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The Iowa secretary of agriculture, chief rabbinate in Israel, and the Orthodox Union weigh in on AgriProcessors. Read their reactions here.
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AgriProcessors workers ignore the suffering of cows who are still sensible to pain after having their throats slit by the ritual slaughterer. The animals stagger and slip in blood while their tracheas dangle from their necks.
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Statement of Rabbi Avrom Pollak, Ph.D.,
President of Star-K (international kosher certification agency)
Jewish Times, December 10, 2004
"None of the practices seen on the video apply in any places Star-K is associated with." The animals were restrained in a device called a Weinberg pen, common in Israel and in Europe but almost unknown in the United States. Dr. Pollak said none of Star-K's plants use that pen. Also, none of the slaughterers at Star-K-certified plants use the second cut to take out the animal's trachea and esophagus.
He suggested that what the video showed was a "miscut, which sometimes happens."
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And while use of the Weinberg pen is permitted by Jewish law, the slaughter actually violated the kashrut standards of the Conservative movement, which is usually more lenient than Orthodoxy but which issued a ruling banning use of the pen as being cruel to animals in 2000.
Dr. Pollak said that a properly slaughtered animal would not be able to get up as the steers in the video do.
In plants certified by Star-K, the animals are restrained upright and cannot fall over. This allows them to finish bleeding before they are removed from their restraints.
"You don't see the animals thrashing on the ground like that," he said. "You might see a leg kicking, that kind of thing, clearly an involuntary reflexive action. It is disturbing that the animal got up and walked away. The only way to explain that is a miscut."
The removal of the trachea and esophagus could be to facilitate bleeding, he said. None of the Star-K plants use that cut, which also is banned in Israel, according to the rabbinate.
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