Science

Jane Goodall, trailblazing naturalist whose intimate observations of chimpanzees transformed our understanding of humankind, has died

Published

7 months ago

October 12, 2025

Jane Goodall, trailblazing naturalist whose intimate observations of chimpanzees transformed our understanding of humankind, has died

Jane Goodall, the trailblazing naturalist whose intimate observations of chimpanzees in the African wild produced powerful insights that transformed basic conceptions of humankind, has died. She was 91.

A tireless advocate of preserving chimpanzees’ natural habitat, Goodall died on Wednesday morning in California of natural causes, the Jane Goodall Institute announced on its Instagram page.

“Dr. Goodall’s discoveries as an ethologist revolutionized science,” the Jane Goodall Institute said in a statement.

For the record:

5:45 p.m. Oct. 2, 2025An earlier version of this story stated the chimpanzees are “humankind’s closest living ancestors.” They are humans’ closest living relatives, but not our ancestors.

A protege of anthropologist Louis S.B. Leakey, Goodall made history in 1960 when she discovered that chimpanzees, humankind’s closest living relatives, made and used tools, characteristics that scientists had long thought were exclusive to humans.

She also found that chimps hunted prey, ate meat, and were capable of a range of emotions and behaviors similar to those of humans, including filial love, grief and violence bordering on warfare.

In the course of establishing one of the world’s longest-running studies of wild animal behavior at what is now Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park, she gave her chimp subjects names instead of numbers, a practice that raised eyebrows in the male-dominated field of primate studies in the 1960s. But within a decade, the trim British scientist with the tidy ponytail was a National Geographic heroine, whose books and films educated a worldwide audience with stories of the apes she called David Graybeard, Mr. McGregor, Gilka and Flo.

“When we read about a woman who gives funny names to chimpanzees and then follows them into the bush, meticulously recording their every grunt and groom, we are reluctant to admit such activity into the big leagues,” the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote of the scientific world’s initial reaction to Goodall.

But Goodall overcame her critics and produced work that Gould later characterized as “one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.”

Tenacious and keenly observant, Goodall paved the way for other women in primatology, including the late gorilla researcher Dian Fossey and orangutan expert Birutė Galdikas. She was honored in 1995 with the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal, which then had been bestowed only 31 times in the previous 90 years to such eminent figures as North Pole explorer Robert E. Peary and aviator Charles Lindbergh.

In her 80s she continued to travel 300 days a year to speak to schoolchildren and others about the need to fight deforestation, preserve chimpanzees’ natural habitat and promote sustainable development in Africa. She was in California as part of her speaking tour in the U.S. at the time of her death.

Jane Goodall in Gombe National Park in Tanzania.

(Chase Pickering / Jane Goodall Institute)

Goodall was born April 3, 1934, in London and grew up in the English coastal town of Bournemouth. The daughter of a businessman and a writer who separated when she was a child and later divorced, she was raised in a matriarchal household that included her maternal grandmother, her mother, Vanne, some aunts and her sister, Judy.

She demonstrated an affinity for nature from a young age, filling her bedroom with worms and sea snails that she rushed back to their natural homes after her mother told her they would otherwise die.

When she was about 5, she disappeared for hours to a dark henhouse to see how chickens laid eggs, so absorbed that she was oblivious to her family’s frantic search for her. She did not abandon her study until she observed the wondrous event.

“Suddenly with a plop, the egg landed on the straw. With clucks of pleasure the hen shook her feathers, nudged the egg with her beak, and left,” Goodall wrote almost 60 years later. “It is quite extraordinary how clearly I remember that whole sequence of events.”

When finally she ran out of the henhouse with the exciting news, her mother did not scold her but patiently listened to her daughter’s account of her first scientific observation.

Later, she gave Goodall books about animals and adventure — especially the Doctor Dolittle tales and Tarzan. Her daughter became so enchanted with Tarzan’s world that she insisted on doing her homework in a tree.

“I was madly in love with the Lord of the Jungle, terribly jealous of his Jane,” Goodall wrote in her 1999 memoir, “Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey.” “It was daydreaming about life in the forest with Tarzan that led to my determination to go to Africa, to live with animals and write books about them.”

Her opportunity came after she finished high school. A week before Christmas in 1956 she was invited to visit an old school chum’s family farm in Kenya. Goodall saved her earnings from a waitress job until she had enough for a round-trip ticket.

