Brampton Chicken Save

“Maple Lodge Farms” in Brampton located near Steeles and Winston Churchill intersection is Canada’s largest chicken slaughterhouse killing half a million chickens a day. 

Maple Lodge Farms was the first slaughterhouse to be successfully prosecuted by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) on animal welfare grounds. In 2012, Save activists attended the court proceedings in Brampton. The focus of the CFIA’s case was animal welfare, which was unprecedented because previously the emphasis was on human health and safety issues.

Here is a summary of some of the key points:

• 41% of the chicken dead on arrival on one truck, that’s almost 3,000 birds  more than 700 on another truck
•  many other cases discussed of chickens travelling wet and then freezing to death in extreme cold weather at -15 degrees C or below with wind chill as they arrived at Maple Lodge Farms slaughterhouse
• there was 80% feather loss on average!
• Each of those chicken trucks carry about 10,000 chickens
• The ‘catchers’ take less than 7 seconds to fill each crate –and there are 14 ‘spent hens’ in a crate and 12 ‘broiler’ chickens!

For background information regarding the court case, see Josh Tapper, “Maple Lodge Farms faces 60 criminal charges as thousands of chickens perish,” Toronto Star, January 8, 2012.

Maple Lodge Farms slaughterhouse converted to carbon dioxide gassing for chickens.

One outer building has pretty wooden curtains, fairy tale-like, and there’s a Merry Christmas sign on another wall, yet it is the largest chicken slaughterhouse in Canada!

Maple Lodge has three ‘production lines’, one for ‘spent hens’ (these become ‘chicken dogs’), one for male broiler chickens (these larger chickens are destined for Swiss Chalet), and the other for smaller female broiler chickens (these go to KFC).