BROKEN WINGS is a new investigative report by Canadians for the Ethical Treatment of Food Animals (CETFA). It documents with explicit photos and footage the brutal handling, transport and slaughter of poultry in Canada and the intense pain and suffering of chickens and turkeys from day-old to death in the Canadian poultry industry.

Released on April 6, 2009, Broken Wings: The Breakdown of Animal Protection in the Transport and Slaughter of Meat Poultry in Canada "provides graphic photographic and video evidence captured in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec. Based on some 44 investigations conducted between 2007-2009, the report shows rampant, systemic welfare violations involving on-farm practices, transportation and slaughter."

For example, footage shot at Granny's Poultry Cooperative in Manitoba, and at the Lilydale plant in British Columbia, shows amputated turkeys' legs "raining down on still-live birds beneath."

CETFA is urging the Canadian Minister of Agriculture to enforce existing regulations that could offer some protection to the birds and is calling on companies to convert to controlled-atmosphere killing, a less inhumane slaughterhouse method than the standard practice of torturing fully conscious birds with pre-slaughter paralytic electric shocks - the same torture that is practiced with impunity by the poultry industry in the United States.

For What You Can Do to Help Poultry in Canada, please go to: www.cetfa.com/. Email addresses and CEOs of Granny's Poultry in Manitoba and Lilydale in B.C. are provided on the homepage where you can read the entire Broken Wings report and view the photos and footage of "the vastness of the suffering of poultry in Canada."

UPC gratefully acknowledges providing some requested information about poultry slaughter for this Broken Wings report. www.upc-online.org/slaughter/.

Additional information about the Animal Welfare abyss in Canada can be read at www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/April2009/02/c6989.html. "The Minister of Agriculture has shown no interest in taking any leadership on animal welfare in Canada."