“I don’t see what you see.” That’s why there continues to be strident conflict on what’s appropriate in the treatment of dairy cattle and other livestock.
Remember the quoted statement? It was Willet Dairy chief operating officer Lyn O’Dell’s comment to correspondent Brian Ross of ABC News in the late January broadcast on the network’s evening news and Nightline programs of a segment titled “Disturbing Reality of Dairy Land.”
The segment was based on undercover video provided by Mercy for Animals, a vegan organization based in Chicago, at one of Willet’s three dairy facilities that house about 7,000 cows near Locke in New York’s Cayuga County between Ithaca and Syracuse. The video showed unsanitary conditions and the handling of cows, heifers and calves that Ross and representatives of Mercy for Animals and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) described as barbaric, outrageous, inhumane, brutal and painful.
As put together by Ross and ABC, the piece was clearly a slam on the dairy industry and its “Got Milk?” and “Happy Cows” promotions. An opening reference to the “Milk Moustache” project noted how milk has been promoted as “a hip, nutritious drink.”
Right after that, the knife was inserted and twisted, replete with fighting words chosen to provoke strong reactions by viewers. It started with how ABC cleverly tried to portray National Milk Producers Federation spokesman Chris Galen as a fool and liar for his comment about how dairy cows enjoy a better life than ever because of the high quality of care they receive.
Then the video taken at Willet Dairy began. It showed a downed cow in a manure-filled alley; tail-docking by cutting rather banding the tail; open sores on cattle; a heifer being hit on the head with a wrench; and horn removal by burning with smoke arising in the fairly dark barn. The video was shot from December 2008 to February 2009 by a Mercy for Animals plant who was hired as a maintenance worker at Willet.
Ross implied that it is not appropriate that cows never get to go outside at Willet and that it’s virtually criminal to use the apparently evil practice of artificial insemination to keep the cows perpetually pregnant – a biological impossibility known by anyone with even a minimal understanding of the fertility of dairy cows, not to mention humans. He also virtually equated a factory farm as something that’s inherently evil – a claim similar to that made a couple of weeks later by Katie Couric on CBS during segments on the use of antibiotics with livestock.
PETA spokeswoman Jennifer Fearing indicated that it’s not Old McDonald’s Farm any more. Nathan Runkle of Mercy for Animals bemoaned the treatment of cows as milk-producing machines and the dragging of newly-born calves from their mothers by one leg.
As a final dig, another reference was made to “Got milk?” ABC’s segment closed with Fearing asking the dairy industry “Got ethics?” Given the one-sided tone of the broadcast, one could also ask ABC “Got ethics?”
In the wake of the ABC broadcast, stories in regional newspapers in the Syracuse area indicated that, according to local law enforcement officials, what was shown on the video might not be palatable to everyone and shocking to some but not illegal. The video had been presented to the county district attorney in 2009 with a request that charges be brought for animal abuse but no prosecution resulted. The complaint is now in the hands of the local unit of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
In a federal court case that dragged on for nine years, neighbors sued Willet Dairy for environmental pollution but the farm was not found to be guilty. The farm has been cited twice for shipping cows with drug residues to slaughter.
It didn’t take much for CNN host Jane Velez-Mitchell to weigh in with some judgments based on the video. She described the cattle at Willet Dairy as poor defenseless animals, characterized parts of the video as so shocking, graphic and horrible that “we can’t show them,” and called practices at Willet mind-blowing.
Velez-Mitchell and CNN did exhibit a bit of trouble with factual information, however. She said Willet sends 400,000 gallons of milk to New York City but did not specify a time period for that volume and the network’s graphics spelled the Mercy for Animals executive director’s surname as Hunkle while all other sources had it as Runkle.
Most sources indicated that the milk output from Willet was about 40,000 gallons per day. Apparently, there are about 4,000 cows at the facility where the video was taken but owner Dennis Eldred has at total of 7,000 cows at three locations with O’Dell as his farm manager.
One quick fallout of ABC’s broadcast was a decision by Leprino Foods to stop buying milk from Willet Dairy. It supplies pizzas to the Domino, Papa John’s and Pizza Hut chains.
