Science

Mexico may legalize magic mushrooms. Will this traditional medicine lose its meaning?

Published

2 years ago

June 25, 2024

Mexico may legalize magic mushrooms. Will this traditional medicine lose its meaning?

HUAUTLA, MEXICO —

Alejandrina Pedro Castañeda opened a brown paper package and pulled out a handful of magic mushrooms, which many residents of this Indigenous Oaxacan town tenderly refer to as “child saints” or “the little ones that sprout.”

Then she handed each of her six visitors — who had driven seven hours from Mexico City and paid up to $350 apiece for a healing retreat — a generously sized portion, prompting a few dubious looks.

It was nighttime, and the guests were sitting in a hut that was barely illuminated by two candles, making it difficult for them to see what they were about to eat.

Pedro Castañeda has used mushrooms in her healing practice for years and was comfortable stepping outside as the group crunched slowly in silence.

One person said the fungi tasted like stale popcorn. Another tasted dirt.

The healer returned a few minutes later.

“Now we’re starting the trip,” she said. “Let’s go to work.”

Indigenous communities in Mexico have long considered psychedelic mushrooms to be intermediaries to the spiritual world. But their growing popularity outside of Mexico has spurred a debate over who should have access to them and whether science and Indigenous medicine can or should be reconciled.

Magic mushrooms have been used in Mesoamerican religious rituals since pre-Hispanic times. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that a New York banker and mushroom enthusiast named R. Gordon Wasson made them famous — perhaps too famous — in the Western world.

(Alejandra Rajal / For The Times)

Some Indigenous healers are courting tourists. Scientists interested in their chemical properties have been studying mushrooms in hopes of developing treatments for depression and other mental health problems. And growing demand from recreational users has fueled a thriving black market.

Currently, the fungi can only be used in Indigenous rituals or in government-approved research. But a senate bill proposes making psilocybin, a psychedelic compound in the mushrooms, more widely available.

In addition to making psilocybin available to anyone with a doctor’s prescription, the bill would permit therapy that uses the actual mushroom that a government office of traditional medicine would help regulate. It also calls for scientific research on Indigenous medicine and providing compensation to Indigenous people for “patents” involving their traditions.

The bill’s supporters say that they’re trying to protect Indigenous medicine by making sure the traditional use of magic mushrooms is enshrined into law.

But the prospect of expanding the availability of magic mushrooms has created friction within Indigenous communities that have used them for centuries. Will the spirituality associated with this traditional medicine be lost?

Magic mushrooms have been used in Mesoamerican religious rituals since pre-Hispanic times. A mural from the ancient city of Teotihuacán, just outside Mexico City, shows the Toltec rain god Tlaloc with two figures alongside him holding mushrooms that have risen from where his raindrops fell. A Franciscan missionary documenting 16th century life in New Spain referred to the mushrooms as the “flesh of the gods.”

But it wasn’t until the 1950s that a New York banker and mushroom enthusiast named R. Gordon Wasson made Mexico’s magic mushrooms famous — perhaps too famous — in the Western world.

On a trip to Huautla, in southern Mexico, he ate mushrooms with Indigenous Mazatec healer María Sabina and wrote about the experience in a 1957 article for Life magazine titled “ Seeking the Magic Mushroom.” The story inspired thousands to travel to Huautla — some seeking out Sabina. The Mexican press described the foreigners as addicts, and the military ultimately set up a checkpoint on the road to Huautla to try to block the outsiders.

In July 1970, Reuters reported: “Hundreds of hippies are braving imprisonment and fines to penetrate this mushroom paradise in the State of Oaxaca, where the authorities are conducting a drive against mushroom eaters.”

Wasson said he felt guilty about the crowds in a New York Times op-ed published later that year. A “humble out-of-the-way” town had been overrun by “a torrent of commercial exploitation of the vilest kind.”

“The old ways are dead,” he wrote, “and I fear that my responsibility is heavy, mine and María Sabina’s.”

In an interview toward the end of her life, Sabina described how some outsiders would take the mushrooms “at whatever time and whatever place” and “don’t use them to cure themselves of a sickness.”

“From the moment the foreigners arrived to search for God,” she said, “the saint children lost their purity.”

