Not So Nice: Inside Canada’s Animal Farms

Photographers: Balvik C., Human Cruelties, Victoria de Martigny, Jeremy Mathieu, Louise Jorgensen, Jo-Anne McArthur, Abigail Messier

Videographers: Jacob Berry, William Cote

[Content warning: Includes confronting images and/or video footage]

Most Canadians care about how farmed animals are treated. But how much do we really know about what happens behind farm doors?

Canadian photojournalist Jo-Anne McArthur has been photographing Canada’s animal farms for more than two decades. Even after all that time, she still sometimes has trouble believing what she sees.

After one Canadian pig-farm assignment, the We Animals founder described the place as “absolutely macabre” and said that the photographs she brought home “defy sense, defy words.” McArthur has documented scenes like these across Canada’s farms for years, and they bear little resemblance to the wholesome image of Canadian farming we’re presented with as we step inside a grocery store. Under the current US administration, “Product of Canada” labels are more important to Canadians than ever, but can lead to prioritizing regional buying over concern for animal welfare.

These photos, and others like them, present Canadians with a peculiar problem. Although most of us won’t ever set foot inside a commercial animal farm, that doesn’t mean we don’t care about what happens there. In fact, we care a lot. Ninety-four percent of Canadians say it’s important that animals’ physical and psychological needs are met. And when we shop, 91 percent of us rely on labels to tell us whether the food we’re buying was humanely produced.

The trouble is, almost none of us will ever get to fact-check the story. Big food producers have big voices, and big budgets. They have marketing departments, industry groups, and plenty of ways to shape what you hear.

That’s where animal photojournalists come in.

For years, We Animals photojournalists have gone onto farms, followed animals as they are shipped in transport trucks and documented auctions and slaughterhouses across Canada. They do it to answer an important question: what happens when nobody is looking?

A System Almost Too Big to See

In 2024 alone, nearly 863 million land animals were slaughtered for food in Canadian slaughterhouses. That’s a number that’s hard to grasp, but for context, it’s roughly 100,000 animals every hour, around the clock, all year long. And that tally doesn’t include animals who die from illness or injury on farms, in hatcheries or during transport.

Numbers this big have a strange effect on our ability to visualize. Ten animals, we can picture. Maybe even a hundred. But 863 million? At some point, we give up.

We Animals’ photojournalists help us see the scale of farming—and the animals within—through photography.

Oh, Canada, How Is This Legal?

Many of us may see a photo of an animal suffering and assume someone must have broken a rule. Sometimes, yes. But often, no. In fact, many of the conditions our photojournalists document aren’t exceptions to the system. They’re legal and commonplace.

How the rules for farmed animals are made and enforced in Canada is surprisingly complicated patchwork.

Instead of having one federal set of welfare rules, Canada’s agribusiness relies heavily on something called the Codes of Practice. These are developed by the National Farm Animal Care Council (NFACC), a group that brings together the farming industry, animal-welfare groups, vets, scientists and government representatives to help decide what counts as acceptable treatment of farmed animals in Canada.

But these Codes aren’t federal law. Provinces get to decide how they’re used and enforced. In other words, Canada has national standards for farmed animal welfare, but no single national system for enforcing them. And guess who has the biggest seat at the table where those standards are written? The animal farming industry. Out of the 54 NFACC members, only two represent animal welfare organizations. The remaining members represent entities such as the Canadian Pork Council and the Chicken Farmers of Canada, major food companies, restaurant chains, and grocery retailers.

The Realities of Industrial Animal Farming in Canada

So what do those standards actually allow?

In 2026, under Canada’s current Pig Code, piglets under 10 days old can be castrated with no vet present and no anesthetic. Piglets can also have their tails docked with pain-control requirements varying by procedure and age.

