The secret ingredient in McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets is no longer a secret. A newly-released investigative video (below) by Mercy For Animals uncovers the brutal truth: animal cruelty.

The gruesome footage reveals shocking abuses to birds at Tyson Foods, one of the world’s largest meat producers and a supplier of McDonald’s McNuggets. The video, filmed at a factory farm in Tennessee, includes:

Birds painfully beaten, stabbed, and impaled on makeshift clubs spiked with nails, then thrown into buckets to slowly die

Factory farm owners stepping on the heads of live chickens and then pulling their wings or bodies to break their necks

Chickens bred to grow so fast they became crippled under their own weight and frequently died from organ failure

Hundreds of thousands of birds crammed into filthy, windowless sheds forced to live for weeks in their own waste

While Tyson has cut ties with the factory farm shown in this video, animal cruelty is standard practice in the chicken industry. Last year, a Compassion Over Killing investigator documented similar horrors behind the closed doors of chicken factory farm that contracted with Pilgrim’s — we even caught on camera workers who were knowingly dumping sick and injured birds in outdoor pits and burying them alive.

What can you do to help? The most effective step each of us can take to protect these — and all chickens — is to simply leave them off our plates. Choosing compassion is easier than ever. Start today at TryVeg.com!

You can help expose the truth by sharing this post and video (below) to empower others to stand up for animals every time they sit down to eat.