“Chicken King” fined for animal cruelty

WEALTHY business tycoon Ranjit Singh Boparan, owner of chicken processing company 1Stop Halal, has been fined £8,000 and ordered to pay £6,000 costs after the company admitted causing “unnecessary suffering” to 81 chickens which were boiled alive in July 2015. Boparan, known as the “chicken king” for running a volume business processing up to 100,000 birds a day, is not involved in the factory’s day-to-day running but was deemed responsible for the error. 

1Stop Halal, which is based in Eye, Suffolk, uses two methods to slaughter chickens. Some are put in a water pool through which an electric current is run to stun the birds. Others have their throats slit without being stunned. The first failure at the company occurred when the water pool stopped working and the workers had to cut all the chickens’ throats without any stunning. Workers noticed that some chickens were coming out of the slaughtering process still alive, and a disagreement broke out between two of the men doing their slaughtering about who was responsible.

Once they have been killed, the dead birds pass through into a tank of boiling water, where they remain for two minutes to remove their feathers. However, the consequence of the failure to ensure all birds were dead meant that 81 fowl were plunged into the boiling water while they were still alive – and were boiled to death, causing the animals unnecessary suffering.

The workers claimed that the birds had got through because they were having to work fast to keep up with targets, which require up to 100,000 chickens a day to pass through the production process. The company has said that these workers are no longer employed by them and also confirmed that the animals killed in the boiling water were disposed off and not supplied to customers.

1Stop Halal issued a statement regretting the error which, it said, occurred on the first day they began operating the Suffolk factory. The company said that it had now invested “substantially” in training and improved control systems and pointed out that it had processed more than 30 million birds since the incident.

The company supplies chickens sold under the Shazans brand to Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons.

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