An investigation by For All Animals, a coalition of 14 campaigning organisations including Animal Aid, has uncovered more than 700 incidents of abuse in just three days at Two Pools Farm in Gloucestershire.
Hidden cameras captured newborn calves being kicked, hit, thrown and dragged, alongside repeated verbal abuse. Footage also shows calves being subjected to painful procedures including dehorning and castration – both of which are legal and routine under RSPCA Assured guidelines.
Most disturbingly, one calf was force-fed milk through a tube which entered her lungs, causing her to drown to death. Documents showed many other calves had also recently died by drowning.
The farm supplies major retailers including Marks & Spencer who, on the same day cameras were filming, carried out an inspection. Filming shows workers were aware of the inspection and deliberately carried out a ‘clean-up operation’ prior to the assessor’s arrival.
In fact, Two Pools Farm was inspected by M&S, Müller, and by RSPCA Assured, and not a single one found cause for concern, highlighting the gulf between the reassuring image presented to shoppers and the reality experienced by animals.
Read the full For All Animals investigation.
No welfare label can give animals freedom
The findings are deeply disturbing but they also expose a more fundamental problem: that even the strongest welfare standards cannot make animal exploitation acceptable.
When welfare schemes fail, the answer is often to introduce more rules, more inspections, or for retailers to drop a particular supplier. But audits can only ever show a snapshot of an animal’s life – often the mere few minutes that an assessor spends on location – and even then, as we’ve demonstrated with our own investigation into Food Standards Agency (FSA) audits of slaughterhouses, audits rarely result in meaningful action.
A welfare label may promise that animals have been treated according to certain rules, but it cannot give a calf her mother back. This latest investigation should prompt serious questions for the retailers, regulators, and assurance schemes involved. But it should also prompt all of us to look beyond the labels on animal products.
