Ryan Gosling isn’t just a pretty face. He also sees himself as a savior of cooped-up farm animals.
The movie star has teamed up with the Humane Society calling on Costco to buy eggs from suppliers that don’t keep their chickens in cages.
Gosling sent a letter to Costco CEO Craig Jelinek, accusing him of sourcing eggs from an abusive chicken supplier and deceiving customers about it.
“Video footage revealed abhorrent cruelty including rows and rows of birds confined in filth-laden cages with the mummified corpses of their cage mates,” Gosling wrote, referring to an undercover video conducted by the Humane Society.
Gosling also said Costco deceptively sells the same eggs in cartons that feature images of “birds living out in a green pasture.”
He called on the store to go “completely cage-free.”
The Humane Society’s video shows that many chickens die in their cages and are left there, even as the other chickens lay eggs on top of the dead ones.
The egg supplier Hillandale said the images are an isolated incident in a barn where the undercover worker held primary responsibility.
“It was his job to identify and address the types of issues that were shown, and he did not adequately perform his job requirements,” Hillandale said.
Costco did not immediately respond to CNNMoney on Gosling’s letter.
But Costco did comment about the video when it first surfaced. A spokeswoman for Costco told CNNMoney that recent inspections “confirmed for us that Hillandale is behaving appropriately.”
Gosling has in the past also called upon pig farmers in his native Canada to get rid of cramped cages.