New York: Dairy Atrocities Provoke New Laws

The video viralled from ABC's World News Tonight with Diane Sawyer, Nightline and CNN to YouTube and social networks.

A worker at Willet Dairy, New York's largest dairy repeatedly forces his finger deeply into the eye sockets of calves to hold them in place while he burns off their horn buds. A calf collapses from the pain and hangs by a rope around her neck while the worker lifts her by her tail and continues with the second horn. Calves, enveloped in smoke, bellow as their tails are docked--an amputation procedure so painful and unnecessary, it is banned in five European countries and opposed by the American Veterinary Medical Association.

Downer cows and cows with hemorrhagic uterine prolapses are left to suffer and die--and cows leaving pools of blood when they walked, also denied veterinary care, provide milk for the public reports Mike, the humane investigator who shot the video for Mercy For Animals (MFA) last year.

Upon viewing the video, Denver cheese maker Leprino Foods Co which distributes cheese to Pizza Hut, Domino's and Papa John's announced it was dropping Willet as a supplier at one of its plants.

"We take these issues very, very seriously and we will respond, said Mike Reidy, a Leprino senior vice president, according to the Denver Business Journal. "We continue to view animal health and welfare as a matter of critical importance. We'll continue to work with our milk suppliers on these matters."

The video moved New York State Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal to propose a ban on tail docking, similar to one enacted in California last year. http://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?bn=A09732

"Painfully cutting off the tails of horses has been illegal in New York state for decades and it's high time that we extend this same modest protection to cattle," says MFA urging New York consumers to contact their Assembly members.

Downed cows at the 7,000-animal dairy were left to suffer for as much as 12 days writes Mike, after being hired as a maintenance worker last year. One worker, he writes in a diary, was shocked when a "dead" cow he was moving with a forklift "[expletive] move a little bit."

FDA records show harmful drugs were detected at least twice in Willet cows sold as meat--the antibiotic sulfadimethoxine at excessive levels and the antibiotic gentamicin, not allowed in edible tissues at all--after inspection. "Our investigation found that you hold animals under conditions which are so inadequate that diseased and/or medicated animals bearing potentially harmful drug residues in edible tissues are likely to enter the food supply," wrote FDA officials, Jerome G. Woyshner and Brenda J. Holman to the dairy farm. Virtually all dairy cows are sold for their flesh at four or five years, a fraction of their natural lifespan, when profitability decreases.

The animals' drinking water was "opaque brown, with chunks of feed, manure, and other debris floating on top," writes Mike and troughs and drains were never cleaned, according to a dairy mechanic. One employee even deliberately contaminated the cows' drinking water by dipping his feces-covered tools in the water troughs for spite.

The employee, believed to have worked at Willet Dairy for nineteen years, boasts of and enacts such violence against animals, he is named in the Mercy For Animals complaint to Jon E. Budelmann, the District Attorney Cayuga County in Auburn, New York submitted last August.

"What do you think that wrench did to her?" the worker asks Mike, recounting a violence incident using one of his tools. "Cracked her right over the [expletive] skull."

"With her head in a headlock?" asks Mike.

"Yep. Dropped her right down. [yells] Stupid bitch!"

The employee also describes braining a bull with a two by four and then kicking its genitals, "stomping" an animal by jumping off of a gate and onto her head repeatedly and brutalizing a tied up calf so badly the manager asks why it's so bruised.

While newborns at Willet are allowed to die from the cold--many freezing to death in unheated, coffin-like tin sheds spaced every few feet in the snow--their mothers also suffer. Video shows the cows following their days-old calves as they are pulled away by one or two legs to become veal, vocalizing plaintively. They "run around the box stalls" searching for their offspring "for days" a worker confirms.

After finding a severely ill calf at 8:30 in the morning, the worker responsible for newborns tells Mike she was "cold" and would soon be dead. But "at 4:30 p.m. the dying calf was still in the same place, her throat barely expanding and contracting in slow breaths" writes Mike. "Her eyes were completely gray. I sat down beside her and stroked her hair. She did not respond, but when I got up to walk away, she let out a weak bleat, so I returned and continued to pet her."

Hopefully more lawmakers and suppliers while say never again to this type of "farming."

Links www.mercyforanimals.org/dairy
http://mercyforanimals.org/willetmedia

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