Jane Goodall gives a little kiss to Tess, a 5- or 6-year-old female chimpanzee, in 1997.

She arrived in Kenya in 1957, thrilled to be living in the Africa she had “always felt stirring in my blood.” At a dinner party in Nairobi shortly after her arrival, someone told her that if she was interested in animals, she should meet Leakey, already famous for his discoveries in East Africa of man’s fossil ancestors.

She went to see him at what’s now the National Museum of Kenya, where he was curator. He hired her as a secretary and soon had her helping him and his wife, Mary, dig for fossils at Olduvai Gorge, a famous site in the Serengeti Plains in what is now northern Tanzania.

Leakey spoke to her of his desire to learn more about all the great apes. He said he had heard of a community of chimpanzees on the rugged eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika where an intrepid researcher might make valuable discoveries.

When Goodall told him this was exactly the kind of work she dreamed of doing, Leakey agreed to send her there.

It took Leakey two years to find funding, which gave Goodall time to study primate behavior and anatomy in London. She finally landed in Gombe in the summer of 1960.

On a rocky outcropping she called the Peak, Goodall made her first important observation. Scientists had thought chimps were docile vegetarians, but on this day about three months after her arrival, Goodall spied a group of the apes feasting on something pink. It turned out to be a baby bush pig.

Two weeks later, she made an even more exciting discovery — the one that would establish her reputation. She had begun to recognize individual chimps, and on a rainy October day in 1960, she spotted the one with white hair on his chin. He was sitting beside a mound of red earth, carefully pushing a blade of grass into a hole, then withdrawing it and poking it into his mouth.

When he finally ambled off, Goodall hurried over for a closer look. She picked up the abandoned grass stalk, stuck it into the same hole and pulled it out to find it covered with termites. The chimp she later named David Graybeard had been using the stalk to fish for the bugs.

“It was hard for me to believe what I had seen,” Goodall later wrote. “It had long been thought that we were the only creatures on earth that used and made tools. ‘Man the Toolmaker’ is how we were defined …” What Goodall saw challenged man’s uniqueness.

When she sent her report to Leakey, he responded: “We must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human!”

Goodall’s startling finding, published in Nature in 1964, enabled Leakey to line up funding to extend her stay at Gombe. It also eased Goodall’s admission to Cambridge University to study ethology. In 1965, she became the eighth person in Cambridge history to earn a doctorate without first having a bachelor’s degree.

In the meantime, she had met and in 1964 married Hugo Van Lawick, a gifted filmmaker who had traveled to Gombe to make a documentary about her chimp project. They had a child, Hugo Eric Louis — later nicknamed Grub — in 1967.

Goodall later said that raising Grub, who lived at Gombe until he was 9, gave her insights into the behavior of chimp mothers. Conversely, she had “no doubt that my observation of the chimpanzees helped me to be a better mother.”

She and Van Lawick were married for 10 years, divorcing in 1974. The following year she married Derek Bryceson, director of Tanzania National Parks. He died of colon cancer four years later.

Within a year of arriving at Gombe, Goodall had chimps literally eating out of her hands. Toward the end of her second year there, David Graybeard, who had shown the least fear of her, was the first to allow her physical contact. She touched him lightly and he permitted her to groom him for a full minute before gently pushing her hand away. For an adult male chimpanzee who had grown up in the wild to tolerate physical contact with a human was, she wrote in her 1971 book “In the Shadow of Man,” “a Christmas gift to treasure.”

Jane Goodall shares a play with Bahati, a 3-year-old female chimpanzee.

Her studies yielded a trove of other observations on behaviors, including etiquette (such as soliciting a pat on the rump to indicate submission) and the sex lives of chimps. She collected some of the most fascinating information on the latter by watching Flo, an older female with a bulbous nose and an amazing retinue of suitors who was bearing children well into her 40s.

Her reports initially caused much skepticism in the scientific community. “I was not taken very seriously by many of the scientists. I was known as a [National] Geographic cover girl,” she recalled in a CBS interview in 2012.

Her unorthodox personalizing of the chimps was particularly controversial. The editor of one of her first published papers insisted on crossing out all references to the creatures as “he” or “she” in favor of “it.” Goodall eventually prevailed.

Her most disturbing studies came in the mid-1970s, when she and her team of field workers began to record a series of savage attacks.

