Following Up on Last Week's Post About AgriProcessors

Articles about AgriProcessors keep coming in, and I can't help but follow up on last week's post about the slaughterhouse and its ongoing controversies.

I talked about how common articles articles about the kosher meat industry have become. The Jew & The Carrot has a terrific post rounding up some of the latest coverage of the AgriProcessors story, and the post links to an article in The Nation that discusses media coverage since the May 12 immigration raid:

The raid received some coverage in the mainstream press but has gained serious traction within the Jewish news media, which have been focusing attention on workplace abuses and animal cruelty at the Postville plant since at least 2004. While the New York Times has written eleven articles on the raid, the Forward and the Jewish Week (both weekly publications) have run twelve and fourteen, respectively, and the JTA-- an international Jewish wire service--has posted twenty-five.

Those numbers back up my conclusion last week: "In the Jewish media at the very least, all eyes are on the kosher meat industry. Please take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to get people to see what's wrong with the kosher meat industry and consider adopting a vegetarian diet."

I also discussed how Dawn Watch was urging people to send letters to the editor to The New York Times in response to an op-ed about AgriProcessors by Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld that didn't discuss animal welfare much. Yesterday, the Times printed a half-dozen letters to the editor in response to the op-ed. It looks like only one of the six (the last one) attempted to take the animals' side, and it appears that it was cut short so that it couldn't make much of a point:

Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld writes about the horrors of a kosher slaughterhouse where "news reports and government documents have described abusive practices." But he says almost nothing about reports of how badly the animals were treated there.

Religious slaughter is still slaughter.

Last but not least, here's a quote about AgriProcessors from The Onion (a satirical "news" organization):

Man, having to slaughter animals by the kosher process of a single cut across the throat to a precise depth, severing both carotid arteries, both the jugular veins, the vagus nerves, the trachea and the esophagus, no higher than the epiglottis and no lower than where the cilia begin inside the trachea, thus causing the animal to bleed to death would probably really f*** you up as a kid.