Science
New drug's potentially fatal side effects obscured by 'soothing acronym,' doctors say
Seventy-nine-year-old Genevieve Lane volunteered to take the Alzheimer’s drug Leqembi in a clinical trial because she was forgetting words and misplacing her keys.
Infusions of the drug gave her headaches so severe they sent her to bed. A week after the third dose, she was at a restaurant with her best friend when her speech slurred and she had a seizure. Five days later she was dead.
An autopsy found that Lane died of a mysterious side effect that has a name that sounds like it might be part of an Italian opera, but has doctors on edge.
The complication called ARIA has nothing to do with music. It is a term adopted by an influential group of pharmaceutical executives and academic scientists to describe potentially fatal bleeding and swelling in the brain caused by drugs like Leqembi.
“Mom believed the drug would help slow progression of her memory problems or do nothing,” said Lane’s daughter, Yvonne Battaglia. “She didn’t know it might kill her.”
Genevieve Lane, 79, of The Villages, Fla., not long before she died in September, 2022. An autopsy blamed Leqembi, a drug for Alzheimer’s disease.
(Lane family)
Lane’s death, and that of two other trial participants, has raised concerns among some doctors, who question whether Leqembi’s risks are worth its benefits, particularly for the population of older adults it was approved for.
Some of these doctors are urging that a new name be given to the drug’s potential side effects to better alert healthcare professionals to its risks.
ARIA is short for “amyloid-related imaging abnormalities,” with imaging referring to the MRI scans needed to find the brain bleeding and swelling.
“Clearly, it is more than just an imaging abnormality,” said Dr. Matthew Schrag, a Vanderbilt University neurologist, who helped with an autopsy that concluded Lane died of brain swelling and bleeding that was likely caused by Leqembi.
“My feeling is that ARIA is too euphemistic of a term. It conveys that this isn’t serious, and it certainly can be,” he said.
Leqembi, known generically as lecanemab, is a monoclonal antibody that works to remove a protein called amyloid from the brain. It received full Food and Drug Administration approval in July.
Eisai, a Japanese drugmaker that has partnered with Biogen, is promoting Leqembi to doctors and people concerned about their memories.
“Get ahead & stay ahead for longer,” an Eisai website says about the drug. It also says that “ARIA usually occurs early in treatment and is usually asymptomatic, although serious and life-threatening events rarely can occur.”
In a recent article, a Stanford neurologist and his colleagues detailed their concerns about ARIA, which they called a “soothing acronym” for brain bleeding and swelling.
“It does certainly have the ring of something that a pharmaceutical company or public relations person would come up with,” Dr. Michael Greicius said in an interview.
Leqembi is approved for mild dementia and also a diagnosis known as mild cognitive impairment, where patients have more memory problems than others their age but can compensate and continue their daily activities. People with MCI have been found to be at greater risk for developing dementia; but in many cases, their memory problems stay the same or even improve.
The FDA has required that the company warn doctors about ARIA. The agency says the condition, which affected more than 20% of those taking the drug in a large trial, can be managed by requiring patients to get repeated MRI scans to look for bleeding and swelling.
“The FDA maintains that the benefits of Leqembi outweigh its risks when used according to the approved labeling,” said Dr. Teresa Buracchio, director of the FDA’s neuroscience office.
Libby Holman, an Eisai spokesperson, called ARIA “globally established nomenclature.”
Because of the risk of ARIA, some Los Angeles medical centers are taking extra precautions.
At Keck Medicine of USC, a neurologist is available 24/7 to take calls from families of those taking Leqembi, since a headache or sudden confusion can be a sign of ARIA, said Dr. Helena Chui, chair of the neurology department.
At UCLA and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, warnings pop up in a patient’s electronic health record to ensure that all medical staff know the patient is taking Leqembi, because it can interact with certain other medications to make brain bleeding far worse.
And at all three medical centers it takes more than a single doctor to prescribe the drug. Each patient’s case must be reviewed by a panel of doctors and other staff — similar to how complex cancer cases are evaluated.