The incidents grew into what Goodall called the four-year war, a period of brutality carried out by a band of male chimpanzees from a region known as the Kasakela Valley. The marauders beat and slashed to death all the males in a neighboring colony and subjugated the breeding females, essentially annihilating an entire community.

It was the first time a scientist had witnessed organized aggression by one group of non-human primates against another. Goodall said this “nightmare time” forever changed her view of ape nature.

“During the first 10 years of the study I had believed … that the Gombe chimpanzees were, for the most part, rather nicer than human beings,” she wrote in “Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey,” a 1999 book co-authored with Phillip Berman. “Then suddenly we found that the chimpanzees could be brutal — that they, like us, had a dark side to their nature.”

Critics tried to dismiss the evidence as merely anecdotal. Others thought she was wrong to publicize the violence, fearing that irresponsible scientists would use the information to “prove” that the tendency to war is innate in humans, a legacy from their ape ancestors. Goodall persisted in talking about the attacks, maintaining that her purpose was not to support or debunk theories about human aggression but to “understand a little better” the nature of chimpanzee aggression.

“My question was: How far along our human path, which has led to hatred and evil and full-scale war, have chimpanzees traveled?”

Her observations of chimp violence marked a turning point for primate researchers, who had considered it taboo to talk about chimpanzee behavior in human terms. But by the 1980s, much chimp behavior was being interpreted in ways that would have been labeled anthropomorphism — ascribing human traits to non-human entities — decades earlier. Goodall, in removing the barriers, raised primatology to new heights, opening the way for research on subjects ranging from political coalitions among baboons to the use of deception by an array of primates.

Her concern about protecting chimpanzees in the wild and in captivity led her in 1977 to found the Jane Goodall Institute to advocate for great apes and support research and public education. She also established Roots and Shoots, a program aimed at youths in 130 countries, and TACARE, which involves African villagers in sustainable development.

She became an international ambassador for chimps and conservation in 1986 when she saw a film about the mistreatment of laboratory chimps. The secretly taped footage “was like looking into the Holocaust,” she told interviewer Cathleen Rountree in 1998. From that moment, she became a globe-trotting crusader for animal rights.

In the 2017 documentary “Jane,” the producer pored through 140 hours of footage of Goodall that had been hidden away in the National Geographic archives. The film won a Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. Award, one of many honors it received.

In a ranging 2009 interview with Times columnist Patt Morrison, Goodall mused on topics from traditional zoos — she said most captive environments should be abolished — to climate change, a battle she feared humankind was quickly losing, if not lost already. She also spoke about the power of what one human can accomplish.

“I always say, ‘If you would spend just a little bit of time learning about the consequences of the choices you make each day’ — what you buy, what you eat, what you wear, how you interact with people and animals — and start consciously making choices, that would be beneficial rather than harmful.”

As the years passed, Goodall continued to track Gombe’s chimps, accumulating enough information to draw the arcs of their lives — from birth through sometimes troubled adolescence, maturity, illness and finally death.

She wrote movingly about how she followed Mr. McGregor, an older, somewhat curmudgeonly chimp, through his agonizing death from polio, and how the orphan Gilka survived to lonely adulthood only to have her babies snatched from her by a pair of cannibalistic female chimps.

Her reaction in 1972 to the death of Flo, a prolific female known as Gombe’s most devoted mother, suggested the depth of feeling that Goodall had for the animals. Knowing that Flo’s faithful son Flint was nearby and grieving, Goodall watched over the body all night to keep marauding bush pigs from violating her remains.

“People say to me, thank you for giving them characters and personalities,” Goodall once told CBS’s “60 Minutes.” “I said I didn’t give them anything. I merely translated them for people.”

Woo is a former Times staff writer.

Science

5 Great Stargazing Trains

Published

6 hours ago

May 14, 2026

Press Room

Stargazing, it turns out, doesn’t have to be a stationary activity.

On railway lines around the world, from the Arctic Circle to New Zealand, a select set of evening train excursions take riders deep into dark-sky territory — some en route to remote station stops decked out with telescopes, others featuring onboard astronomers.

These five rail journeys (all of which are accessible) range from two- to three-hour desert outings to a hunt for the northern lights. One route even has a planetarium on rails. All promise a renewed appreciation of train travel — and of our pale blue dot’s improbable place in the cosmos.

Nevada

The Great Basin Star Train

Any stargazing train worth its salt requires one thing: a dark sky. The Star Train resoundingly checks that box, traveling through a part of eastern Nevada that is one of the least-populated places in the lower 48.

