At midnight one day in spring 2023, a team of animal rights investigators decked out in biosecurity gear snuck onto a massive chicken farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, an hour and a half drive from Baltimore. The operation was raising some 75,000 birds for Mountaire Farms, the nation’s fourth-largest chicken company.

When the investigator Joseph Allman entered one of the facility’s sprawling barns, he found chickens packed wall to wall, including three dead, decaying birds. The place smelled “awful and noxious,” he said, and as he waded through the barn’s “blanket of chickens,” Allman found plenty more dead animals. Right outside the barn, Allman told me recently, there was a massive pile of manure “completely littered with dead bodies and body parts.”

Over the following year, the investigators returned to the farm and also visited another operation in the area raising birds for Mountaire, where they found similar conditions. In January, Sherstin Rosenberg — a veterinarian who reviewed the footage — wrote that there were multiple birds “unable to reach food or water due to severe limb deformity and disease, or because they are stuck on their backs and unable to get up.” Several dead birds, the footage showed, had been “left to decompose for days to weeks,” according to Rosenberg.

The investigators also obtained a trove of inspection documents from two Mountaire Farms slaughterhouses through a Freedom of Information Act request, which revealed instances of birds being scalded alive, buried alive, suffocated to death, amputated, diseased, and contaminated with feces.

Bonnie Klapper, a former assistant US attorney, reviewed the investigators’ footage and wrote an opinion in January arguing that the conditions documented constitute criminal animal cruelty under Maryland state law. The activists have sent Klapper’s opinion and Rosenberg’s veterinary analysis to a number of county and state authorities requesting an investigation into the company and charges for animal cruelty. They haven’t received much interest.

Mountaire alleges that early one morning in mid-February, Allman and his colleague Adam Durand posed as AT&T contractors to gain access to a Mountaire slaughterhouse in Delaware. They were later arrested for criminal impersonation — a charge which was soon dropped — and trespassing, to which they agreed to a plea deal to remove the charge from their records in exchange for one year of no contact with Mountaire, Allman told me. Mountaire sued the two in early March for trespassing.

“This lawsuit isn’t about protecting their business — it’s about silencing whistleblowers,” Allman wrote to me in response to the lawsuit. Durand declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Mountaire Farms declined an interview request for this story, but emailed a statement to Vox. The company said it requires its contract farmers to “follow sound poultry management practices that conform to practices of good animal husbandry and animal welfare.” Mountaire declined to comment further on the allegations lodged by Allman and his fellow investigators.

However grisly the investigation into Mountaire’s operations was, they’re far from unusual. At US chicken factory farms, overcrowded, unhygienic conditions are so common that 6 percent of the nation’s 9 billion chickens raised for meat — chickens that have been bred to be unhealthily large — die on the farm each year before they can even be........

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