Calf cut raises anger: "Concentration camp for cows"

"Is this true?!", a viewer writes to Verifieringshjälpen and links to a clip showing a facility with room for tens of thousands of calves kept alone in so-called calf huts.

The clip has received over ten million views on Instagram alone.

Lena Lidfors is a professor of ethology at the Swedish Agricultural University SLU and has researched, among other things, the behavior of calves for many years. The pictures don't surprise her - this can look like this in many places in, for example, the USA, Canada and Mexico, according to her.

- I understand the reactions. The funnest thing is to see calves that get to go with their mother or go with other calves and play, she says.

The clip has been circulated in several rounds since August 2026. In some publications, it has been falsely claimed to show a farm in Argentina, as reported by the Spanish fact-checking site Malditas.

In fact, it shows a facility for raising calves and heifers in Kansas, USA.

The video was filmed during a tour for livestock professionals, visitor organizer Santiago Debernardi told Malditas.

The phenomenon of calves being separated from their mothers and kept in huts also occurs in Sweden, but on a smaller scale and with stricter regulations behind it.

- As a consumer, you should always buy Swedish milk and meat because then you know that the animals have been raised according to Swedish animal welfare regulations. If you want to do something further, you can choose organic because those animals are kept according to even stricter rules, says Lena Lidfors.

Why does the milk become more expensive if calves are allowed to stay with the cows for longer? See the review in the clip above.