Around 18,000 cows were killed and one female employee was critically injured after a fire erupted inside a milking parlour at a dairy farm in Dimmitt, Texas, on April 10. In a statement, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, said, “While devastating, I’m grateful that there were no further injuries to agricultural workers or any loss of human life.” “This was the deadliest barn fire for cattle in Texas history and the investigation and cleanup may take some time,” he added. According to the Washington-based Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), a non-profit organisation that tracks barn fires, the incident is the deadliest fire for cows in the United States since at least 2013. The BBC reported that nearly three million farm animals have died in such fires across the country between 2018 and 2021. What happened at the dairy farm? As per USA Today, although the Texas fire officials are still investigating the incident, it might have taken place due to a farm equipment malfunction, which caused an explosion, leading to the fire. The emergency responders reached the spot after 7 pm and witnessed a plume of smoke, mushrooming over the plains. The female worker, who was trapped inside the farm, was rescued and rushed to a nearby hospital by helicopter. After the blaze was subdued, the officials noted that around 18,000 cows had been killed. USA Today said, “Most of the perished animals – a mix of Holstein and Jersey cows – were in a large holding pen before being milked.” It added that each cow was worth approximately $2,000 and the deceased cows made up 90 per cent of the farm's total herd. Meanwhile, the surviving cows were shifted to a different facility on the farm, but the local sheriffs told the media that some of those cattle suffered, too. “There's some that survived, there's some that are probably injured to the point where they'll have to be destroyed,” Castro County Sheriff Sal Rivera told the news channel KFDA. Are such fire incidents common in the US? As per AWI, around 6.5 million animals have died in barn fires in the country since 2013, of which 7,385 were cows. The biggest casualty has been chickens with six million of them getting killed in such incidents. Talking to CBS, Allie Granger, policy associate for AWI's farm animal program, urged the lawmakers and agriculture industry to pass stricter laws protecting animals from fire. “It is hard to imagine anything worse than being burned alive," Granger said. “We hope the industry will remain focused on this issue and strongly encourage farms to adopt common-sense fire safety measures.” What are the previous instances of animals dying en masse in the US? Notably, fire isn’t the only thing that has led to mass-scale deaths of livestock in the country. In 2016, a fierce blizzard killed more than 35,000 dairy cows in Texas, The New York Times mentioned. As “the wind blew mercilessly for 48 hours, leaving snow drifts as high as 14 feet”, cows and other animals developed frostbites and died. Next year, some cattle farmers in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas lost their herds due to catastrophic wildfires. The worst hit was Kansas, where an estimated 450,000 acres were burnt and thousands of cows were killed.
