Cruel Chicken Slaughterhouse’s Proposed Permit Is Illegal, Says PETA

Local Zoning Ordinance Prohibits Business, and Residents Don’t Want Killing Factory in Town

For Immediate Release:
March 25, 2019

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

Islip residents and local PETA supporters have sent an urgent letter to the town’s Zoning Board of Appeals urging board members to deny a “special exception” application to establish a poultry slaughterhouse on Beaver Dam Road. The applicant, Joseph Rosario, proposes to operate a “live market,” in which hundreds of live chickens would be kept on site until they’re purchased for slaughter. Islip’s zoning ordinance expressly prohibits—and provides no exception for—the “live storage of poultry” in the district of the proposed operation.

Unlike typical slaughterhouses—which don’t have provisions to provide animals with food and water and typically kill them within 24 hours of delivery to the facility—the proposed live market plans to store and supply food or water for the birds until they’re killed. Irrespective of the type of facility in which they’re kept, sensitive birds fight for their lives as they’re sent to be killed in terrifying and painful ways.

“It’s imperative that Islip’s zoning laws prohibiting the storage of live poultry be abided by here,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA is calling on the board to shut down this operation’s shady attempt to skirt the law and spare countless gentle chickens the agony that they endure when their throats are slit while they’re still conscious.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, which is a supremacist worldview. The group’s other efforts to block this killing facility include speaking out against it alongside 300 other people at a hearing last October and protesting at a zoning board meeting after video footage emerged of dead and dying birds languishing outside the applicant’s existing slaughterhouse in Queens.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.