“We want to keep safety first,” said Dr. Keith Vossel, UCLA professor of neurology. “This is the most complicated, complex drug that we’ve prescribed in the dementia field.”
Other physicians say they won’t prescribe the drug.
“If there was a medication that worked, I would be the first person to use it,” said Dr. Clifford Sigel, a neurologist in Santa Monica. “But I won’t be using this in my practice.”
He pointed to a large clinical trial of Leqembi that led to its approval. It found that patients who took the drug saw their memory decline 27% more slowly — or less than half a point on an 18-point cognitive scale — than their counterparts who took a placebo. Sigel and other doctors doubt patients or their families would notice the difference.
Eisai’s Holman disputed claims that the drug does not work. She noted that a panel of outside experts convened by the FDA had voted unanimously that trial data confirmed its clinical benefit.
The name ARIA traces to July 2010 when “turmoil ensued” at an international scientific conference that the Alzheimer’s Assn. holds each year, according to an article by two scientists working in the field.
The FDA had proposed that companies testing new anti-amyloid drugs exclude any volunteer from clinical trials who had more than two brain microbleeds, according to an Alzheimer’s Assn. report. The tiny hemorrhages are sometimes found in healthy people and those with Alzheimer’s or other illnesses.
The agency also said it would require any volunteer who experienced a brain microbleed during the clinical trial to cease taking the drug.
The companies and academics working on the trials viewed the new FDA requirements as “excessively restrictive,” said the report by the association, a nonprofit that has become a powerful force in dementia science.
The industry and academic scientists feared the FDA proposal would stall research on the experimental drugs, the report said, and limit their use.
The drug companies asked the association to debate the FDA’s guidance at its Research Roundtable. Pharmaceutical and medical testing companies can become members of the roundtable by paying the association a $50,000 annual fee.
The association said that “one key question” taken up by the roundtable was whether ARIA was a temporary symptom of the new drug — much the way nausea and hair loss are side effects of chemotherapy — or evidence that anti-amyloid medicines may have more serious adverse effects. That question was never settled.
“Current knowledge doesn’t provide definitive answers to this critical question,” the association said in the 2011 report explaining the roundtable’s work.
Despite the unknowns, the roundtable proposed that volunteers be allowed into the trials even if they had as many as four brain microbleeds. The group said volunteers could keep getting the drug infusions if they developed brain bleeding as long as they did not have significant worsening of symptoms such as headaches and confusion.
The roundtable also proposed calling the brain bleeding and swelling ARIA.
The FDA “subsequently revised and updated the original advice…in a manner consistent” with the roundtable’s suggestions, wrote three of its members.
“Scientific evidence at the time led the workgroup to propose excluding people who have four or more microbleeds from clinical trials,” the association told The Times in a statement. “The FDA agreed.”
The association declined to answer questions on whether the name ARIA should be changed.
An FDA official told The Times that the industry group’s advice was just one of the factors the agency considered before it revised its 2010 guidelines.
More than a decade later, little more is known about why ARIA occurs or how to recognize it.
One problem is that a patient with ARIA can look like they’re having a stroke. And when stroke patients are taken to an emergency room, the first treatment doctors often consider is a clot-dissolving medicine called tPA, which can make brain bleeding worse.
That’s what happened to a 65-year-old woman taking Leqembi in a trial who arrived at a Chicago ER with stroke-like symptoms, according to a report published in February 2023. Doctors gave her tPA.
“As soon as they put it in her, it was like her body was on fire,” the woman’s husband said in a news story in the journal Science. “She was screaming, and it took like eight people to hold her down.”
The woman died, and an autopsy showed extensive bleeding in her brain, leading doctors to conclude the combination of the two drugs may have caused her death.
Knowing about that risk, Southern California doctors have been teaching emergency room staff to find out if patients thought to be suffering a stroke may be taking Leqembi.
“We’ve had to train and discuss this with the ER, the neuroradiology team and urgent care,” said Dr. Sarah Kremen, who leads Cedars Sinai’s Alzheimer’s clinical trial program. “You must ask this person, ‘Are you taking this medication?’”
