What The AP Saw

Todd Dvorak, the AP reporter who toured AgriProcessors with Iowa's Secretary of Agriculture, other politicians and press describes the slaughter he witnessed at Rubashkin:

Cattle are killed by trained rabbis once every three minutes, said Sholom Rubashkin, company president.

Once an animal is secured, the barrel pen rotates 180 degrees. The animal is upside down, its neck exposed to rabbis wielding 2-foot knives. After rinsing the neck with water, rabbis make a quick cut, severing a pair of arteries, the esophagus and windpipe. The cut releases a massive spill of blood from the cow's brain.

Another rabbi immediately steps in to make a second cut, targeting arteries only. It is described as a fail-safe cut to ensure rapid blood loss and quick and painless death.

"The animals I saw were unconscious within one or two seconds," Judge said after the 90-minute tour.

After slaughter, the barrel rotates again and a door opens. The animal slides to the floor, where a worker wraps a hind leg with a chain. The animal is hoisted and carried away for butchering.

None of the five animals viewed during the tour thrashed or tried to regain its footing.

What Judge and the press saw does not appear to be how the Rubashkin slaughterhouse normally operates. Please note that:

1. "Cattle are killed by trained rabbis once every three minutes." This appears to be a much slower rate than seen on the PETA video. The 30 plus seconds added to the slaughter time seems to have been used to restrain the animal in the pen after shechita until bleed-out is complete. This would minamize thrashing, etc. after shechita. In fact, this is one of the recommendations Dr. Grandin and others made after seeing the PETA video.
2. "Another rabbi immediately steps in to make a second cut." In the PETA video, the second cut was done by a low-paid, poorly trained worker, not a rabbi. Rather than using the extremely sharp knife used by rabbis for shechita, that worker used a hook and gouged out the animal's throat. The AP saw a rabbi make the second cut with a very sharp knife and no throat-ripping.
3. "[U]nconscious within one or two seconds." After the properly done second cut, but not after the throat-ripping practiced by Rubashkin until the PETA video exposed it.
4. "None of the five animals viewed during the tour thrashed or tried to regain its footing." It should be evident that five animals slaughtered under highly controlled circumstances with a hand-picked shochet and altered procedures cannot be considered representative of how the slaughterhose operated last month or last year.

During the event, Rubashkin also released its long-promised "independent Humane audit." According to the AP:

Rubashkin also released an audit of the company's slaughter policies done last spring by ASI Food Safety Consultants of St. Louis. Among 100 cattle killed, inspectors found no cases of inhumane treatment.

Without seeing a copy of the audit its difficult to render any judgement on its findings. Although Rubashkin announced the audit and promised to make it available to anyone who wanted to have it, he has consistantly refused to make it available to me (and, according to PETA, to PETA). But, briefly, my questions about the audit are as follows:

1. Did the audit take place over a three-hour period in one day?
2. Did Rubashkin know in advance the time and day of the audit?
3. Was there an earlier audit that found fault with AgriProcessors?
4. Were any HACCP violations uncovered in that audit? Were they audited?
5. Was a worker safety audit done? If so, what were the results?

In short, it appears to me that what the press tour saw at AgriProcessors is a representation of how the plant should run, not a representation of how the plant was running before the PETA video was released.

It also seems that Iowa's Agriculture Secretary Patty Judge knowingly lent her name to Rubashkin's PR efforts. Is that a violation of Iowa law? We'll see.

You can read the entire AP article here.