Animal cruelty charges have been filed against three people after a graphic video was released that showed workers at a northwest Indiana farm kicking and throwing young calves.
The Newton County Sheriff’s Office said 31-year-old Santiago Ruvalcaba Contreros, 36-year-old Edgar Gardozo Vazquez and 39-year-old Miguel Angel Navarro Serrano are each charged with “beating a vertebrate animal,” a misdemeanor. Investigators are still trying to locate them and no arrests have been made as of Tuesday morning.
WARNING: Video features graphic content
An investigator with Animal Recovery Mission, a Miami-based animal rights group, secretly recorded the disturbing footage in 2018 while working for several months at Fair Oaks Farms, a popular destination for school field trips that Food & Wine magazine has called the “Disneyland of agricultural tourism.”
The group said that the footage shows the “daily mistreatment of the resident farm animals” at the farm’s dairies about 70 miles south of Chicago located off I-65 in northwest Indiana.
Fair Oaks Farms founder Mike McCloskey said in a statement last week that four employees seen in the video have been fired and actions have been taken to prevent further abuse. A fifth person shown in the video was a third-party truck driver who was transporting calves, he said.