Animal rights group’s video shows abuse at Ohio dairy farm

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An animal welfare group said that a graphic video it secretly recorded shows workers at an Ohio 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 nonprofit 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 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 Tuesday night in an e-mail statement. ‘We will not condone animal abuse on our farm.’

The company said it would interview its workers and anyone found to have willfully abused the cows or calves would be fired.

Mercy For Animals’ executive director, Nathan Runkle, said the cow video was shot between April 28 and May 23 by an undercover worker at the dairy, about 25 miles northwest of Columbus.

-- Associated Press