And that’s not all. In Canada today, pregnant pigs can spend long stretches in stalls so small they can’t turn around. Over 70 percent of Canadian dairy farms still use tie stalls, a practice that keeps lactating cows tethered in stalls for feeding, resting and milking. Poultry Codes permit practices including beak trimming and, for some birds, alterations to toes, spurs, combs and snoods. And under federal transport regulations, many animals can legally go up to 36 hours without rest, food, or water. (Yes, without water).

Then there is maceration. It’s a clinical word for something most of us would probably find much harder to contemplate in person: in Canada, unwanted chicks can be dropped into machinery that kills them by grinding them up.

None of this is happening because someone broke the rules. These are the rules.

And finally, there are the cages. In the UK, approximately 82-86 percent of egg-laying hens are now cage-free. In the US, it’s 45 percent. In Canada? Just 20 percent. So much for the pastoral Canadian farm. But it wasn’t supposed to be this way. Back in 2016, Canada’s major grocery retailers made a big promise: 100 percent cage-free eggs by the end of 2025. Then, five years later, the Retail Council of Canada dropped the commitment and left individual grocers to make their own rules. Some stuck with the promise. Others delayed it, watered it down or walked away.

Today, nearly four out of five Canadian laying hens are still living in cages with a footprint the size of an iPad, despite 80 percent of Canadians supporting a national ban on the practice. 

Are we okay with all of this?

If your answer is no, there are plenty of examples of alternatives. The UK has legislation governing the welfare of farmed animals and has banned conventional battery cages and sow stalls. New Zealand has a national Animal Welfare Act, enforceable regulations and species-specific welfare codes, and dry sow stalls have been banned there since 2015. Additionally, England and Spain now require video surveillance inside slaughterhouses, including in areas where animals are restrained, stunned and killed, to give regulators access to footage of what happens behind slaughterhouse doors.

None of this makes those countries perfect. But it does make something clear: the way we treat farmed animals in Canada isn’t inevitable. Other countries have made different choices, and increasingly, Canada is being left behind.

What A Photograph Can Do

By the time we reach the supermarket, the animal is mostly gone. In their place is a package, a label and, often, a reassuring picture of where our food supposedly came from. Animals are outdoors, the sun is shining, there’s plenty of grass and everyone, apparently, is having a lovely time.

Nobody expects advertising to show us the ugly stuff, but there’s a difference between putting your best face forward and leaving out so much that the picture is misleading. This is precisely why visual documentation matters.

A photograph can do something drastic that a statistic cannot: it can introduce us to someone. A hen stops being one of 27 million and becomes this hen. A pig, or a cow, stops being one of hundreds, and becomes an individual.

Photographs and video footage do something else, too. They provide evidence. At We Animals, we believe credible visual documentation helps ensure that what animals experience isn’t hidden from public view and gives advocates evidence they can use to act.

Should We Have the Right to See?

Political activist Susan Sontag wrote at length about looking at the suffering of others. Who should look? When, and why? The answer that she and many others came to, is that anyone who can help should look.

Not everyone wants these photographs to exist. The work of animal photojournalists is often challenged, criticized, and, in some cases, actively prevented. It’s worth asking why.

If a practice is legal and commonplace, should there be any reason we can’t see it? And if seeing it changes how we feel about it, what does that tell us?

There may be no simple answers to those questions. But we can’t meaningfully debate a system we rarely get to see. That may be the simplest case for animal photojournalism. Not everyone will look at these photographs and come to the same conclusion. They don’t have to. But we should all at least have the opportunity to see and to decide for ourselves.

So, What Now?

If Canadians believe farmed animals deserve decent lives, those expectations must exist somewhere beyond a voluntary promise or a label on a package. That means meaningful, enforceable protections, set and enforced by governments rather than left largely to industry. It means that when companies make public promises about animal welfare, those promises should count for something. Non-profit organizations such as Animal Justice and the Montréal SPCA are leading the way in holding animal agribusiness accountable.

There’s a role for the rest of us, too. One of the biggest and most immediate actions we can take is to boycott any animal product coming from a factory farm.

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