18,000 cows killed by 'mind boggling' explosion inside farm
Its the single most deadly incident of its kind in the United States.
More than 18,000 cows died and a person was left in a critical condition after an explosion tore through a barn in the United States this week.
Witnesses reported a massive plume of smoke could be seen rising from the Texas dairy farm 50km away on Tuesday (local time), hours after the fire started the previous evening. The cause of the explosion has not been determined, but authorities are investigating whether machinery ignited gas inside.
Local mayor Roger Malone described the scale of the tragedy as "mind-boggling". “I don’t think it’s ever happened before around here. It’s a real tragedy," he said.
Each cow killed in the Texas blaze was valued at US $2,000 ($3,000) according to US media, meaning the fire could cost the company millions of dollars.
Locals are now working to determine how they will dispose of the large number of corpses.
How many animals are killed by barn fires?
While this is the single deadliest cattle incident of its kind in the US in the last decade, barn blazes are not uncommon in the country. Approximately 6.5 million farm animals have been inadvertently killed since 2013, according to Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), but during this time only 7,385 cows were reported to have died in such fires.
Chickens are the farm animal most commonly killed in these events, with more than 6 million dying since 2013. That’s followed by turkeys at almost 192,462, pigs at 151,810, then other types of birds at 99,331.
But it’s not just fire that can devastate herds of livestock. In December 2015, a blizzard killed an estimated 15,000 dairy and 7,000 beef cattle, in the Texas Panhandle which is home to a herd of 600,000 animals.
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AWI also estimates hundreds of thousands of farm animals die in the US from extreme weather each year. In 2019, it claimed the lives of an estimated 927,710 animals, the majority of which were chickens, followed by cows, turkeys, then goats and sheep.
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