Undercover activists went behind the scenes of a cattle auctioneer facility called Erath County Dairy Sales (ECDS) in Texas and Dick Van Dam Dairy, a dairy farm in California, and what they found has left the animal welfare community shocked. In Texas, ECDS employees were filmed kicking cows in their fragile heads and necks, electrocuting fallen animals with prods, and heaping sick and dead animals together to die in a pile. The same facility was found to be ripping the tags out of arriving cows’ ears, only to replace them with new identifiers that falsely stated they were organically raised livestock. This lie is not only a slap in the face of conscious consumers; it makes the medical histories of these cows untrackable, raising the risk of disease. The irony here is that we are in the middle of a pandemic that was transmitted to humans from the animals they consumed.
In California, things didn’t look much better. Dick Van Dam Dairy employees were filmed beating and jabbing cows with sharp, splintering wooden canes, battering them with metal pipes, kicking them in their soft udders, and twisting their tails to the point of breaking. Some of the cows udders were so battered and beaten from milking that their milk turned red with blood. Both undercover investigations have been brought to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), who are investigating. But in so many of these cases, abusers just get a slap on the wrist in the form of fines or other negligible punishments. Sign the petition asking the USDA to deliver real consequences to those responsible for these transgressions! They must charge those responsible with animal cruelty, and shut down these nightmare facilities!