Cross Posted from Jerusalem Post
By SHARON UDASIN
PHOTO: COURTESY OF ‘TNUVA CRUELTY’
About 300 animal rights activists gathered in Tel Aviv on Monday – International Animal Rights Day – to protest abuse that has allegedly gone on in Tnuva’s Adom-Adom brand slaughterhouse in Beit She’an.
The protest follows a criminal investigation launched this weekend against Tnuva by the Environmental Protection Ministry and the Beit She’an police, after the television program Kolbotek on Reshet aired an expose on the facility Thursday night. Showing workers prodding cattle with electric shockers, beating them and dragging them by the legs with forklifts, the program said that the abuse was rampant at the site.
In response to the program and the resultant investigation, Adom-Adom CEO Erez Wolf stressed that the company “unequivocally condemns this behavior,” detailing a number of steps that had been taken against the employees involved.
“Abuse is not kosher,” the protesters chanted, according to the group Anonymous for Animal Rights. “The Tnuva CEO must resign.”
Actress Orna Banai likewise took part in the demonstration, calling for a consumer boycott of Tnuva products and stressing that the company must be held accountable for evading its responsibilities.
Members from the Left and Right, meat-eaters and vegetarians, ultra-Orthodox and secular showed up to the protest and echoed Banai’s call.
“We must remember that if these seem to be the procedures and guidelines at the largest and most advanced slaughterhouse in Israel, the grave abuse that we have seen in the Kolbotek investigation is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Hagai Cohen from Anonymous.