Run by the Nevada Northern Railway in partnership with nearby Great Basin National Park, the train departs the historic East Ely Depot, in Ely, Nev., early enough in the evening to catch the sunset over the Steptoe Valley, and then cruises through darkening skies to its destination: a remote corner of the desert appropriately called Star Flat, where a stargazing platform outfitted with telescopes awaits. There, riders disembark (equipped with red-light necklaces to help preserve their night vision) and take turns viewing the cosmos, guided by professional astronomers. (Last year’s onboard stargazing guides came from Caltech; in previous seasons, the National Park Service’s Dark Rangers, who specialize in night-sky activities, accompanied trips.)

The Star Train makes its two-and-a-half-hour round-trip journey most Friday evenings between mid-May and mid-September, and tickets ($65 for adults) can sell out almost a year in advance — though members of the Nevada Northern Railway Museum get early access. Alternatively, the railroad’s more frequent Sunset, Stars and Champagne excursions trade telescopes for desert sundowners but feature the same expert stargazers and the same Nevada night sky, which is often dark enough to see the Milky Way with the naked eye.

New Mexico

The Stargazer

While plenty of heritage railroads across the United States offer twilight rides and nighttime excursions, at the moment there’s only one other dedicated, regularly scheduled stargazing train in North America besides the Star Train: the Stargazer, operated by Sky Railway, in Santa Fe, N.M.

Much like its Nevada counterpart, the Stargazer makes a two-and-a-half-hour round trip through dark-sky country, though in this case, the journey really is the destination, because it doesn’t make any stops. More of a rolling night-sky revue, the Stargazer features live music and professional astronomers who share their celestial knowledge and stories as the train rumbles into the vast Galisteo Basin south of Santa Fe. Sky Railway’s colorfully painted trains feature heated, enclosed passenger cars to stave off the evening chill and flatbed cars open to the night sky.

Departing from the Santa Fe Depot downtown, the train normally runs once a month (adult tickets from $139, including a champagne welcome toast). Sky Railway also occasionally schedules excursions for special celestial events.

New Zealand

Matariki Rail Experience

With its alpine landscapes and rugged coastline, New Zealand’s South Island is practically tailor-made for scenic daytime train journeys. But when night falls, the sparsely populated island — home to the Southern Hemisphere’s largest International Dark Sky Reserve — is heaven for stargazers, too.

This year, Great Journeys New Zealand, which operates the country’s tourist-centric long-distance trains, is offering a special nighttime run of the Coastal Pacific, whose route skirts the South Island’s northeastern coast. Timed to Matariki, the Maori new year, which is heralded by the first rising of the Pleiades star cluster, the eight-hour round trip from Christchurch is a cultural and astronomical celebration.

After the first half of a four-course onboard dinner, the train arrives in Kaikoura, in dark-sky country, for a guided stargazing stop with a range of telescopes — and fire pits and a night market. (The rain plan involves a virtual stargazing session at the local museum using virtual reality headsets.) Dinner resumes back on the train as it returns to Christchurch. This is a strictly limited engagement, on the rails for one night only: July 11, for 499 New Zealand dollars, about $295, per person.

In the far northern reaches of Norway, inside the Arctic Circle, you can ride a train that chases another wonder of the night sky: the aurora borealis. Twice a week from October to March, the Northern Lights Train takes its riders into the dark polar night in pursuit of the aurora’s celestial light show.

From the remote town of Narvik, the train travels along the Ofoten Railway, the northernmost passenger rail line in Western Europe. The destination on this three-hour round-trip excursion (1,495 kroner, or about $160) is Katterat, a mountain village accessible only by rail and free of light pollution, making it an ideal place to spot the aurora. At the Katterat station, local guides and a campfire cookout await, as does a lavvu, the traditional tent used by the Sami people of northern Scandinavia, offering a respite from the cold (as well as hot drinks and an open fire for roasting sausages).

And aboard the train, the lights stay off, which means that on a clear night, you might even catch the northern lights on the way there and back.

Leave it to Japan to take the stargazing train to another level.

The High Rail 1375 train — so named because it runs along Japan’s highest-elevation railway line (the high point is 1,375 meters, or roughly 4,500 feet, above sea level) — is one of JR East’s deliberately unhurried Joyful Trains, which the railway company describes as “not only a means of transportation, but also a package of various pleasures.” This astronomy-themed train certainly packs plenty of joy into its two cars, with seat upholstery inspired by constellations, a snack bar, a souvenir shop and a planetarium car with a library of astronomy books and images of the night sky projected onto its domed ceiling.

