RSPCA Assured

RSPCA Assured operates as a charity-branded assurance scheme but many of its farms are factory farms. While promoting the products as coming from “higher welfare” farms, animals are still kept in large-scale, indoor, highly industrial, high-throughput systems, and are mutilated and killed inside CO₂ gas chambers.

RSPCA Assured was set up to improve the lives of animals on farms and many of their requirements go significantly beyond the weak legal baseline. Pregnant pigs cannot be locked inside cages for example, and chickens cannot be the fast-growing Frankenchicken breeds, which are prone to so much suffering. But, in many cases, a simple game of spot-the-difference between a standard factory farm and an RSPCA Assured farm would thwart the keenest of eyes.

Factory farming practices that are allowed under the RSPCA Assured label include:

• Debeaking birds. Egg-laying hens and turkeys have their beaks “trimmed” to try and stop them harming one another, which stressed birds do when forced to live in appalling conditions. This mutilation can cause lifelong pain.
• Cutting the tails off pigs (if the farm gets written permission).
• Animals living in crowded pens and barns.
• Pigs and hens can be slaughtered in CO₂ gas chambers.

Disturbing conditions on RSPCA Assured farms are regularly exposed by investigations.^{1 2 3 4} These investigations reveal not just assurance breaches, but systemic suffering and even outright animal abuse.

While the RSPCA says that unannounced visits “may” happen,⁵ farm inspections take place once a year, and are pre-arranged. Do the assessors think that they see a typical day down on the old factory farm or do they, like us, think the farm might just have had a bit of a clean-up before the inspector arrives?