Turkey torture prompts Inghams to monitor staff

The company at the centre of an animal cruelty scandal says it will install video cameras in its Sydney processing plant as soon as possible.

NSW police have been asked to investigate more than 100 allegations of animal cruelty at Inghams' Tahmoor abattoir in Sydney's south west.

The ABC's Lateline program has been provided with an hour's worth of video obtained by the group Animal Liberation.

The footage was secretly filmed over two weeks in an area of the abattoir where workers take the birds from cages and place them into shackles to be stunned and slaughtered.

Workers can been seen kicking the birds, sometimes up to nine times.

Other birds are punched, bashed against walls or the cages and stomped on until they are still.

Inghams has released its second statement since the video aired last night, saying it will place staff who handle live birds under video surveillance as soon as possible.

The company has reiterated its stance on the issue, saying it does not tolerate the mistreatment of livestock.

The shocking footage was provided anonymously to Animal Liberation which is calling on the NSW Government to install CCTV cameras in abattoirs.

The group has also criticised the state government for introducing welfare officers to the red meat industry but not the white meat sector.

But Peter Day from the state's Food Authority says there's a good reason for that.

The processing operations that happen in the sectors between poultry and red meat are very different.

"The initiatives we introduced in the red meat abattoirs last year were specifically around some of the things we uncovered in a review that we did last year," Mr Day said.

"Obviously the poultry industry has got some other processes that we need to look at and obviously we'll look at what initiatives need to come into that as well."

Mr Day says he has seen the footage and there is no defending it.

But he says he does not believe animal cruelty is a widespread problem in the industry.

"I've seen the footage and it is disgraceful," he said.

"There's no defence with that and certainly I can't understand why people would do what's seen - and that's never been my experience of the majority of people in that industry.

"Certainly the companies would have nothing to benefit from that operation coming out like that."

Source: ABC News, 21 March 2013