The train makes two daytime runs along the mountainous Koumi Line, taking a little over two hours to travel between Kobuchizawa (accessible by express train from Tokyo) and Komoro. But the main event is the High Rail Hoshizora (“Starry Sky”) evening trip, which includes an extended stop at Nobeyama Station (the highest in the country) for a guided stargazing session. A one-way ride on High Rail 1375, which runs on weekends and occasional weekdays, requires a seat reservation if you’re traveling on a Japan Rail pass, or a stand-alone ticket plus seat reservation (2,440 yen, or about $15). And remember to preorder a special “Starry Sky” bento box.

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Science

A Physicist Who Thinks in Poetry from the Cosmic Edge

Published

18 hours ago

May 13, 2026

Press Room

A Physicist Who Thinks in Poetry from the Cosmic Edge

Much of the praise for Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s debut book in 2021, “The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred,” lauded the way she used personal experiences in physics to discuss the social and political inequities that exist alongside scientific breakthroughs.

“It contains the narrative of dreams deferred,” Dr. Prescod-Weinstein, a physicist at the University of New Hampshire, explained in April at a bookstore in Chicago. But its very existence, she said, also “represented a dream deferred, because that was not the dream of what my first book was going to be.”

Her second book reclaims that dream. Released on April 7, “The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie” is less pain and more play, a homage to the big questions that made Dr. Prescod-Weinstein want to become a physicist in the first place. She begins the book by asserting that it is humanity’s duty to uncover and share the story of our universe. Her latest offering toward that duty is a journey through physics that is tightly bound to her own cultural roots.

In the midst of a multicity book tour, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein spoke with The New York Times about guiding readers through the cosmos from her own point of view and about some of the art, poetry and literature she drew on to shape that journey. This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Why include so many references to poetry in a book about physics?

I knew poetry before I knew physics. It was part of my upbringing. I loved A.A. Milne’s “Now We Are Six” and Edward Lear’s “Nonsense Limericks.” Both of my books draw their subtitles from Langston Hughes’s “Montage of a Dream Deferred.”

Adrienne Rich’s poem “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” became a guiding light for how my work would move in the world. It also opened up for me that I need language. That’s true among physicists. Even an equation is a sentence; even an equation is telling a story.

As physicists, we’re always working in language to connect what we learn with what we know. Poetry is one of the first places that my brain goes to draw those links. Language, as it moves in my brain, is often in Hughes and Rich and Shakespeare. Those are the lines that flicker up for me.

What if we got away from the argument that doing cosmology and particle physics is practical or materially valuable? Then we have to accept that we’re like the poets. What we do is important culturally in the same way poetry is. A piece of this book is me saying there is value in banding with the poets, and fighting for the value of being curious and trying to articulate the world with whatever tools are available to us. Not for the purposes of selling something, but for the purpose of fulfilling our humanity.

Another theme throughout the book is the story of Lewis Carroll’s Alice and her adventures in Wonderland.

Being a science adviser on future installments in The Legendborn Cycle, a fantasy series written by Tracy Deonn, is one reason Alice is in my book. It has allowed me to be open to the playful side that physics, as a Black queer person, can take from you. I wanted the book to be whimsical, because that’s who I was when I first arrived in physics, and that’s who I want to be when I die.

Part of the call of quantum physics is to change what our sense and sensibility are. When you look at the world through this framework — like the idea that particles have spin but don’t really spin — it sounds like nonsense. Except that’s literally how the universe works. Physics is our “through the looking glass.” It’s real.

Your first chapter invites readers to reflect on the metaphors used to describe the universe, like the “fabric” of space-time or electromagnetic “fields.” Why open in this way?

A lot of books about quantum physics start with its history. I wanted as much as possible not to just do that. I had actually planned to start it with the Stern-Gerlach experiment of 1922. But then I read an essay by the poet Natasha Trethewey about abiding metaphors and started to ask myself what the abiding metaphors of my physics training were.

We don’t ever take time in our classes to ask, “What do we mean when we say ‘space’? What do we mean when we say ‘space-time’?” There are these metaphysical questions that I often told myself were for the philosophers. This book was me letting myself think of them as physics.

