More than 18,000 cows died in an explosion and subsequent fire at a dairy farm in Texas.
The blast at South Fork Dairy near the town of Dimmitt on Monday also left one person trapped. They were rescued and flown to hospital in critical condition.
The cause of the fire is under investigation but authorities believe that machinery in the facility may have ignited methane gas.
The blaze prompted calls from the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), among the oldest U.S. animal protection groups, for federal laws to prevent barn fires which kill hundreds of thousands of farm animals each year.
There are no federal regulations protecting animals from the fires and only a few states, Texas not among them, have adopted fire protection codes for such buildings, according to an AWI statement.
The blaze was the most devastating US barn fire involving cattle since the AWI began tracking such incidents in 2013. Around 6.5 million farm animals have died in such fires in the last decade, most of them poultry.
Speaking to local news outlet KFDA, Sheriff Sal Rivera said that most of the cattle had been lost after the blaze spread to an area in which cows were held before being taken to a milking area and then into a holding pen.
“There’s some that survived,” he said. “There’s some that are probably injured to the point where they’ll have to be destroyed.”
Mr Rivera told KFDA that investigators believed the fire might have started with a machine referred to as a “honey badger”, which he described as “vacuum that sucks the manure and water out”.
“Possibly [it] got overheated and probably the methane and things like that ignited and spread out and exploded,” he said.
