Violations of biosafety norms in place to fight the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus emergency in Italy's mink breeding sector. The violations have been documented by LAV, releasing exclusive images, also of the Cremona breeding farm owned by the President of the Mink Breeders Association and in which, this past August, there were the first documented cases of minks testing positive for the coronavirus in Italy, for this reason subjected to particular monitoring of sanitary conditions which, evidently, were not always respected.
Images which, for institutions and citizens, call attention to the urgent decision to permanently close these breeding farms which, in addition to causing enormous suffering to animals, are also containers for the coronavirus.
The new, dramatic, videos distributed by LAV in the middle of this pandemic, show not only the inhumane conditions of thousands of farmed minks, piled into minuscule and lurid wire mesh cages (wire mesh also on the floor) and in precarious hygienic conditions, deprived of every basic ethological need (like climbing, digging, and swimming: minks are, in fact, semiaquatic animals), animals with serious injuries following episodes of aggression or self-inflicted wounds, minks with stereotypical behaviours, and even dead animals left in cages with live ones. The new video-indictment is "enriched"?by another striking fact: the operators systematically violate biosafety regulations put in place in order to avoid introducing the coronavirus into these breeding farms.