One metaphor you invoke is the “edge” — not only the edge of the universe and of scientists’ understanding, but also existing at the edge of certain identities.

In “Disordered Cosmos,” I talked a lot about being at the margin and looking toward the center. With “The Edge of Space-Time,” I’m choosing to make the margin the center of the story. Part of that was me fully embracing what makes me the physicist I am. I’m an L.A. Dodgers fan. I love “Alice in Wonderland.” I love “Star Trek.” There’s lots of all of that in the book.

Picking a metaphor is a culturally situated decision. I wrote a line that says black holes are the best laid edges in the universe. I did, at some point, think that only some people were going to get this. But for people who don’t understand the reference to Black hairstyles, the sentence is still legible. And for those who do, it will feel like we just had an in-group moment. Anyone who thinks about laying their edges deserves to have an in-group moment in a physics book. Because we are physics, too.

Black students are often told that if you want to be a physicist, then you will make yourself as close to such-and-such mold as possible. At a young age, we have this understanding that whiteness and science are associated with each other, but we are also witnessing in ourselves that this can’t be entirely correct. There’s this narration of, “Well, sure, you can be Black in physics, but that means you have to acclimate to the ‘in physics’ part, and never that physics has to acclimate to the Black part.”

I use the example of rapper Big K.R.I.T.’s song “My Sub Pt. 3 (Big Bang),” in which someone tries to wire up subwoofers in his car but fries the wires because he doesn’t ground them properly. I don’t know if Big K.R.I.T. would think of this as a science story, but I think we should learn to read it as one. Not to contain it in science, but to say it overlaps there. This can be a rap song. It can be about the cultural significance of subwoofers and the Big Bang as a metaphor for the beat. And it can also be about cosmology and about how everybody who wires up cars or does this kind of work is a scientist, too.

How do you want readers to approach this book?

There is this feeling that you’re supposed to read a book like this and walk away an expert. That’s actually not the point of this book at all. The point is to wander through physics. Even if math terrifies you, you are entitled to spend some time with it.

And so here, I have made you a book with a bunch of tidbits on the oddities of the universe. The universe is stranger and more queer and more wonderful and more full of possibility than whatever limitations you might be experiencing right now. Physics challenges what we are told are social norms. For example, non-trinary neutrinos are fundamental to our standard model of physics.

“Non-trinary,” as in they shift between three different forms.

Non-trinary is natural. It’s such a challenge to the current anti-trans rhetoric that says people can only ever be one thing.

I don’t need my book to be the most important thing that someone reads. But I want it to be a source of hope. If it reminds you that, as my mom says, the universe is bigger than the bad things that are happening to us, then that’s all you need to remember. I’m good with that.

Science

Footage shows Central Valley dairy workers kicking young calves, pulling them with pliers

Published

1 day ago

May 13, 2026

Press Room

Footage shows Central Valley dairy workers kicking young calves, pulling them with pliers

In late February, animal rights activists flew a drone over a calf ranch in the Central Valley and watched as workers kicked and punched the animals.

For the record:

7:15 p.m. May 12, 2026This article has been updated to reflect that no calves from Agresti Calf Ranch have ever gone on to be used for Clover Sonoma milk supplies, and the calf ranch opened only in 2025. In additional comments, Clover Sonoma also said in the future, no animals from Agresti Calf Ranch will be part of its supply.

Footage reviewed by The Times shows a worker pulling a calf by the nose with pliers.

It shows two workers removing the budding horns of a calf with a hot iron. While one held the frightened animal’s head, the other — wearing a sweatshirt with an image of the Virgin Mary — applied the iron to a horn. After a puff of smoke, the calf fell to its side, appearing motionless.

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Both male and female calves produce horns. To prevent injury to the animals and their handlers, these are commonly removed. Humane guidelines require anesthesia.

The footage was collected by the group Direct Action Everywhere, known for tactics including releasing beagles from medical breeding facilities and abused calves from farms. It was shot at the Agresti Calf Ranch in Ceres, near Modesto, which is certified by the American Humane Society for its ethical treatment of animals. The workers could not be reached for comment. One was subsequently terminated, the Humane Society said.

The Agresti Calf Ranch opened in 2025 and is operated by the owners of Double D Dairy, just up the road. Double D Dairy owns more than 10,000 cows across several operations.

