More Than 18,000 Cows Perish in Barn Fire at Texas Dairy Farm
Footage of the deadly barn fire at a Texas dairy farm has been circulating on social media, showing the sky filled with thick smoke and the heart-wrenching screams of trapped cows.
More than 18,000 cows have perished at a dairy farm in Texas, resulting in the deadliest barn fire in recorded history.
The explosion occurred at South Fork Dairy near the town of Dimmitt on Monday 10 April and also left one person - a worker at the farm - in critical condition.
Castro County Sheriff Salvador Rivera has said that the fire was probably due to overheated equipment. The incident will be examined by state fire marshals.
"This was the deadliest barn fire for cattle in Texas history and the investigation and cleanup may take some time," Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said in a statement.
Only a small percentage of the cows at the farm survived the blaze, according to local news outlet KFDA, while officials have stated the remaining animals that are injured will ‘have to be destroyed’.
Footage of the disaster circulating on social media shows the sky engulfed in thick, brown smoke, with the sounds of the trapped cows heard from inside the buildings. Multiple animal rights groups shared the video, urging people to consider their food choices and adopt a vegan diet to prevent animals from being harmed.
Animal Welfare Insitute (AWI), one of the oldest animal protection groups in the US, is calling for federal laws to prevent barn fires, which are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of farmed animals every year.
“This [Texas explosion] would be the most deadly fire involving cattle in the past decade, since we started tracking that in 2013,” said spokesperson Marjorie Fishman.
Around 6.5 million farm animals have died in fires in the last decade, most of them poultry. This year alone, an estimated 144,699 farmed animals have been killed in barn fires so far, according to the group.
Credit: AWI
Currently, there are no laws or regulations in the US designed to protect farm animals from barn fires, while only a handful of states, not including Texas, have implemented fire codes for barns, said AWI in a statement.
AWI has developed a set of recommendations to prevent such tragedies from occurring. These guidelines include conducting annual inspections, ensuring access to fire extinguishers, formulating emergency action plans, conducting annual fire safety training, creating emergency lanes in structures, and several others.
"We hope the industry will remain focused on this issue and strongly encourage farms to adopt common-sense fire safety measures," said Allie Granger, policy associate for AWI's farm animal program. "It is hard to imagine anything worse than being burned alive."
Our choices matter to animals. In honor of the thousands of individuals who died in the fire, sign up for the Species Unite 7-Day Vegan Challenge here.
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