NEWS ROUND-UP: bringing you a digest of headlines you might have missed from the past week, covering animal agriculture, animal protection and environmental justice.

Animal death toll of Canadian climate disasters at 1.3 million

The recent flooding in British Columbia took the lives of an estimated 630,000 chickens, 12,000 pigs and 450 cows, while another 650,000 were killed during the country’s “heat dome”, Global News reported on Tuesday in an opinion piece discussing the impact of climate catastrophes and how to prevent them.

Many more still are expected to die as an indirect result of the flooding, with farmers having to euthanise animals upon returning to the barns and as part of rebuilding efforts across the Fraser Vally, a known floodplain.

In the aftermath of the floods, insurers and animal welfare advocates have questioned whether it is sensible to rebuild farms on floodplains where the chances of it happening again are high, and with the cost of protecting such areas prohibitively high.

“Farmers, meanwhile, say they’re the last people who want to see farm animals injured or killed. It eats into their profits and they have to cope with the emotional toll of cleaning up the carcasses,” Global News wrote.

It seems then that farmers are more comfortable about sending animals to slaughterhouses for someone else to kill and ‘process’, rather than deal with death themselves. Worse still is the fact that the changes to the climate that resulted in the flooding may have been accelerated by the very activities of these farmers, with animal agriculture a leading emitter of carbon in the form of methane from animals and carbon dioxide from machinery.

Leading dairy farmer fined £29,000 for pollution offences

A farm near Cheddar, UK, run by Royal Association of British Dairy Farmers chairman Peter Alvis, has been ordered to pay £37,184 after two pollution offences, Farmers Weekly reported on Thursday.

The high-profile farm supplies some of the UK’s leading retail chains, including Waitrose, Marks and Spencers and Sainsbury’s, all of which claim to be socially and environmentally responsible. Alvis Brothers also exports cheese and dairy products to more than 40 countries, according to the report.

Run-off from a heap of manure was found to have polluted more than half a kilometre of water with slurry, while on another occasion, pig slurry spread on fields found its way into the same watercourse. Environment Agency officials said the pollution resulted in a “chronic impact on the aquatic invertebrates living downstream of the farm.” 

District Judge Lynne Matthews said the farm’s conduct was “disgraceful” and “appalling”.

Environment Agency in trouble with farming bodies over vegan activist adviser

Farm groups have accused the UK’s Environment Agency (EA) of a conflict of interest after an employee revealed themselves to be a prolific vegan and animal rights activist, Farmers Guardian reported.

Tim Bailey, a technical advisor to the EA working on Nitrate Vulnerable Zones (NVZs) and diffuse pollution, was found to have shared pro-vegan social media posts and spoken at the National Animal Rights March in London, organised by Animal Rebellion, a campaign group working to end animal agriculture and replace it with a plant-based food system.

Bailey has also written a book entitled Livestock’s Longer Shadow, and is working with the Vegan Land Movement on its buy-outs of dairy grazing pastureland for the purposes of rewilding and creating veganic community orchards while conducting research on how such projects can improve soil health and provide valuable data to prove their effectiveness and many benefits compared to animal farming.

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Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.

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