The footage that the vegan activist Chris Delforce obtained in an Australian pig slaughterhouse on 27th January 2023 has now been made public. The investigator remained hidden for nine consecutive hours inside a tiny space just metres above the pigs, and he was able to film the agony the animals have to endure on their way to their deaths. He gathered the video evidence from three Australian slaughterhouses and the footage was first publicly aired on 27th March on the ABC channel.
He recorded the most common method with which 85% of the 5 million pigs in Australia are killed each year, which consists in using CO2 chambers to render the animals unconscious. However, this is a very inhumane method as it takes a long time for the animals to lose their conscience, as the screams Delforce recorded prove. The videos show pigs crammed inside gondolas and dropped inside the CO2 gas chambers. Many of the pigs screamed between 20 and 40 seconds.
Talking about the pigs that could well come from free-range and organic systems (as all pigs end up in the slaughterhouse), Delforce said to Yahoo News Australia: “No matter how well they’re raised, how well they’re looked after, they all end up in the slaughterhouse and none of them wants to die. They are all fighting with every last breath to survive… If I can at least get it on film, tell the story and hopefully convince people to not support this, then that’s the best possible thing I could do for these animals… There was something just so desperate and awful about some of those screams the way that they fade out to nothing.”
Delforce is the founder of the Farm Transparency Project, and he may be facing legal consequences for his brave journalism as Australia, like several US states, has ag-gag laws which criminalise investigations of animal agriculture facilities.