The owner of Double D, Dominic Assali, declined to answer questions in person. A phone number for the dairy online is disconnected. In response to an email to his personal account, Assali said, “Animal welfare and safety are incredibly important to us, and we have a zero-tolerance policy for any mistreatment.

“We’ll always take immediate, thorough action to address any operational issues, as we have in this instance,” the email said.

The American Humane Society is a 150-year-old nonprofit focused on animal welfare. Among other things, it certifies animal safety on farms as well as on movie sets. In a statement, it said only 10% of animals raised on farms in the U.S. are certified as humanely treated.

Assali is the grandson of the farm’s founders, Harold and Marlene Agresti. He is a board member of Western United Dairies, the largest dairy trade group in California.

The mistreatment captured on video has also created a headache for a prominent California sustainable milk brand, Clover Sonoma, based in Sonoma County.

It gets 10% to 15% of its milk from Double D, and Assali and his family are featured on Clover Sonoma’s website. No calves from Agresti Calf Ranch have ever gone on to be used in Clover Sonoma milk supplies, the company said in a statement. It’s unclear whether the abused calves were being raised for beef or dairy.

A Clover Sonoma sign hung outside the main dairy complex on a recent visit.

Clover Sonoma markets its milk, yogurt and cheese products as humanely sourced and environmentally sound. It was the first dairy company to receive a cruelty-free certification from the American Humane Society in 2000. The website also features a “Our Promise” page, which states the company demands “the humane treatment of animals.”

“We were deeply concerned by the reported mistreatment of some cows captured on video at Agresti Calf Ranch during a separate cow operation,” the company said in an email.

“The rough handling shown at Agresti Calf Ranch is contrary and inconsistent with the humane practices we have fostered for decades and which we demand of all our suppliers.”

Clover Sonoma said it suspended business with Double D as soon as it became aware of the incidents and began “a rigorous audit,” which just ended.

“Clover and the American Humane Society have concluded that the mistreatment was an isolated issue, not systemic or reflective of Agresti Calf Ranch’s personnel. Corrections have been made, including the termination of the employee in the video. As such, we are comfortable reinstating the milk from Double D Dairy.”

After this story published, Clover went further and said a condition of Double D’s reinstatement will be that no animals from Agresti Calf Ranch will be part of Clover’s dairy supply.

A statement from the Humane Society said Clover Sonoma is working with Double D to strengthen its whistleblower policy and training, and has “reiterated its commitment to ongoing independent, third-party audits,” with both announced and unannounced visits.

Clover Sonoma mainly buys and processes milk from dairies in verdant Sonoma County, as the company’s marketing suggests. Double D Dairy is one of its few suppliers in the Central Valley, which is associated more with industrial-scale agriculture.

On a recent weekday, the calf ranch and dairy farm were visible from a public road. Holstein calves, a popular dairy breed, could be seen in cages through small trees in front of the enclosures. The sound of mooing and a pressure washer could be heard. The smell of manure and dirt wafted in the humid air.

Most dairy companies remove calves from their mothers after birth, raising them separately so they don’t take the mother’s commercially valuable milk. Some dairy farms send calves out to third-party calf ranches for rearing. Others raise them on-site. Female calves are typically raised to become milk cows. Male calves are sent away to become beef or other meat-based products, such as pet food.

A 2025 State Water Board document shows the farm houses an average of 700 calves at any one time, with a maximum 1,400.

The Direct Action Everywhere activists were recently on a public road near Double D’s main farm, flying a drone over the property. Within 30 minutes of their arrival, seven Stanislaus County sheriff’s vehicles arrived and surrounded the activists.

A heavily armed officer asked to see the drone pilot’s Federal Aviation Administration license, which he provided. After confirming it was valid, a sheriff’s deputy — one of nine at the scene — told the activists they could remain on the road but could not trespass.

Asked about the heavy response, a deputy said there had been several recent violent incidents from animal rights groups at the site, and mentioned the groups had sent in “busloads” of activists.

The Times reached out to the Sheriff’s Office to get more details about those events but did not get a response.

Temple Grandin, author and professor of livestock medicine at Colorado State University, said that punching and kicking livestock is considered abusive.

An expert in livestock welfare, she said that handlers can tap, push and nudge animals. But if the level of force goes beyond what could bend the side of a cardboard box, “it’s abuse. Period.”

She said the calves’ reaction to the hot iron indicates that pain medication, such as lidocaine, was not applied before the procedure. Double D did not respond to a question about whether medication was given before the procedure.