Cowra Meat Processors

The 30th slaughterhouse to be investigated and exposed as part of Farm Transparency Project's "Shut Down Slaughterhouses" campaign. 

Cowra Meat Processors is a large multi-species slaughterhouse in central west NSW with three separate kill rooms, slaughtering pigs, cows, sheep and goats. 

As with all major pig slaughterhouses in Australia, pigs at Cowra are killed in a carbon dioxide gas chamber, a system now notorious for its cruelty. A painful electric stunner is used to immobilise sheep and goats at the end of a 'V restraint' conveyor, while cows, steers, heifers and a small number of calves are shot with either a pneumatic bolt stunner or a handheld bolt gun in a 'knockbox'. Larger pigs who won't fit in the gas chamber, including injured or unproductive breeding sows, are taken to the cattle knockbox. 

Hidden cameras installed by FTP in November 2024 reveal the aggressive use of electric prodders to move sheep, goats, cattle, pigs and young piglets; workers throwing, kicking, and smacking animals with metal tools; extremely poor and ineffective use of 'stunning' devices causing prolonged agony; animals being killed while conscious, some having escaped the restraint; and a conscious pig drowning in a scalding tank.

Cowra Meat Processors employs around 200 people and is also known by its retail business, Breakout River Meats. The slaughterhouse had gone into liquidation in August 2006, and was brought back to operation with Breakout River as a major partner in March 2007. Both businesses are owned by Christopher Brian Cummins (Chris Cummins), a climate change denier and conspiracy theorist, who is on record claiming that pigs in his gas chamber feel "absolutely nothing". 

In 2012, the facility installed a $15,000 surveillance camera system. The cameras cover the building exteriors, the 'race' areas leading to the kill rooms, and the cattle tipout area, but are otherwise absent from the slaughtering areas and gas chamber.