By Megan Barr
Graphic video released to The Associated Press by an animal welfare group shows workers at a dairy farm beating cows with crowbars, stabbing them with pitchforks and punching them in their heads.
The video was recorded in an undercover investigation at Conklin Dairy Farms Inc., said Mercy For Animals, a not-for-profit group that publicises 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, based in Ohio, didn't immediately respond to a telephone message seeking comment Tuesday.
Mercy For Animals, based in Chicago, said it planned to release the cow video to the public Wednesday. Last year it released a video showing workers at an Iowa egg hatchery tossing male chicks into a grinder, but 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, northwest of Columbus. He said the documented abuse violates Ohio's anti-animal cruelty statute.
AP