Michigan-Based Domino's Asked to Help End 'Horrific Abuse' Videotaped at Dairy Farm

Secret video shot by a Mercy for Animals activist working undercover at a New Mexico dairy shows farm workers kicking, punching and dragging cows, among other practices the animal-rights group said inflict “horrific abuse.” (Screenshot: Mercy for Animals video)

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The world’s largest mozzarella cheese maker severed ties with a New Mexico dairy

Wednesday, hours after activists with Mercy for Animals released undercover video showing farm workers kicking, punching and dragging cows, stabbing them with screwdrivers, and inflicting other “horrific abuse.”

The group asked Denver-based Leprino Foods – the primary supplier for the nation’s largest pizza chains, including Ann Arbor-based Domino’s, Pizza Hut and Papa John’s – to take a zero-tolerance for abusive practices, and to install video monitoring monitoring systems that live stream to the Internet as a deterrent to abuse. The pizza chains were asked to join the activist group in pressuring the supplier to implement more rigid animal protection standards.

In a statement released to KMGH-TV in Denver, Leprino Foods said it “cares deeply about the health and welfare of the animals on the farms that supply our milk” and that the company terminated shipments from Winchester Dairy after learning of the abuse.

An activist with the California-based animal welfare group began working at the farm outside Roswell, NM, last month and shot the video from Aug. 6-Sept. 5. The hidden-camera video also shows “downer” cows – animals that are too sick or injured to stand – being dragged with a tractor while workers shock them in the genitals with electric prods.

» Warning: the video at SliceOfCruelty.com contains graphic content.

In a statement Mercy For Animals’ President, Nathan Runkle said that the pizza chains have “the power and ethical responsibility to ensure that the cows used for its cheese are spared from vicious beatings, painful mutilations, intensive confinement, and neglect.”

In an email to the Detroit Free Press, Domino’s spokesman Tim McIntyre said the video, shot from Aug. 6-Sept. 5, shows isolated “sadistic acts.”

“No act of cruelty can ever be condoned. Ever. What we do know is that this is not an issue with our cheese supplier – it was an isolated case of sadistic acts by employees at a single dairy farm in southern New Mexico,” McIntyre wrote. “That farmer, who is very likely reeling from this, has terminated the employees, turned their information over to law enforcement and has closed his operations after moving his cows to other farms (according to the Associated Press).”

In a statement to the AP, the dairy said it remains “committed to the ethical and responsible treatment of the animals and have learned from this incident.”

McIntyre said Domino’s is grateful to Mercy for Animals for making the video public and raising awareness of animal cruelty issues.

“There is no room for this anywhere in the food industry,” he said, emphasizing again practices revealed in the video are the rare exception to normal dairy husbandry practices.

“America’s individual family dairy farms — 47,000 of them — are being painted in a horrible light due to the horrendous acts of a small group of individuals. That’s not fair to the hard working farmers across America,” McIntyre said.