An US animal welfare group said on Tuesday that a graphic video it secretly recorded shows workers at a dairy farm beating cows with crowbars, stabbing them with pitchforks and punching them in the head.
The video was recorded as part of an undercover investigation at Conklin Dairy Farms, said Mercy For Animals, a not-for-profit group that publicizes what it calls cruel practices in the dairy, meat and egg industries and promotes a vegan diet.
The video shows workers holding down newborn calves and stomping on their heads. It shows one worker wiring a cow’s nose to a metal bar near the ground and repeatedly beating it with another bar while it bleeds.
Conklin Dairy Farms, a fourth-generation family operation based in Plain City, Ohio, said it takes the care of its cows and calves very seriously and had reviewed the video.
“The video shows animal care that is clearly inconsistent with the high standards we set for our farm and its workers, and we find the specific mistreatment shown on the video to be reprehensible and unacceptable,” Gary Conklin, of Conklin Dairy Cattle Sales, said on Tuesday in an e-mailed statement.
“We will not condone animal abuse on our farm,” he said.
The company said it would interview its farm workers and that anyone found to have willfully abused cows or calves would be fired.
Last year, Mercy For Animals, which is based in Chicago, released a video showing workers at an Iowa egg hatchery tossing male chicks into a grinder. Industry groups said such instantaneous euthanasia was a common practice because male chicks can’t lay eggs or be raised quickly enough to be sold for meat.
Mercy For Animals’ executive director, Nathan Runkle, said the cow video was shot between April 28 and Sunday by an undercover worker at the dairy, about 40km northwest of Columbus.
He said the documented abuse violates Ohio’s anti-animal cruelty statute.
The group presented the video and the evidence it collected to the prosecutor’s office in Marysville, which did not respond to a request for an official comment late on Tuesday.
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