An FDA database that collects reports of adverse drug reactions from doctors and others shows 23 deaths of patients taking Leqembi.
Holman at Eisai said it would be incorrect to assume the deaths were caused by Leqembi. She noted that Alzheimer’s patients have a higher risk of death because of the natural course of the disease.
In the large trial, less than 1% of patients died — the same rate whether they were taking the drug or the placebo.
Buracchio at the FDA said the agency takes “all adverse event reports seriously.” But she said the agency’s evaluation of the reports “must take the treated population into account,” which in this case is typically older or elderly adults.
To teach doctors about ARIA, Eisai created a website called understandingaria.com. It tells doctors that ARIA “usually resolves without intervention or treatment modification.”
In a brochure for healthcare providers, Eisai assures physicians that infusions may continue if an MRI turns up evidence of microbleeds as long as there are four or fewer and that the discomfort doesn’t disrupt the patient’s activities.
For Genevieve Lane, an MRI discovered four brain microbleeds before she started taking Leqembi in the trial.
After Lane died, an autopsy found more than 30 microbleeds in her brain, including some that could not be seen on the MRI, according to a report in Nature Communications.
The report’s authors, who included Schrag at Vanderbilt, questioned whether the pre-treatment limit of four brain microbleeds was stringent enough and called for higher standards.
The FDA told The Times that the agency had reviewed the available data and had not identified a specific number of preexisting microhemorrhages that would make it unsafe for patients to take anti-amyloid drugs like Leqembi.
“However, we will continue to monitor the accruing safety data,” the agency said.
Other doctors have questioned what happens to the memories of those who suffer ARIA, even if the bleeding and swelling appears to resolve.
Dr. Madhav Thambisetty, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Aging, said he was concerned by a report in a French medical journal about two women with mild dementia who experienced serious ARIA during a trial. One suffered severe seizures; 11 months later, her memory score dropped by nine points on a 30-point scale. The other patient developed a brain bleed described as “massive”; she lost a significant part of her vision, and her memory score declined by 12 points on the same scale.
An FDA scientist reviewing reports of patients who suffered high numbers of microbleeds in the clinical trial also noted the possible harm to their cognition in her January 2023 report on Leqembi.
One of the patients that Dr. Deniz Erten-Lyons pointed to was a 68-year-old man who had four microbleeds before starting the infusions. After treatment, he began to lose his vision and was hospitalized because of a seizure. An MRI found 96 microbleeds.
Thambisetty said he and Dr. Rob Howard of University College London wrote to Eisai last year to request information about what happened to the cognition of those who suffered ARIA in trials.
Eisai has not responded to their request, he said.
“I’m concerned about the lack of full and transparent reporting,” Thambisetty said. “It’s really important to know what happens to these patients.”
Holman said the company’s analysis of trial data showed that ARIA did not impact cognition.
“Eisai is transparent,” she said. The company follows guidelines for sharing clinical data established by PhRMA, the industry trade association, Holman said.
Greicius, the Stanford professor, also asked Eisai for trial data that would break down results for each volunteer to better understand ARIA and whether patients benefited as more amyloid was removed from their brains.
The response from Eisai, he said, was, “Thanks for your interest, but we can’t release the data.”
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.
Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2026.
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.
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.
-
Share via
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.
A pickup truck rolls by the barns at Agresti Calf Ranch at sunrise in Ceres.
(Tomas Ovalle/For The Times)
-
New Mexico23 seconds agoNew Mexico elementary school partners with NASA and earns elite STEM certification
-
North Carolina6 minutes agoPolice: North Carolina man charged after high-speed chase in Erie County, arrested in the Town of Perry
-
North Dakota12 minutes agoND Emergency Services receives wildfire prevention award
-
Ohio18 minutes agoA unique project asks Ohioans to map Revolutionary War graves
-
Oklahoma24 minutes agoOklahoma teacher turns PB&J’s into a lifeline for students
-
Oregon30 minutes agoWho’s running for a seat in the Oregon House of Representatives?
-
Pennsylvania36 minutes agoShirley Ann Dailey
-
Rhode Island42 minutes agoWeather Now: Showers, T’storm Today