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In 2019, Erin Wing labored for practically three months at a salmon hatchery in Maine that’s owned and operated by Cooke Aquaculture, the world’s largest privately held seafood firm. As a hatchery technician, she helped to boost tens of millions of delicate salmon eggs into salmon juveniles. From there, they had been transported to Cooke’s fish farms off the coast of Maine, the place they had been fattened as much as be slaughtered and offered underneath the model identify True North Seafood at grocery shops throughout the Northeastern US.

However Wing had a secret: She was there undercover, carrying a hidden digicam on behalf of the animal safety nonprofit Animal Outlook. Throughout her time at Cooke’s hatchery, she documented:

Shortly after Animal Outlook launched a video of the investigation, Cooke Aquaculture CEO Glenn Cooke apologized.

“As a household firm, we place animal welfare excessive in our working requirements and endeavor to boost our animals with optimum care and consideration of finest observe,” he wrote in a assertion. “I’m very sorry that this has occurred.”

Maine’s division of agriculture investigated the hatchery however didn’t file any fees as a result of Cooke had dedicated to retraining its staff and updating its facility administration plan, amongst different measures.

However it seems that its promised reforms didn’t stick. In 2025, Animal Outlook despatched a second investigator into the identical hatchery and lately launched a second exposé, this time discovering related habits and welfare points.

To Animal Outlook, it didn’t come as a shock.

“I’d’ve been extra shocked had we seen the situations improved demonstrably for these animals,” Ben Williamson, govt director of Animal Outlook, instructed me. “We all know that essentially crowding this many animals in these sorts of tanks goes to result in welfare issues. Treating these animals as commodities goes to result in cruelty.”

That cynicism is the product of hard-won expertise. Animal safety teams have carried out practically 200 investigations into US farms elevating chickens, pigs, cows, turkeys, and fish, gathering a staggering quantity of proof on commonplace, but inhumane, practices and residing situations and sometimes documenting malicious cruelty alongside the best way.

In some cases, investigations have led to firms making substantive adjustments, reminiscent of phasing out small cages for pigs and chickens. However like with Cooke Aquaculture, most farms and firms promise to make reforms after they’ve been uncovered, just for follow-up investigations to disclose continued abuse and depressing residing situations. This sample highlights the restrictions of such investigations, which have confirmed important to constructing our understanding of situations on manufacturing unit farms however inadequate to considerably enhance them.

Although, they reveal that, for a lot of the livestock trade, cruelty is the norm. What meaning is that, within the absence of presidency oversight and federal animal welfare legal guidelines for farms, there’s little purpose for customers to take meat firms at their phrase once they promise to do higher.

What occurred when an investigator returned to Cooke’s fish hatchery 7 years later

Animal Outlook’s second investigator labored at Cooke’s Maine hatchery in late 2025 (the investigator isn’t named as a result of covert nature of their work). Like Wing, the second investigator documented quite a few extreme welfare points, together with staff:

In a single scene, a employee is proven chopping right into a fish whereas the fish’s coronary heart continues to be beating.

All instructed, Animal Outlook documented 133 cases of what seemed to be improper killing, throwing, and tough dealing with, together with fungal and bacterial infections (which point out poor water high quality), deformities, overcrowding, and different animal welfare issues.

“It appears to me like they’ve a systemic welfare problem at this farm,” Culum Brown, a professor and distinguished researcher on fish welfare at Macquarie College in Australia, instructed Vox over e-mail.

There have been additionally a number of unexplained mass fish mortalities of lots of and even tens of hundreds of fish dying.

Cooke Aquaculture didn’t reply to an interview request for this story and declined to answer detailed questions in regards to the investigation. “Cooke USA takes animal welfare very severely,” a spokesperson wrote in an announcement to Vox by which the corporate acknowledged the hidden digicam investigation and stated it’s reviewing the footage. “Applicable disciplinary measures can be taken with respect to staff who haven’t adopted firm coverage.”

The corporate is licensed by Finest Aquaculture Practices, a program that guarantees “secure, accountable and moral farm-raised seafood.” Finest Aquaculture Practices declined an interview request for this story and stated an investigation into Cooke Aquaculture is at present underway.

