Young piglets with growths nearly as big as their heads, large bulls hanging from the roof while blood streams from their throat, mother sheep bleating because their babies have been stolen and baby chicks so heavy their young skeletons can not hold their body weight. This is the reality of life for millions of animals on New Zealand’s pastoral and factory farms and it is what we saw during our first investigation.

What we saw is the very reason we wanted to start investigating what is happening to animals in New Zealand. We want everyone to get the chance to see what is happening behind the closed doors of the countries animal abuse industries. This summer we had an overview look at what life and death is like for these millions of animals. During this investigation we visited several pig, duck, goat and chicken factory farms, as well as dairy farms, sheep and ‘beef’ cattle farms, sales yards and chicken, duck, cow and sheep slaughterhouses. During these visits we documented what we saw with video and still cameras.

The footage from this investigation has been made into a documentary called ‘Who Are You Having For Dinner: the reality of the meat production in Aotearoa’. What we have documented so far is only a glimpse of the reality for the millions of animals trapped on pastoral and factory farms in New Zealand. As such we plan on revising this documentary every year with footage from our future investigations so that it is always an up to date account of what farm animals are being subjected to.

What follows is an account of our investigation, the animals we met and the conditions that we saw, smelt and heard. More . . .