DEMAND that Whole Foods immediately stop promoting its meat as "humane." The company's marketing of its "5-Step" rating program is misleading, as most of the animals still suffer in the same ways as other factory-farmed animals.
In 2015, a PETA observer worked for more than two months at Sweet Stem Farm, LLC, a Lancaster County farm that produces “humanely raised pork”.
PETA’s eyewitness documented the following:
Workers hit pigs who were being loaded for slaughter, including with a hard plastic board.
More than 20 pigs were tightly packed into a metal trailer on a hot day more than 24 hours before they were hauled to slaughter for Whole Foods—just because the manager didn’t want to wait another day to pull straw out of a pen. They had no choice but to stand or sit on top of each other for much of that time.
Two dead pigs were diagnosed with having had highly contagious salmonellosis.
A manager grabbed and lifted screaming pigs weighing over 70 pounds by their ears to vaccinate them.
Agitated, frustrated pigs fought and bit each other’s tails, sometimes causing bloody wounds.
Cows still endure painful mutilations of castration, dehorning, and branding; pigs are still confined inside crowded barns, have notches cut into their ears, and are castrated without being given painkillers; and chickens are crammed inside dark barns, never seeing daylight until they are stuffed into crates and begin a frightening journey to slaughter. Most are killed at the same slaughterhouses as other factory-farmed animals. All these practices are permitted by Whole Foods' "standards" and cannot remotely be considered "humane."
