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A new investigation reveals why you can’t take meat companies at their word

Meat companies keep promising to do better. They almost never do.

In 2019, Animal Outlook — an animal protection nonprofit — exposed cruelty at a salmon hatchery in Maine. The company apologized and committed to reforms.

But in 2025, Animal Outlook re-investigated and documented similar behavior and welfare problems.

This is a familiar pattern: Nonprofits investigate, the company apologizes and promises to change, yet follow-up investigations reveal continued abuse.

In 2019, Erin Wing worked for nearly three months at a salmon hatchery in Maine that’s owned and operated by Cooke Aquaculture, the world’s largest privately held seafood company. As a hatchery technician, she helped to raise millions of delicate salmon eggs into salmon juveniles. From there, they were transported to Cooke’s fish farms off the coast of Maine, where they were fattened up to be slaughtered and sold under the brand name True North Seafood at grocery stores across the Northeastern US.

But Wing had a secret: She was there undercover, wearing a hidden camera on behalf of the animal protection nonprofit Animal Outlook. During her time at Cooke’s hatchery, she documented:

Workers culling diseased fish by repeatedly striking them against the sides of tanks and stomping on their heads

Live fish left in buckets to suffocate or be crushed to death by other fish

Fish overcrowded into tanks, some of them born with spinal deformities or dying from painful fungal diseases that ate at their faces

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

“As a family company, we place animal welfare high in our operating standards and endeavor to raise our animals with optimal care and consideration of best practice,” he wrote in a statement. “I am very sorry that this has happened.”

Maine’s department of agriculture investigated the hatchery but didn’t file any charges because Cooke had committed to retraining its employees and updating its facility management plan, among other measures.

But it appears that its promised reforms didn’t stick. In 2025, Animal Outlook sent a second investigator into the same hatchery and recently released a second exposé, this time finding similar behavior and welfare issues.

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

“I would’ve been more surprised had we seen the conditions improved demonstrably for these animals,” Ben Williamson, executive director of Animal Outlook, told me. “We know that fundamentally crowding this many animals in these kinds of tanks is going to lead to welfare problems. Treating these animals as commodities is going to lead to cruelty.”

What we’ve done to the salmon

That cynicism is the product of hard-won experience. Animal protection groups have conducted nearly 200 investigations into US farms raising chickens, pigs, cows, turkeys, and fish, gathering a staggering amount of evidence on standard, yet inhumane, practices and living conditions and often documenting malicious cruelty........

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