Two weeks after the broadcast, Willet Dairy announced that the employee shown hitting a heifer on the head with a wrench – a maintenance worker, not someone regularly handling the cattle – had been suspended. Willet pointed out that not all of the video was from its facilities and it invited New York’s department of agriculture and markets to audit its protocols and practices.
Before the broadcast, dairy industry officials invited ABC to a Pennsylvania dairy farm where the practices are quite different in hopes of getting some video from there into the broadcast segment. “No dice,” was the answer from ABC.
O’Dell’s on-camera comments to Ross indicated that the practices shown in the video are standard in dairying. I think that’s stretching it.
What’s true is that dehorning is universal and that tail-docking is common, though now or soon to be prohibited in some states. What’s not standard is how these things were being done at Willet Dairy. In most cases, tail-docking, which is opposed by the American Veterinary Medical Association, is accomplished by banding rather than cutting.
If what was captured on the hidden camera was a series of isolated incidents, I’d call it marginally acceptable. If it’s an everyday practice, I’d say it’s far over the line. And if the latter is true, I wonder how Willet is still in business.
Given what was at stake, my initial reaction to the broadcast was that O’Dell was as clueless – at least in what was broadcast – as Ross was about his apparent inability to distinguish between a dairy cow, heifer and calf. Despite his promise to fire anyone who mistreats animals at Willet, O’Dell wasn’t aware enough to detect undercover videoing by a planted employee who was hired to do mechanical maintenance.
This episode was similar to the undercover video from a hog farm in Wayne County, Ohio that was broadcast repeatedly last spring on HBO under the title of “Death on a Factory Farm.” In that case, the parties were found guilty of some minor violations but nothing on the scale of what the complainants were seeking.
So did ABC’s episode deserve cheers or jeers? Or should it have been ignored? And what should the reaction of the dairy sector have been?
From a personal source, I confirmed what seemed quite likely from other sources – that Willet Dairy is not a good actor although it has so far escaped being found guilty of doing anything illegal. This puts other players in the dairy industry in a quandary. Do they defend something that’s not very defensible or do they take on the parties – Mercy for Animals and ABC – who uncovered a situation that they could exploit?
It certainly wasn’t comfortable to watch the undercover video on ABC and it certainly didn’t do the dairy industry any favors. I think everyone would agree that most dairy farmers wouldn’t welcome or tolerate such scenes in their facilities – especially as standard practices.
What’s abuse or mistreatment certainly varies according to the eye and perspective of the beholder – obviously what O’Dell meant when he said “I don’t see what you see.” That’s presuming he spent enough time inside the facilities to see what the undercover fellow captured on his camera.
Situations depicted in the video seldom or rarely occur on most dairy farms but for outsiders the impression and reaction would differ greatly. I feel confident that a great majority of dairy farm owners and operators wouldn’t engage in or allow some of the situations shown in the video. On my visits to dozens of farms and on our home farm decades ago, I don’t ever recall dairy cattle so caked with manure as was shown in the video from Willet – if that part was really from there.
This incident also shows how media outlets jump onto the bandwagon for a juicy topic. “Gee” and “wow” seem to be the order of the day because of how easily such depictions grab the attention of the public, if only briefly.
Getting excited by underground video that purports to reveal dirty and shocking secrets is apparently justification enough to proceed with a broadcast. Truth and perspective suffer at times but, again, the prevailing attitude is to go with it so long as it draws viewers and readers.
Obviously, this incident drew a flood of commentary, much of it predictable, on Internet chat sites. Most of the comments posted by members of dairy farm families didn’t question the reality of what was shown but they chastised ABC for not being fair or portraying both sides of how dairy cattle are treated.
A fair way to characterize the clashing Internet chatter would be to suggest that it arose from individual perspectives – an illustration of the “I don’t see what you see” response by Lyn O’Dell. Let’s at least credit him for something.
I would pose three more questions for dissecting this type of encounter: Who’s looking? Where are they looking? What do they see?
“I don’t see what you see” could apply in many cases.
