A new investigation reveals why you can’t take meat companies at their word
· Vox
Key takeaways
- In 2019, Animal Outlook — an animal protection nonprofit — exposed cruelty at a salmon hatchery in Maine. The company apologized and committed to reforms.
- But in 2025, Animal Outlook re-investigated and documented similar behavior and welfare problems.
- This is a familiar pattern: Nonprofits investigate, the company apologizes and promises to change, yet follow-up investigations reveal continued abuse.
In 2019, Erin Wing worked for nearly three months at a salmon hatchery in Maine that’s owned and operated by Cooke Aquaculture, the world’s largest privately held seafood company. As a hatchery technician, she helped to raise millions of delicate salmon eggs into salmon juveniles. From there, they were transported to Cooke’s fish farms off the coast of Maine, where they were fattened up to be slaughtered and sold under the brand name True North Seafood at grocery stores across the Northeastern US.
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But Wing had a secret: She was there undercover, wearing a hidden camera on behalf of the animal protection nonprofit Animal Outlook. During her time at Cooke’s hatchery, she documented:
- Workers culling diseased fish by repeatedly striking them against the sides of tanks and stomping on their heads
- Live fish left in buckets to suffocate or be crushed to death by other fish
- Fish overcrowded into tanks, some of them born with spinal deformities or dying from painful fungal diseases that ate at their faces
Shortly after Animal Outlook released a video of the investigation, Cooke Aquaculture CEO Glenn Cooke apologized.
“As a family company, we place animal welfare high in our operating standards and endeavor to raise our animals with optimal care and consideration of best practice,” he wrote in a statement. “I am very sorry that this has happened.”
Maine’s department of agriculture investigated the hatchery but didn’t file any charges because Cooke had committed to retraining its employees and updating its facility management plan, among other measures.
But it appears that its promised reforms didn’t stick. In 2025, Animal Outlook sent a second investigator into the same hatchery and recently released a second exposé, this time finding similar behavior and welfare issues.
To Animal Outlook, it didn’t come as a surprise.
“I would’ve been more surprised had we seen the conditions improved demonstrably for these animals,” Ben Williamson, executive director of Animal Outlook, told me. “We know that fundamentally crowding this many animals in these kinds of tanks is going to lead to welfare problems. Treating these animals as commodities is going to lead to cruelty.”
That cynicism is the product of hard-won experience. Animal protection groups have conducted nearly 200 investigations into US farms raising chickens, pigs, cows, turkeys, and fish, gathering a staggering amount of evidence on standard, yet inhumane, practices and living conditions and often documenting malicious cruelty along the way.
In some instances, investigations have led to companies making substantive changes, such as phasing out small cages for pigs and chickens. But like with Cooke Aquaculture, most farms and companies promise to make reforms after they’ve been exposed, only for follow-up investigations to reveal continued abuse and miserable living conditions. This pattern highlights the limitations of such investigations, which have proven essential to building our understanding of conditions on factory farms but insufficient to significantly improve them.
Though, they reveal that, for much of the livestock industry, cruelty is the norm. What that means is that, in the absence of government oversight and federal animal welfare laws for farms, there’s little reason for consumers to take meat companies at their word when they promise to do better.
What happened when an investigator returned to Cooke’s fish hatchery 7 years later
Animal Outlook’s second investigator worked at Cooke’s Maine hatchery in late 2025 (the investigator isn’t named due to the covert nature of their work). Like Wing, the second investigator documented numerous severe welfare issues, including workers:
- Culling fish by repeatedly beating them with metal rods on more than a dozen occasions, despite the availability of stunning equipment on-site (hitting fish like this is a common method to stun them, but it should be done in such a way that rapidly renders them unconscious)
- Leaving some bludgeoned fish to thrash on the ground out of water for as long as 90 seconds to suffocate, and two instances of employees dropping live fish into buckets to suffocate
- Shooting and bleeding out fish that were not fully anesthetized, causing “some of the worst suffering documented at the facility,” according to the organization
In one scene, a worker is shown cutting into a fish while the fish’s heart is still beating.
All told, Animal Outlook documented 133 instances of what appeared to be improper killing, throwing, and rough handling, along with fungal and bacterial infections (which indicate poor water quality), deformities, overcrowding, and other animal welfare problems.
“It looks to me like they have a systemic welfare issue at this farm,” Culum Brown, a professor and prominent researcher on fish welfare at Macquarie University in Australia, told Vox over email.
There were also multiple unexplained mass fish mortalities of hundreds or even tens of thousands of fish dying.