In the mid-20th century, psilocybin was classified as a Schedule I substance in the U.S. — which put the kibosh on research. But interest in scientific research on mental health and psilocybin was rekindled in the 1990s.

Psilocybin is thought to boost neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to form new neural connections, and research indicates that it may be successful in treating depression, anxiety and substance abuse. Parts of the United States have legalized or decriminalized the substance. (Oakland decriminalized magic mushrooms in 2019.)

“That plasticity enhancement may allow people to shift how their brain is functioning into a mode that’s more helpful, more adaptive, that’s going to promote mental health,” said Greg Fonzo, who co-directs the Center for Psychedelic Research & Therapy at the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin.

Alejandrina Pedro Castaneda has used mushrooms in her healing practice for years.

Some people who ingest magic mushrooms report overwhelming feelings of joy or the presence of family. Others have said they feel deeply sad or that they are having an out-of-body experience.

The risk of a lethal overdose is considered very low, Fonzo said. What’s more common is having a difficult experience or a “bad trip” due to anxiety.

Pedro Castañeda, who compares the bill with a birth certificate, supports the legislation, insisting the world must not forget that the Mazatecs, as well as other Indigenous communities, have preserved rituals with magic mushrooms for centuries.

“The medicine is not protected now. It’s out of control,” she said. “Everyone has it in their home, like cannabis,” she said, referring to black market purchases. “What we need is a record that says the Mazatecs are the custodians, the Mazatecs are the ones that for millennia have defended the medicine.”

But other Mazatecs in Huautla are worried about appropriation and misuse, that traditions associated with Indigenous culture will be disrespected as increasing numbers of people rush to pick up their prescriptions.

In an Indigenous mushroom ceremony, the healer will use mushrooms to communicate with their spiritual world to inquire about a patient’s illness. A patient may also experience revelations.

If the bill passes, “It’ll be taken like an aspirin,” said Isaias Escudero Rodriguez, a local doctor. It will no longer have the “spirituality that it carries for us.”

The push to legalize magic mushrooms in Mexico dates back to the early days of the pandemic. Alejandra Lagunes, 52, a senator in Mexico’s national congress, started to experience anxiety attacks that were reminiscent of the severe depression she suffered in her 20s. The depression from decades ago, she said, was resolved after she took ayahuasca — a psychoactive brew made from the Amazonian Banisteriopsis caapi vine — with an Indigenous healer.

Lagunes researched psychedelics and introduced legislation in November to increase access to magic mushrooms while recognizing the long tradition of Indigenous medicine. She hopes it opens the door for non-Indigenous Mexicans to learn from Indigenous practices.

The initiative has supporters at Mexico’s National Institute of Psychiatry, where scientists have government permission to investigate the potential therapeutic effects of magic mushrooms.

Jesús María González Mariscal, a clinical psychologist in Mexico City who has advised the senator, said much can be learned from traditional medicine, including the importance of companionship in Mazatec mushroom ceremonies. These ceremonies occur at night under the guidance of a healer with candles, flowers, incense and an altar with Catholic images. A patient’s family members may accompany them.

The result, Mariscal said, “is a space of care and protection so a person can explore their inner world in a context that’s safe, trustworthy and ethical” — and that’s what Mexico City psychotherapist Oscar O’Farrill is trying to teach his students.

O’Farrill runs a master’s and doctoral degree program affiliated with the National School of Psychologists and Experts of Mexico where his approximately dozen students listen to Indigenous guest speakers talk about traditional medicine. He schedules group therapies in his home, a two-story house where a large container on his kitchen counter has powder from lion’s mane, a non-psychedelic mushroom, that he takes with his morning coffee. Indigenous healers have led his students through ceremonies with mushrooms, peyote and bufo, the smoked secretions of a Sonoran desert toad.

“Psychiatry in this moment can’t understand what psilocybin is if it doesn’t understand all the aspects of the customs of Indigenous people,” he said. “Like it or not, the mushrooms have a spirit.”

But Eros Quintero, a biologist who co-founded the Mexican Society of Psilocybin in 2019, said he would have preferred that Indigenous communities were not singled out in the bill, that psilocybin simply be reclassified.

