Millmerran Meats

In operation since 1975, Millmerran Meats is a multi-species slaughterhouse owned by Rob Ashton, who also owns and operates award winning butcher shop, Ashton’s Meats.

In 2024, FTP's investigators visited Millmerran Meats and installed hidden cameras to document and observe what happens at this facility when they don’t think anyone is watching. 

Described as a “paddock to plate” operation, the slaughterhouse kills around 50 cows, 40 pigs and over 100 lambs each week, who are butchered and sold at Ashton’s shop, and other local butcher shops. In 2020, Rob Ashton was awarded a $140,000 state government Rural Economic Development (RED grant)in order to improve the facilities at the slaughterhouse. 

In the footage FTP captured, pigs are seen being kicked or struck with a gate door by the workers when they avoid being moved to the stun pen. Some were grabbed by their ears and pulled roughly to the kill room. The stun pen is too small to allow for effective stunning, causing every pig to be stunned multiple times. Afterwards, many continue to struggle as they are raised up the shackle line for sticking. The pigs are often still thrashing intensely while trying to raise their heads as they bleed out. Other pigs in the stun pen witness this thrashing when they enter the kill room, and are frightened by it; causing them to try and retreat or escape the pen. In one instance, a large pig jumped over the pen and ran out of the kill room.

Cows are forced up a narrow metal race and into the kill room. Frightened and confused, they attempt to turn around and back out, but are struck by the workers and have their tails twisted to make them move forward. Once in the knockbox, panicked cows try desperately to back out, with one even attempting to leap over the side. A worker waits for the opportunity and then shoots them with a bolt-gun. Once bolt-gunned, many cows still thrash and exhibit signs of consciousness, requiring a second or third bolting.

Lambs are forced into the knockbox by the workers, who bolt-gun them one at a time, usually in groups of four. In every instance of sheep being stunned, at least one of the group continued to thrash violently up until they had their throats slit and were hung on the shackle line. The sticking is so violent that many sheep fall off the kill table due to their intense kicking, ending up on the kill floor, covered in the blood of other animals.

Millmerran Meats is an Australian Meat Industry Council (AMIC) certified slaughterhouse, meaning that they are expected to uphold AMIC standards of animal welfare. These standards are considered the industry gold standard across Australia. If this is what the industry considers best practice, can you imagine the worst?