Undercover footage that appears to show extremely sick cows being smuggled into a Polish slaughterhouse and sold on with little or no veterinary inspection has raised alarm about standards in one of the EU’s largest meat exporters.



Covert footage in a slaughterhouse in the central Polish region of Mazovia appears to show cows so sick that they are unable to stand up being dragged out of trucks and into the slaughterhouse using a winch, with ropes tied around their horns or legs.

The slaughter of sick cows appears to take place at night with no veterinary officials on site, another contravention of basic standards. Workers at the slaughterhouse appear to remove evidence from the carcasses such as pressure sores and tumours that indicate that the cows have been sick and lying on their side for days on end.

Experts who have seen the film said it raises the possibility of serious health risks, and called on the Polish government to act quickly to notify all other European states. Chris Elliott, professor of food safety at Queen’s University in Belfast and founder of the Institute for Global Food Security, who led the UK government’s independent review of food systems following the 2013 horsemeat scandal, told the Guardian: “If there is any evidence at all that some of this meat has left Poland then there will be the potential for a European-wide safety alert, with the involvement of many regulatory agencies and potentially police forces from across Europe.”

In 2017, according to the most recent UN Comtrade figures available, Poland exported more than 415m kg of beef, worth more than $1.5bn. HMRC figures for that year show that the UK, one of Poland’s largest markets for meat, bought 16m kg of beef (fresh, frozen and offal), worth £64m.

According to the report, workers cut off signs of illness such as tumours and pressure sores. Photograph: Courtesy of Superwizjer TVN

Reporters from Superwizjer, a Polish investigative television programme broadcast on news channel TVN24, infiltrated the Polish slaughterhouse late last year. A reporter worked undercover at the slaughterhouse for almost three weeks.

According to Patryk Szczepaniak, the reporter who worked at the slaughterhouse and recorded the footage, instead of being inspected by qualified veterinarians as the law demands, the carcasses would simply be marked as safe for human consumption by staff.

“I was ordered by my supervisors to mark the meat as healthy, and basically to make it prettier. It was horrible, believe me. The smell of rotting meat just makes you puke. I had to make it prettier by scrubbing it with my knife.”

The slaughterhouse’s designated veterinarian would appear the following morning, said Szczepaniak, who was also expected to mark the carcasses as safe as part of his duties, and sign off on the certifications without inspecting the meat themselves.

“Veterinarians are supposed to be there before, during, and after the slaughter, but in almost three weeks working in the slaughterhouse, I only saw the vet in the morning while he took care of the paperwork and briefly examined the cow’s heads,” Szczepaniak said. “He wasn’t there during the slaughter of the sick cows at the night shift either. On paper everything is fine, but in reality it was a disaster.”

Once the meat receives this certification, it will not be inspected before it is sent to suppliers and on to consumers, including in other countries. Approximately 80% of the beef produced in Poland is sent for export.

During three night shifts at the slaughterhouse, Szczepaniak counted the slaughter of 28 cows that were too sick to stand. A month after he stopped working there he returned to film the slaughterhouse from a nearby field, where they saw trucks bringing sick cows for five consecutive weeknights.

Vet Paul Roger, chair of the Animal Welfare Science, Ethics and Law Veterinary Association, said: “It’s totally unacceptable to kill animals in that state and put them into the food chain. There is no way you can tell what’s wrong with the animals. You can guess, but that’s all you can do without doing a full postmortem examination.”



Szczepaniak also told the Guardian that workers at the slaughterhouse would be fed beef from the slaughterhouse during meal breaks. A vegetarian himself, he ate the meat in order to preserve his cover.

Towards the end of the programme, which was broadcast on Saturday evening, reporters entered the slaughterhouse during a night shift. Confronted on camera with the allegations, both the slaughterhouse owner and the designated veterinarian, who arrived at the site later, denied any wrongdoing.

This is not the first Polish slaughterhouse to be accused of involvement in the processing of sick cows. In December, the owner of a slaughterhouse near Łódź in central Poland was given a prison sentence for running a similar operation (he has appealed against his sentence). Prosecutors are also conducting an investigation into a slaughterhouse in eastern Poland.

In Poland, a sick cow typically costs five to six times less than a healthy cow. According to Superwizjer’s calculations, a slaughterhouse that slaughtered 20 healthy cows a day would yield the owner an approximate annual profit of 347,000 złoty, about £70,000 a year; if it only slaughtered sick cows that would rise to almost 2.5m złoty, just over half a million pounds.



Polish traders openly advertise sick cows online, using euphemisms such as “traumatised” and “damaged” for animals that typically are too sick to stand. In just one hour dialling telephone numbers published on the internet, two reporters from Superwizjer spoke to dozens of traders willing to discuss a deal. Based on their investigation, they estimated that there were approximately 300 such traders operating right across Poland.

Without knowing the exact diseases being carried by the cows, it is hard to specify the precise health risks for humans. But, according to an expert medical veterinary opinion conducted during the prosecution of the owner of the slaughterhouse near Łódź, analysis of the tainted meat revealed evidence of a wide range of different bacterias.

“The handling of those animals, dragging them across the floor to be slaughtered, is just totally unacceptable and there are huge potential health risks as well,” said Roger. “Without adequate surveillance there are a number of zoonotic diseases such as salmonella, E coli, and foot and mouth that can spread – the whole point of having certified meat is to identify and prevent these risks from spreading.”

The allegations will raise serious concerns in a number of EU countries, including the UK, which import Polish beef. “I hear of such things going on in many different places in Europe, but it’s the scale of the information in terms of how organised it appears to be, really quite shocking,” Elliott told the Guardian, after watching the footage.

“This really does seem to be well-organised, well-orchestrated criminal activity. It will be extremely difficult if not impossible to track down where all that meat has gone … In terms of whether any of this meat might have entered the UK, the answer is I have absolutely no idea. Always in the past when I’ve looked at illicit supply chains like this, they always extend incredibly far because there will be lots of intermediaries in different countries handling this meat, trying to get it into bona fide supply chains.”

And in Poland itself, the question remains as to whether the allegations will lead to the kind of regulatory action that observers say was lacking the last time such a scandal broke.

“We are worried that the same thing happens as always happens,” said Tomasz Patora of Superwizjer, “that the authorities will try to claim that this an isolated incident and that they were not at fault, and that things will go back to normal, as it always does.”

Responding to the programme on Saturday night, Paweł Jakubczak, the head of the Mazovian region’s veterinary inspectorate, announced that the slaughterhouse’s designated veterinarian and his supervisor at the county level had both been dismissed, and that the police had already begun investigations.

“I think the police, which is at this moment already engaged in this issue, will be trying step by step to explain what has been the role of the supervisory authorities in this illegal, reprehensible, and downright criminal procedure.”