Cooke Aquaculture did not respond to an interview request for this story and declined to respond to detailed questions about the investigation. “Cooke USA takes animal welfare very seriously,” a spokesperson wrote in a statement to Vox in which the company acknowledged the hidden camera investigation and said it’s reviewing the footage. “Appropriate disciplinary measures will be taken with respect to employees who have not followed company policy.”
The company is certified by Best Aquaculture Practices, a program that promises “safe, responsible and ethical farm-raised seafood.” Best Aquaculture Practices declined an interview request for this story and said an investigation into Cooke Aquaculture is currently underway.
The advocacy group Aquatic Life Institute rates Best Aquaculture Practices as having the lowest animal welfare standards among nine aquaculture certification programs it reviews because of how it compares to other certifiers on key issues, such as overcrowding, environmental enrichment, transport, and stunning and slaughtering. Best Aquaculture Practices, which is among the largest of the nine, said in an emailed statement to Vox that it is “actively engaged with ALI [Aquatic Life Institute] and has integrated several of their recommendations.”
The Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry confirmed to Vox that it is conducting an animal welfare investigation in response to Animal Outlook’s investigation.
Animal Outlook also documented problems that went beyond animal welfare at the hatchery.
When farmed salmon escape into rivers and streams, they compete with wild salmon for resources. They also mate with them, contributing to what researchers call “genetic pollution,” which has created a hybrid breed of salmon that can have lower survivability rates.
In the investigation video, a worker said that the company had failed to follow one of its escape prevention protocols of putting a screen on the waste discharge pipes, from which fish can escape, that release into the Kennebec River. “They have screens that are supposed to be down,” a worker said, “but there’s so much shit in there that… we pretty much just keep them up all the time.”
This alarmed Neville Crabbe of the conservation nonprofit Atlantic Salmon Federation, because the Kennebec River is home to endangered Atlantic salmon and the site of a $300 million project to restore their populations.
“The escape of farmed fish…is a significant contributor to population collapse and loss,” for wild Atlantic salmon, Crabbe told me, and “Cooke is basically intentionally allowing” their release.
Some employees also suggested that a general culture of callousness pervades the company. “Unfortunately, I don’t think the company is in it for the fish health side, they just want fish production,” a manager told the Animal Outlook investigator. “Kinda why our vet[erinarian] left too.” Speaking about the veterinarian, one employee said “they just disregard her shit all the time.”
In one part of the investigation, a manager who Animal Outlook alleges worked at the hatchery in 2019 when Wing investigated it and was still employed there in 2025 said of Wing: “I hunted her down and I found her on Instagram… I was gonna send like a horse tongue or something to her mail… I was gonna send like a deer tongue or something, or like some brains. Cause she’s like an animal activist… Bitch.”
I asked Wing what she felt when she heard this recording. She expressed concern for her family’s safety and also that she believes this shows how those at the company are “not sorry that they did what they did — they’re sorry that they got caught.” But she also expressed empathy for the employees who have little control over how the company operates.
Why we can’t take animal agriculture companies at their word
The juxtaposition between the CEO of Cooke Aquaculture’s heartfelt apology in 2019 and the grisly findings of Animal Outlook’s follow-up investigation is unsettling, but it isn’t unique. It’s a pattern that animal protection groups have witnessed for decades: They investigate farms that supply meat, milk, and egg companies and find that some employees maliciously abuse animals. The farm or company apologizes and promises to change, sometimes firing a handful of workers. Then, the advocacy organization investigates another of the company’s supplier farms, only to find the same problems.
This includes many of the largest animal protein companies, such as Foster Farms (six investigations), Butterball (four investigations), Cal-Maine (two investigations), Smithfield Foods (around nine investigations), Tyson Foods (10 investigations), and Fairlife (around five investigations, though Fairlife has denied sourcing from some of the investigated farms).
The companies’ initial responses often give the illusion that justice has been served — that the bad employees will be punished and the bad farm will be improved. The responses lead many consumers and regulators to believe that these are cases of rogue actors rather than a fundamentally cruel system.
But that system is cruel, as its many relapses and false pieties reveal. And while instances of malicious abuse are hard to stomach, standard practices and conditions on farms — including intensive breeding, overcrowding, and pervasive disease — cause even more suffering than the occasional beatings caught on camera.
The companies that make up this system have an unbelievably immense responsibility: the welfare of billions upon billions of animals. And yet, they are accountable to no one. Undercover investigations make this reality plain to see. Maine officials didn’t hold Cooke accountable after the first investigation. Lawmakers didn’t pass new animal welfare standards. Regulators didn’t commit to meaningful oversight.
Meat, dairy, and egg companies reveal who they are when they think no one’s watching, and we should listen. Everything else — the statements, the apologies, the promises to reform — is just noise.