Footage from a feedlot in Arizona
April 11th, 2009 in updates from the road, videos by Eric
I tweeted yesterday about stopping along our route to San Diego to shoot footage of a feedlot that we saw off I-8. The photo I uploaded with that tweet hardly did justice to the place, so I thought I’d share one of our video clips here, which was shot from our van as we drove from one end of the lot to the other. Even this does not begin to give you the scale of what we encountered, as the closest we could get to the cows was the narrower end of the lot:
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April 11th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Do cows sleep laying down? Weird question but I just realized I didn’t know if those cows were asleep or sick/dead. What I think is what makes all of this so horrible is the smell. I’ve driven between Colorado and Texas a number of times and there are feedlots along the way and the smell of manure is almost overpowering. It feels like it’s just hanging in the air. It doesn’t seem so bad seeing cows standing around until you realize that it’s mostly their own feces, not dirt, that they are standing in.
April 22nd, 2009 at 7:39 am
OMG, miles and miles and miles of cows! How disgraceful. They should be grazing out in the open. How sad. I’m so glad I stopped drinking milk.
April 22nd, 2009 at 11:16 pm
Um… not to mention they’ve been bred for miserable overproduction of milk and are probably milked all the time when not eating or sleeping. And that they’ll die quite young due to overmilking. Not to mention that there are no calves there drinking their mothers’ milk – calves are out of sight and out of mind.
And it just goes on and on and on, this feedlot. I’m thinking, “When does it end?!?!”
May 12th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
A mass of cows…too many to count…it’s almost numbing if you stare at the video too long…but each cow in the video, in the lot, is an individual experiencing life…a miserable life at this place, followed by a miserable death. My hope is that this film, and a million other things activists are doing, will get people to caring, thinking, questioning, and changing, so that scenes like this are a distant memory some day.