- 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.
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- PETA claims the video, posted on its Web site Tuesday
afternoon, shows repeated acts of animal cruelty at AgriProcessors Inc.
in northeastern Iowa. The organization filed a complaint with the U.S.
Department of Agriculture on Monday that alleged improper slaughtering
practices.
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- "They're ripping the tracheas and esophagi out of
fully conscious animals, dumping them out of pens into pools of their own
blood. The animals stand and bellow and attempt to escape for up to three
and even four minutes in some cases," Bruce Friedrich, a spokesman
for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said late Tuesday.
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- But Rabbi Chaim Kohn, the plant's supervising rabbi,
told The New York Times in Wednesday's 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.
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- 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.
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- The PETA Web site 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."
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- In it's complaint, PETA said its investigator filmed
the slaughter of 278 animals, 25 percent which remained conscious "for
a significant period of time."
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- "I think we should attempt to ponder how we would
feel in similar situations. The level of cruelty is absolutely outrageous,"
Friedrich said.
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- PETA told the Times that a volunteer was hired at the
plant last summer and used a hidden camera to obtain the footage.
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- A man who answered a phone call from The Associated Press
at AgriProcessors late Tuesday night 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.
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- A telephone message left after business hours for the
Orthodox Union, a major supervisor of kosher food in the United States,
was not immediately returned.
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- In May 2003, PETA wrote to officials at AgriProcessors
and asked them to investigate and take steps to make certain that cruelty
was not occurring there.
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- According to the PETA Web site, 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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- Friedrich said kosher slaughter is more than twice as
well regulated as conventional slaughter, being overseen by both the USDA
and the Orthodox Union, and is widely believed to be more humane. "What
this case indicates is that anybody who is eating meat is supporting horrific
cruelty to animals," Friedrich said.
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- On the Net:
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- PETA: http://www.peta.org
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