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In 2019, Erin Flit labored for virtually three months at a salmon hatchery in Maine that’s owned and operated by Cooke Aquaculture, the arena’s most fascinating privately held seafood company. As a hatchery technician, she helped to lift millions of truthful salmon eggs into salmon juveniles. From there, they were transported to Cooke’s fish farms off the cruise of Maine, where they were fattened as much as be slaughtered and acquired underneath the emblem establish Correct North Seafood at grocery stores all the plan by plan of the Northeastern US.

But Flit had a secret: She used to be there undercover, carrying a hidden digicam on behalf of the animal protection nonprofit Animal Outlook. At some level of her time at Cooke’s hatchery, she documented:

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

“As a family company, we jam animal welfare high in our working standards and endeavor to lift our animals with optimum care and consideration of handiest notice,” he wrote in a assertion. “I’m very sorry that this has took jam.”

Maine’s division of agriculture investigated the hatchery however didn’t file any costs because Cooke had dedicated to retraining its workers and updating its facility management plan, among other measures.

But it indubitably seems that its promised reforms didn’t stick. In 2025, Animal Outlook sent a 2nd investigator into the equal hatchery and recently released a 2nd exposé, this time discovering identical behavior and welfare factors.

To Animal Outlook, it didn’t plan as a shock.

“I’d’ve been extra bowled over had we seen the must haves improved demonstrably for these animals,” Ben Williamson, govt director of Animal Outlook, suggested me. “We know that essentially crowding this many animals in all these tanks goes to result in welfare issues. Treating these animals as commodities goes to result in cruelty.”

That cynicism is the manufactured from laborious-won skills. Animal protection groups occupy performed virtually 200 investigations into US farms raising chickens, pigs, cows, turkeys, and fish, gathering a staggering quantity of proof on long-established, yet inhumane, practices and residing prerequisites and barely documenting malicious cruelty alongside the manner.

In some instances, investigations occupy led to firms making substantive changes, equivalent to phasing out tiny cages for pigs and chickens. But admire with Cooke Aquaculture, most farms and firms promise to win reforms after they’ve been uncovered, exact for notice-up investigations to snarl continued abuse and heart-broken residing prerequisites. This pattern highlights the limitations of such investigations, which occupy proven valuable to building our concept of prerequisites on manufacturing facility farms however insufficient to seriously toughen them.

Though, they snarl that, for worthy of the livestock switch, cruelty is the norm. What meaning is that, within the absence of authorities oversight and federal animal welfare prison guidelines for farms, there’s tiny trigger of possibilities to take meat firms at their notice as soon as they promise to price better.

Animal Outlook’s 2nd investigator labored at Cooke’s Maine hatchery in gradual 2025 (the investigator isn’t named due to the the covert nature of their work). Like Flit, the 2nd investigator documented lots of extreme welfare factors, at the side of workers:

In a single scene, a employee is proven reducing into a fish while the fish’s heart is composed beating.

All suggested, Animal Outlook documented 133 instances of what regarded to be despicable killing, throwing, and rough handling, alongside with fungal and bacterial infections (which exhibit unfortunate water quality), deformities, overcrowding, and other animal welfare issues.

“It looks to me admire they occupy got a systemic welfare mission at this farm,” Culum Brown, a professor and neatly-known researcher on fish welfare at Macquarie College in Australia, suggested Vox over e-mail.

There were additionally extra than one unexplained mass fish mortalities of an complete bunch or even tens of hundreds of fish death.

Cooke Aquaculture did not reply to an interview quiz for this story and declined to reply to detailed questions in regards to the investigation. “Cooke USA takes animal welfare very seriously,” a spokesperson wrote in a assertion to Vox in which the company acknowledged the hidden digicam investigation and said it’s reviewing the photos. “Appropriate disciplinary measures would possibly be enraged about appreciate to workers who occupy no longer followed company policy.”

The company is certified by Simplest Aquaculture Practices, a program that promises “receive, responsible and ethical farm-raised seafood.” Simplest Aquaculture Practices declined an interview quiz for this story and said an investigation into Cooke Aquaculture is at the 2nd underway.

