable to get to their water as the drinkers had not been made accessible to them.¹⁵ They could not even get that basic requirement right.

In 2016, 315 birds were sprayed with pressurised water jets and disinfectant instead of being humanely slaughtered, which the company said was accidental.¹⁶ Hands up if you think that is a believable explanation for the "mix up".

In 2017, Moy Park was fined £118,000 after leaving 500 birds to die in a hot truck.¹⁷

Several months later, another 80 birds were crushed to death when the stacking system failed.¹⁸

In 2019, it was discovered that Moy Park was leaving the bodies of dead birds to rot for days beside still-living animals.¹⁹

In 2020, an investigation showed Moy Park left hundreds of chicks to die from dehydration simply because they were too small to be profitable.²⁰

Of Moy Park’s four slaughterhouses, two were not even able to spare animals avoidable pain, suffering or distress when the auditors visited to check their competence.²¹

Moy Park still farms fast-growing "Frankenchickens". This is a type of bird, bred to grow so fast, they suffer serious welfare issues, including muscle diseases, bone deformities, and burns from lying in their own waste.²²

Despite all this, Moy Park is known to mislead consumers with humane-washing promotions about the high standards on its farms.²³

Moy Park is said to have polluted the air so badly that local residents felt physically sick. The company was fined £50,000 for emitting nauseating smells.²⁴

Moy Park has lobbied hard for taxpayer-funded subsidies… and it got them.²⁵

The company is reported to use an offshore company to funnel money through to reduce its tax liabilities in the UK. The Tax Justice Network described the company’s financial activities as having “all the appearance of tax avoidance.”²⁶

Moy Park was responsible for hundreds of environmental breaches over seven years, discharging the birds’ “effluent” into the environment illegally.²⁷

The company has been linked to the pollution of the UK’s largest lake, Lough Neagh, with damage so severe it decimated wildlife²⁸ and became visible from space. Ever keen to deflect, Moy Park says the sources of the pollution are “complex” but the link between industrial chicken farms and water pollution has been known for decades. And is not at all complex.²⁹

It’s not just about what they discharge into waterways, it’s what they take out. In 2012, Moy Park was fined £15,000 for illegal water abstraction.³⁰

As if that wasn’t bad enough, its chicken feed has consistently been linked to deforestation in the Amazon.³¹

In 2019, a large consignment of Chinese antibiotics, reported to be destined for unregulated use on a Moy Park poultry farm, was seized.³²

At its most recent audits,³³ Moy Park’s slaughterhouses displayed a lovely range of hygiene breaches, with the word “contamination” cropping up way more often than most of us would be comfortable with.

In 2017, Moy Park was fined £200,000 after a worker got their hand caught in the blades when fixing machinery.³⁴

In 2022, Moy Park was fined £125,000 after a worker was crushed by a forklift and left with life-changing injuries.³⁵

And it was fined again for failing to pay their workers even the minimum wage.³⁶ Such a great place to work.