Feds See Lamb Kicked in Face at Slaughterhouse; PETA Seeks Kill-Floor Cameras

For Immediate Release:
March 31, 2022

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

Following a federal report documenting that an employee at Dillsburg Halal Meat kicked a hoisted, dying lamb, whose throat had been slashed, “very hard in the nose” and laughed when a federal official said this was unacceptable, PETA fired off a letter this morning to the company’s owner, Saber Sassi, urging him to livestream video from inside the slaughterhouse in order to help prevent workers from mishandling and abusing more animals.

“As if slaughter weren’t terrifying enough, this bully of a slaughterhouse worker kicked a lamb in the face and laughed about it,” says PETA Senior Vice President Daphna Nachminovitch. “PETA is calling for Dillsburg Halal Meat to help stop more egregious abuse by publicly livestreaming slaughter operations and urging anyone disturbed by this incident to go vegan.”

PETA has also asked Sassi to report the worker who kicked the lamb to local law-enforcement officials and permanently reassign him to a position that doesn’t involve having contact with live animals.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

PETA’s letter to Sassi follows.

March 31, 2022

Saber Sassi

Owner

Dillsburg Halal Meat LLC

Dear Mr. Sassi:

Given the recent U.S. Department of Agriculture report detailing that one of your employees violently kicked a hoisted, dying lamb in the face at Dillsburg Halal Meat and laughed when a federal official said that this was unacceptable behavior, we ask that you immediately change operations there to reduce animal suffering at your slaughterhouse.

Will you please publicly livestream video from all areas of your facility where live animals are handled? Workers would take their duty to handle animals lawfully more seriously if they knew that caring people were watching. As Dr. Temple Grandin, the world’s foremost expert on livestock welfare, writes, “Plants [t]hat are doing a good job should show what they are doing.” Your industry often complains that today’s consumers do not understand how animals are raised and killed for food. You could help by enabling us to observe your workers moving countless individual animals—who value their lives as we value ours—off crowded trucks in all weather, slashing or sticking their throats, and bleeding them to death.

At the very least, will you permanently reassign your worker referenced in the federal report to a job that does not involve having contact with any live animals—such as evisceration, butchering, and packaging—and report him to your local law-enforcement agency for investigation for a possible violation of the state’s anti-cruelty statute?

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Colin Henstock

Assistant Manager of Investigations