The intensive meat production system is embedded in our contemporary food consumption dynamics but it is unsustainable. Intensive livestock production has a major impact on public health, climate change and animal welfare. Agribusiness giants turn animals into meat under the most horrific circumstances. Italy in this global food production system is a key spot. With many famous food products exported around the world, Italian agribusiness has become the front line of a battle for animal welfare. Over the past 13 years I've been documenting the investigations of an Italian animal-rights organization called "EssereAnimali". They work on public awareness, mostly with undercover investigations and night raids, reporting and spreading their video reports on meat production through international media, showing the real life animals endure in industrial farms and slaughterhouses.
The body of a dead piglet is laying abandoned on the floor inside an industrial pig farm in northern Italy. Keeping dead animals inside the plant without being legally stocked is absolutely forbidden by EU health regulations, and risky for public health.
Automatic egg picking machine, a new type of modern technology in the process of laying chicken breeding.
A broiler-chickens shed in northern Italy. Chickens are raised in warehouses that can hold up to 30,000 animals, 20 chickens per square meter, with no outdoor access. The broiler chicken – the most common breed for poultry farming – reaches slaughter weight in 6 weeks. Chickens, when allowed to live out their natural lives, can reach about 15 years of age. Through genetic mutations and hormone injections, these animals reach puberty far earlier than nature intended, so their bodies aren’t designed to support their advanced weight.
The majority of intensive farmed rabbits are reared in barren environments, with just a drinker and feeder and a wire mesh floor. This does not allow for natural behaviours. 99% of rabbits in Italy are raised in cages. Bare wire floors cause them injuries, and filthy conditions spread disease. In 2019 one billion rabbits were slaughtered for food production (FAO stats).
A shed for artificial insemination and gestation of sows in a swine intensive farm that is part of an Italian "Prosciutto di Parma" certified circuit. Inside a swine industrial plant like this, the sows are never going to see the light of the day, they are not able to move, and they are just fed and injected with drugs and antibiotics to reach the desired weight as fast as possible to be slaughtered and sold.
A sow kept in individual crate during lactation. Crates like this restrict the sow’s movement so that she is only able to stand up and lie down; she is unable to turn around or walk more than one or two steps. This metal platform is similar to a stall for pregnancy except that there is space to the side for the piglets. The sows are fed with a small quantity of high nutrient-dense feed and injected with antibiotics to avoid deseases.
After weaning, the swines stay in the same crowded cage for 4 to 6 months, then they’re divided in two groups: fattening or reproduction. Pigs raised in intensive farms can reach 150/160 Kg; in one year of intensive farming, a pig grows about 500 grams per day. In Italy in 2019, 11 million pigs were slaughtered, almost half destined for Prosciutto di Parma, and 30% is distributed abroad.
A Friesian cow with a broken horn in a large-scale dairy farm. Cows are normally without horns in order to be handled without injuries in intensive livestock facilities. They do not fit well in the milking robot machine, that's why industrial farmers normally cut off the horns in the first few weeks of a cow's life.
Activists controlling the gates while using Walkie Talkie Earpieces to communicate with two activists sneaked inside a swine intensive farm in Northern Italy . This moment is part of a clandestine investigation about "Prosciutto di Parma" carried out by "Essere Animali" crew. Their intent is to document shocking images that reveal the institutionalised suffering that humans inflict on pigs to produce "Prosciutto", the famous Italian dry-cured ham.
A room for sows and their piglets. Sows live their whole lives without access to open space.
A group of calves in a cage. During the first weeks of life, a calf lives far from its mother and in single box, then is temporarily moved to a box with other calves of the same age. If they are male, they will be slaughtered at six months of age; if female, they will be destined to become milk cows.
Laying hens are seen trapped in a cage with six to eight hens, each given less than a square foot of space to roost and sleep in. The cages rise five floors and run thousands long in a warehouse without windows or skylights. Laying hens live an average of two years and produce about 600 eggs before being slaughtered.
The bloodstained floor of a slaughterhouse seen at night during a nighttime investigation with the facility closed.
An activist collects SD memory cards from a hidden camera inside a large-scale meat company. The videos they record during night missions, undercover investigations, or hidden cameras serve to educate people about the real life animals endure in factory farms, slaughterhouses or other violent situations. The videos and photos are also the tool that activists use to expose and shut down entire production facilities.
An activist during a nighttime visit inside a slaughterhouse in central Italy
Hooks inside a slaughterhouse facility.
Animal-Rights activists coming back from a turkey factory farm after they took back SD-cards from their hidden micro-cameras placed outside and inside the factory farm. They install hidden cameras to record abuses and violence on animals by workers during the day. Almost 630 million turkeys are produced for meat each year, globally. Of there over 240 million in the Europe (FAO Stat, 2014).