Corporate EngagementMercy For Animals works to eliminate the worst animal abuse and grow market
share of plant- and cell-based foods.
Institutional Change
Standard practices used widely by the meat, dairy, and egg industries cause tremendous animal suffering. Piglets routinely have their tails cut off and teeth ground down without painkillers. Chickens are bred to grow so fast their legs often bow in or out and break easily. Some become immobile and are unable to reach water. Hens break wings, which are brittle from lack of movement and unnaturally high egg production, and are trapped in small, cramped cages.
Mercy For Animals’ corporate engagement program moves the biggest players in the food industry to eliminate the worst farming practices and adopt meaningful policies to protect animals. We also strive to enable increased market share of plant- and cell-based foods.
Our Powerful Progress
After pressure from Mercy For Animals, Jack’s, a fast-food chain with more than 150 locations, agreed to ban many of the worst abuses endured by chickens raised for meat.
Carrefour became the first retailer in Asia and Brazil to pledge to stop selling eggs from hens confined in cruel cages.
Burger King, Chipotle, Nestlé, Kraft Heinz, General Mills, and dozens of other brands pledged to eliminate cruel practices after Mercy For Animals campaigns or discussions with us.
Champions for Chickens
Most factory-farmed chickens never see the sun or feel its warmth. Their toes never sink into soft soil. Their curious minds never know the pleasure of discovering seeds in a field.
Chickens abused for meat are crowded into filthy, windowless sheds; forced to live in their own waste and toxic fumes; and bred to grow so large so fast that they are sometimes immobilized by their own weight. At slaughter, birds are shackled, shocked, cut open, and often scalded alive. Roughly 9 billion farmed chickens live and die in the United States every year.
These animals are afforded virtually no legal protections.
Mercy For Animals is urging companies to end the worst forms of cruelty routinely endured by these birds. Producers can do this by switching to higher-welfare breeds of birds with lower rates of disease and injury. They should give birds more space, provide better lighting, and properly manage litter to ensure it absorbs waste and is suitable for dustbathing (a natural self-cleaning behavior for chickens).
Another critical reform is to end live-shackle slaughter methods in favor of less cruel systems that eliminate the horrific suffering caused by dumping, shackling, shocking, and slitting the throats of conscious animals.
Become a Hen Hero
Bye, Cages
Numerous Mercy For Animals exposés in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil have revealed the misery hens endure in the egg industry. Birds are often trapped in the wire of their small cages or mangled by factory machinery. Workers kill baby birds by smashing their heads against equipment. Injured or weak birds are thrown into industrial macerators and ground up alive.
Mercy For Animals supporters campaigned relentlessly for years, pushing nearly the entire Canadian and U.S. food industry, from grocers and restaurants to foodservice providers, to commit to ending caged confinement of hens.
Mercy For Animals is pressing companies in Latin America and Brazil to do the same. In Mexico, companies Grupo Bimbo, McDonald’s, Starbucks, and PepsiCo, among others, have already pledged to stop using eggs produced in facilities with cages.
Grupo Habib’s, Grupo Halipar, Carrefour, and Madero are among more than 30 companies in Brazil that have made similar commitments. Tim Hortons and Burger King’s parent company has agreed to prohibit cages for stores throughout Brazil and Latin America.