Dairy factory linked to animal torture

Adirondack Farms, a dairy factory in Clinton County, New York, has been responsible for severe animal abuse, PETA investigators learned. The cows there have been beaten, burned, and even electrocuted, The Daily Activist reports.

The factory is responsible for shipping milk to Massachusetts’ Agri-Mark, Inc., one of the largest milk suppliers in the New England area and distributor of several popular cheeses. While they tout their products as fresh and wholesome, the practices that go on behind the scenes, said PETA, are anything but.

From late 2011 through early 2012, an undercover animal rights activist observed Adirondack employees routinely using poles and canes to beat the livestock in the face, udder, torso, hindquarter and limbs. A manager of the facility electro-shocked a cow in the face. He called another of the animals a “dumb b*tch,” and proceeded to jab it in the ribs with a screwdriver, before dragging the terrified cow 25 feet with a skid steer (a motorized farm vehicle).

When that manager was confronted about the abuses, he simply said that employees “get carried away with striking cows.”

The attacks on animals don’t end there; calves are subjected to “de-budding” – which involves burning off their horn buds without using an anesthetic. One of the abusers was caught on video as he gleefully watched a calf “thrash around in agony, with smoke rising from her seared flesh” after he burned off the young animal’s buds.

The older cows often had their horns lopped off, too – usually with guillotine cutters, and always without anesthetics.

And then, there are questionable practices that have often been termed in the industry as “standard procedure”: In order to supposedly make milking easier, calves’ tails are docked by being tightly bound with rubber bands. That causes the skin and tissue on the tail to rot and die, and the whole appendage later comes off. This, in addition to being a gruesome procedure, is highly unhealthy for cows, which rely on their tails to swat away flies, and without which, they frequently endure chronic pain.

Cows were also subjected to a bovine growth hormone in order to increase milk production. That contributed to mastitis, a condition in which the udder becomes inflamed. Cows tested positive for this condition on a near-daily basis on this farm.

PETA has encouraged Adirondack Farms’ owners to employ disciplinary action and termination where necessary to its abusive employees. However, it would seem that, in the interest of better profits, Adirondack has turned a blind eye to animal cruelty. PETA has asked all who are concerned over this atrocity to send a message to Agri-Mark CEO Richard Stammer, urging him to end cow abuse.

Photo: Dinesh Ramde/AP