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.