Wales has joined England and Scotland in mandating the installation of CCTV in all of its slaughterhouses.
Celebrated by RSPCA Cymru, a welfare organisation, the move may seem on the surface like a good outcome for animals. Surely visibility improves accountability?
Sadly not. Since 2018, when English slaughterhouses were required by law to fit CCTV, welfare abuses have continued unabated.
In 2020, Animal Justice Project secretly filmed inside a duck slaughterhouse run by Gressingham Foods. In just 24 hours, they recorded 15 breaches of welfare regulations.
Worse yet, the organisation returned in 2024 and found that nothing had changed. Workers were observed swinging ducks by their necks, strangling them and even using them to strike other birds.
Installing CCTV did nothing to stop these abuses. Instead, it took the courageous investigative work of vegan charities to bring the violations to light.
Like RSPCA-assured meat, the presence of a meaningless monitoring system should be called out for what it is: another excuse to continue abusing animals.
veganpoetry.com 
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