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Slaughterhouse accused of animal abuse
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)--An animal rights group has captured videotape that it says shows cattle at a kosher slaughterhouse enduring an "absolutely outrageous" level of cruelty.
PETA say the video, posted on its website Nov. 30, shows repeated acts of animal cruelty at AgriProcessors Inc. in northeastern Iowa. The organization filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Nov. 29 that alleged improper slaughtering practices.
"They're ripping the tracheas and esophagi out of fully conscious animals," Bruce Friedrich, a spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said late Nov. 30.
But Rabbi Chaim Kohn, the plant's supervising rabbi, told The New York Times in the Dec. 1 editions that the tapes were "testimony that this is being done right." In kosher slaughter, the animals' throats are sliced with a razor-sharp blade, intended to cause instant and painless death. Jewish law forbids stunning them first.
Federal law considers properly conducted religious slaughter as humane, and allows Jewish and Muslim slaughterhouses to forgo stunning. But the rules outlaw leaving animals killed that way conscious for an extended period of time.
The PETA website describes the videos as showing AgriProcessors workers ignoring "the suffering of cows who are still sensible to pain after having their throats slit by the ritual slaughterer."
In its complaint, PETA said its investigator filmed the slaughter of 278 animals, 25 percent which remained conscious "for a significant period of time."
PETA told the Times that a volunteer was hired at the plant last summer and used a hidden camera to obtain the footage.
A man who answered a phone call from The Associated Press at AgriProcessors late Nov. 30 said media questions would be answered the following morning and hung up. The plant is the world's largest glatt kosher slaughterhouse and the producer of Rubashkin's and Aaron's Best meats. Glatt, under kosher law, means that the animals are free of certain physical defects.
A telephone message left after business hours for the Orthodox Union, a major supervisor of kosher food in the U.S., wasn't immediately returned.
In May 2003, PETA wrote to officials at AgriProcessors and asked them to investigate and take steps to make certain that cruelty wasn't occurring there.
According to the PETA website, AgriProcessors attorneys wrote back saying "Kosher slaughter is being conducted in accordance with the letter and spirit of Jewish law, which prescribes the most humane treatment of animals that has been known throughout human history."
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