The advocacy group Aquatic Lifestyles Institute rates Simplest Aquaculture Practices as having the lowest animal welfare standards among nine aquaculture certification functions it opinions due to the how it compares to other certifiers on key factors, equivalent to overcrowding, environmental enrichment, transport, and beautiful and slaughtering. Simplest Aquaculture Practices, which is one of many absolute most sensible of the nine, said in an emailed assertion to Vox that it’s “actively engaged with ALI [Aquatic Life Institute] and has integrated several of their strategies.”

The Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry confirmed to Vox that it’s conducting an animal welfare investigation per Animal Outlook’s investigation.

Animal Outlook additionally documented issues that went beyond animal welfare at the hatchery.

When farmed salmon spoil out into rivers and streams, they compete with wild salmon for resources. They additionally mate with them, contributing to what researchers name “genetic pollution,” which has created a hybrid breed of salmon that can perhaps perhaps occupy decrease survivability rates.

In the investigation video, a employee said that the company had did not examine indubitably one of its spoil out prevention protocols of placing a screen on the raze discharge pipes, from which fish can spoil out, that originate into the Kennebec River. “They’ve displays that are supposed to be down,” a employee said, “however there’s so worthy shit in there that… we graceful worthy exact back them up the full time.”

“The spoil out of farmed fish…is a huge contributor to population give plan and loss,” for wild Atlantic salmon, Crabbe suggested me, and “Cooke is if truth be told intentionally allowing” their originate.

Some workers additionally urged that a commonplace tradition of callousness pervades the company. “Sadly, I don’t mediate the company is in it for the fish health facet, they exact prefer fish manufacturing,” a supervisor suggested the Animal Outlook investigator. “Kinda why our vet[erinarian] left too.” Speaking in regards to the veterinarian, one employee said “they exact push apart her shit the full time.”

In a single allotment of the investigation, a supervisor who Animal Outlook alleges labored at the hatchery in 2019 when Flit investigated it and used to be composed employed there in 2025 said of Flit: “I hunted her down and I discovered her on Instagram… I used to be gonna send admire a horse tongue or something to her mail… I used to be gonna send admire a deer tongue or something, or admire some brains. Motive she’s admire an animal activist… Bitch.”

I requested Flit what she felt when she heard this recording. She expressed subject for her family’s security and additionally that she believes this displays how these at the company are “no longer sorry that they did what they did — they’re sorry that they received caught.” But she additionally expressed empathy for the workers who occupy tiny back watch over over how the company operates.

The juxtaposition between the CEO of Cooke Aquaculture’s heartfelt apology in 2019 and the terrifying findings of Animal Outlook’s notice-up investigation is unsettling, nonetheless it isn’t queer. It’s a pattern that animal protection groups occupy witnessed for decades: They investigate farms that provide meat, milk, and egg firms and procure that some workers maliciously abuse animals. The farm or company apologizes and promises to interchange, most continuously firing a handful of workers. Then, the advocacy organization investigates one other of the company’s provider farms, handiest to search out the equal issues.

This entails a bunch of the absolute most sensible animal protein firms, equivalent to Foster Farms (six investigations), Butterball (four investigations), Cal-Maine (two investigations), Smithfield Foods (around nine investigations), Tyson Foods (10 investigations), and Fairlife (around 5 investigations, though Fairlife has denied sourcing from one of the valuable crucial investigated farms).

The companies’ preliminary responses frequently give the phantasm that justice has been served — that the negative workers would possibly be punished and the negative farm would possibly be improved. The responses lead many consumers and regulators to factor in that these are cases of rogue actors in possibility to a essentially cruel gadget.

But that gadget is cruel, as its many relapses and erroneous pieties snarl. And while instances of malicious abuse are laborious to stomach, long-established practices and prerequisites on farms — at the side of intensive breeding, overcrowding, and pervasive illness — trigger worthy extra suffering than the occasional beatings caught on digicam.

The companies that win up this plan occupy an unbelievably mountainous responsibility: the welfare of billions upon billions of animals. And yet, they’re responsible to no one. Undercover investigations win this actuality undeniable to undercover agent. Maine officials didn’t back Cooke responsible after the first investigation. Lawmakers didn’t pass new animal welfare standards. Regulators didn’t decide to valuable oversight.

Meat, dairy, and egg firms snarl who they’re as soon as they mediate no one’s staring at, and we must listen. Every part else — the statements, the apologies, the promises to reform — is exact noise.