Womans outrage as dead calf dumped in driveway

“Who in their right mind puts a dead animal into a vehicle and drives it somewhere to dump it?”

Amy Carroll discovered a dead calf in her driveway recently. Someone had driven to her property in Clonfad, Dalystown and dumped the animal.

To the passer-by, you might never know that a family lived there. Amy’s home is located at the end of a long driveway, which to all intents and purposes, looks like the entrance to an idyllic forestry.

But there is a family living there and for Amy and her family, it was a disturbing discovery to make.

“I want to highlight this because, first of all, what’s happening in the farmer’s farm? What way are they treating their animals if they can do this? Should they even have a licence to hold animals because this isn’t right at the end of the day,” Amy told the Westmeath Examiner.

Amy’s first port of call was to the gardaí, who inspected the dead calf, and found the animal hadn’t been tagged.

“The farmer was banking on the fact that because it hadn’t been tagged, it couldn’t be traced back to him. They thought they’d get away with it.”

Amy now has to pay for the removal of the dead animal from her property. She tried every avenue to try and locate the owner, in a bid to name and shame.

“I tried every office in the Department of Agriculture, and I kept being passed from one office to the other. I can’t tell you how many calls I made, to Dublin, Tullamore... The mind boggles – the fact that no one is interested in finding out who’s behind it. And if that’s the case couldn’t anyone do it?” she asks. “Ireland is supposed to be all about traceability.”

Amy is in the process of sending a sample for a BVD test, in the hope that the calf can be traced back to the farmer’s herd.

“Farmers are telling me a test can be done, a BVD test, to check its origin. Every cow at some stage has had a blood test done.

“It’s probable that the cow has had a calf before this one and therefore would be in the system,” she explains.

This is not the first time Amy has experienced dumping on her land.

“Some people don’t know that there’s a home at the end of this lane. They tend to come in and dump. I’ve had a chap dump here before. There were bags and bags of rubbish and I went through it and I finally found a name in amongst it all. He was made to come and pick it all up and had to pay a fine.

“On any farm you will have so many calves that will die because of natural causes. But you dispose of the animal right.

“If I can’t trace who it belongs to, I want them to know that they haven’t got away with it. It’s in the newspaper, people now know.

“Truthfully, every farmer, their herd calves at certain times of the year. Most farmers will know when each farmer’s herd is calving. So someone in reading the newspaper will say, 'Do you know what, I know who that is’.

“Eventually it will come out who it is. There will be nothing done but it might prevent them from doing it again.”