The advocacy group Aquatic Life Institute charges Finest Aquaculture Practices as having the lowest animal welfare requirements amongst 9 aquaculture certification applications it critiques due to the way it compares to different certifiers on key points, reminiscent of overcrowding, environmental enrichment, transport, and gorgeous and slaughtering. Finest Aquaculture Practices, which is among the many largest of the 9, stated in an emailed assertion to Vox that it’s “actively engaged with ALI [Aquatic Life Institute] and has built-in a number of of their suggestions.”

The Maine Division of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry confirmed to Vox that it’s conducting an animal welfare investigation in response to Animal Outlook’s investigation.

Animal Outlook additionally documented issues that went past animal welfare on the hatchery.

When farmed salmon escape into rivers and streams, they compete with wild salmon for assets. In addition they mate with them, contributing to what researchers name “genetic air pollution,” which has created a hybrid breed of salmon that may have decrease survivability charges.

Within the investigation video, a employee stated that the corporate had didn’t comply with considered one of its escape prevention protocols of placing a display screen on the waste discharge pipes, from which fish can escape, that launch into the Kennebec River. “They’ve screens which are alleged to be down,” a employee stated, “however there’s a lot shit in there that… we just about simply preserve them up on a regular basis.”

This alarmed Neville Crabbe of the conservation nonprofit Atlantic Salmon Federation, as a result of the Kennebec River is residence to endangered Atlantic salmon and the positioning of a $300 million mission to revive their populations.

“The escape of farmed fish…is a major contributor to inhabitants collapse and loss,” for wild Atlantic salmon, Crabbe instructed me, and “Cooke is mainly deliberately permitting” their launch.

Some staff additionally steered {that a} common tradition of callousness pervades the corporate. “Sadly, I don’t suppose the corporate is in it for the fish well being facet, they simply need fish manufacturing,” a supervisor instructed the Animal Outlook investigator. “Kinda why our vet[erinarian] left too.” Talking in regards to the veterinarian, one worker stated “they simply disregard her shit on a regular basis.”

In a single a part of the investigation, a supervisor who Animal Outlook alleges labored on the hatchery in 2019 when Wing investigated it and was nonetheless employed there in 2025 stated of Wing: “I hunted her down and I discovered her on Instagram… I used to be gonna ship like a horse tongue or one thing to her mail… I used to be gonna ship like a deer tongue or one thing, or like some brains. Trigger she’s like an animal activist… Bitch.”

I requested Wing what she felt when she heard this recording. She expressed concern for her household’s security and likewise that she believes this reveals how these on the firm are “not sorry that they did what they did — they’re sorry that they obtained caught.” However she additionally expressed empathy for the staff who’ve little management over how the corporate operates.

Why we will’t take animal agriculture firms at their phrase

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 surely isn’t distinctive. It’s a sample that animal safety teams have witnessed for many years: They examine farms that offer meat, milk, and egg firms and discover that some staff maliciously abuse animals. The farm or firm apologizes and guarantees to alter, typically firing a handful of staff. Then, the advocacy group investigates one other of the corporate’s provider farms, solely to seek out the identical issues.

This consists of lots of the largest animal protein firms, reminiscent of Foster Farms (six investigations), Butterball (4 investigations), Cal-Maine (two investigations), Smithfield Meals (round 9 investigations), Tyson Meals (10 investigations), and Fairlife (round 5 investigations, although Fairlife has denied sourcing from among the investigated farms).

The businesses’ preliminary responses usually give the phantasm that justice has been served — that the unhealthy staff can be punished and the unhealthy farm can be improved. The responses lead many customers and regulators to imagine that these are instances of rogue actors quite than a essentially merciless system.

However that system is merciless, as its many relapses and false pieties reveal. And whereas cases of malicious abuse are exhausting to abdomen, commonplace practices and situations on farms — together with intensive breeding, overcrowding, and pervasive illness — trigger much more struggling than the occasional beatings caught on digicam.

The businesses that make up this method have an unbelievably immense accountability: the welfare of billions upon billions of animals. And but, they’re accountable to nobody. Undercover investigations make this actuality plain to see. Maine officers didn’t maintain Cooke accountable after the primary investigation. Lawmakers didn’t move new animal welfare requirements. Regulators didn’t decide to significant oversight.

Meat, dairy, and egg firms reveal who they’re once they suppose nobody’s watching, and we must always hear. Every thing else — the statements, the apologies, the guarantees to reform — is simply noise.