Indigenous people, he said, may not view illness through the prism of Western science. In Mazatec culture, for example, people may believe that a person fell ill because they walked through a cave where spirits are thought to reside or broke a communal rule.

“They have their own traditions and their own way of seeing things, and what we see is that there are few who are interested in what we’re interested in with psilocybin,” he said.

Huautla presents itself as a place for the mushroom-seeker.

Taxis decorated with images of small mushrooms speed up and down narrow mountain roads that are lined with tin-roofed houses. In the summer, when mushrooms are in season, locals wait by a bus terminal to offer the fungi to tourists. Prices vary, but a dozen pairs of mushrooms (they’re sold by the pair) may cost $25 and a ceremony can cost $90 or more. After mushroom season, the fungi are often preserved in jars with honey.

Several signs announce the home of the family of María Sabina — who died in poverty in 1985 but whose life has since been celebrated in Mexican culture. Her descendants, who live on the property where Sabina once resided, maintain a small museum filled with portraits of the healer and sell mushroom-themed crafts.

Anselmo García Martínez, a farmer and a great-grandson of Sabina, says he was about 6 when he tried mushrooms for the first time during a ceremony with relatives who were accompanying a sick family member. (Many other locals say they first consumed mushrooms as children.)

Like some other residents, he said he didn’t mind if mushrooms are allowed outside Indigenous rituals because the general public already has access to them through the black market.

But he issued a reminder: “For us, for the Mazatecs, it’s something sacred.”

Lagunes said she’s invited Indigenous people to the forums she has sponsored, and last year she posted a video on the social media platform X that showed her with several healers and indigenous people in Huautla. They presented her with a baton that she said she’d carry to “bring the voice and knowledge of ancestral medicine to the place that it deserves.”

But some opponents have said that the Mazatec people haven’t been properly consulted on whether the bill should move forward, reminding supporters that, for the moment, there is no infrastructure to make it happen. Santos Martínez, one of the founders of Caracol Mazateco, a civil society group focused on preserving Mazatec culture, agrees there hasn’t been enough outreach to the Mazatecs.

Martinez said his experiences with magic mushrooms transformed his life. As a medical student working at a clinic in the state of Puebla, he fell into a depression after seeing patients suffer from inadequate care. He returned to his community in Huautla, where he participated in mushroom ceremonies, hoping they would help him find direction in his life.

During the ceremonies he felt happy and had visions of family members, including his grandfather. “It was as if he was saying, ‘adelante, hijo,’” he said, or, “go forward, son.”

Francisco Javier Hernandez García, a Huautla healer who leads mushroom ceremonies for tourists almost daily at some points of the summer, fears that mushrooms will “lose respect” if they are legalized for therapy outside of the Indigenous context.

Like others, he spoke about mushrooms as carrying wisdom.

“They sprout because they are waiting for that person,” he said, referring to the one who will eat them. “They already know who carries problems.”

In mid-April, O’Farrill organized a trip for six people — including himself — to visit Pedro Castañeda for the healing retreat. Two people, a man who works for a Wall Street asset management firm and a woman training to guide people during mushroom trips, had flown in from the U.S. A mother and daughter, both psychologists, and a literary editor were from Mexico.

They spent three days at the home of Pedro Castañeda, who lives with eight dogs in a house that has several floors under construction. She hosts a mushroom ceremony for locals or tourists once or twice a week and said that the “great spirit” tells her how many mushrooms to give each person.

The members of O’Farrill’s group had individual therapy sessions with Pedro Castañeda in which she asked them about their insecurities. After her guests ate mushrooms, Pedro Castañeda asked several of them to sing. At one point, the editor began to suddenly cry, and the younger psychologist said she felt pain, prompting the healer to rigorously brush her with a feather in a cleansing ritual. A few minutes later, the psychologist said she was having visions of “injustice in jail.”

The next morning, the group hiked — mostly barefoot — the Mountain of Adoration, which the Mazatecs consider sacred.

At the top of the mountain, which overlooked Huautla, the healer gave each person cacao beans to leave as an offering, giving thanks for the previous night. They placed them on a tower of rocks jutting out from the mountain, next to many little mounds of cacao left earlier by other visitors.

Science

5 Great Stargazing Trains

Published

4 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

16 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.