During controls, emaciated cattle lying in the droppings were discovered. The farmers had it explained in court that they were overwhelmed after their son’s car accident.
In the first trial of the Allgäu animal welfare scandal, three farmers were sentenced to suspended sentences at the Kempten district court. For those responsible for the family business, a married couple and their adult son, the sentences of one year and three months to one year and eight months are “appropriate and sufficient,” said the presiding judge, Christoph Schwiebacher, on Tuesday. The court thus remained just below the demands of the public prosecutor’s office. The judgment is final.
At the start of the trial, the three accused farmers had admitted that they had neglected cattle on their farm in the Oberallgäu district for months in more than 100 individual cases. They had their defense lawyers explain that they had been overwhelmed by the dairy farm, which had only recently been increased from 180 to almost 600 cattle, after their son had had a car accident.
The farmers have given up the business
During controls from October 2019 to March 2020, veterinarians found emaciated animals lying in faeces, cattle with inflamed claws and overcrowded stalls. The three farmers are now banned from keeping animals and have given up their business.
In the wake of the Allgäu animal welfare scandal, several farms hit the headlines between July 2019 and January 2020 because of massive animal welfare violations. The trigger was video recordings that are said to have come from a company in the Unterallgäu district. The process in this case at the Memmingen district court is still pending.