Gathercole's Wangaratta slaughterhouse - Part 1

10 years ago, this slaughterhouse was one of the first investigated by the recently launched organisation, Aussie Farms (now Farm Transparency Project). At the time, investigators filmed pigs, cows, sheep and calves being beaten and violently slaughtered across two, blood-soaked kill rooms. A decade later, we returned and spent two months installing cameras inside the multi-species slaughterhouse, which sits on a residential street in the busy, rural city of Wangaratta.

The scale of suffering we uncovered was so bad that we’ve had to split it across two videos.

In the cow kill room, workers force cows into a knockbox with an electric prodder, before shooting them in the head with a handheld bolt gun. Often, cows are forced into the narrow box two at a time, trampling on each other in panic as they are shot one-by-one. Our cameras revealed that, more often than not, cows would not be stunned on the first attempt, and would be shot up to four times as they thrashed and tried to escape.

Dozens of these cows are ‘spent’ dairy cows, discarded from the dairy industry at 4-6 years of age when they are no longer able to produce enough milk. These exhausted mothers were seen thrashing and kicking as their throats were cut and they slowly bled out onto the kill room floor.