Postville, Iowa – Inquiry Finds Lax Federal Inspections at Rubashkin’s Kosher Meat Plant

Postville, Iowa – An internal report from the Agriculture Department has found that Rubashkin’s Kosher Meat Plant, the country’s largest producer of meat certified glatt kosher, violated animal cruelty laws and that government inspectors not only failed to stop the inhumane practices but also took improper gifts of meat from plant managers.
Also, some of the plant’s 10 inspectors made faulty inspections of carcasses, failed to correct unsanitary conditions and were seen sleeping and playing computer games on the job, said the report, by the agency’s inspector general.

Conditions at the plant – AgriProcessors Inc. of Postville, Iowa – created a controversy in late 2004, when PETA released a videotape taken clandestinely inside, where animals were shown staggering around the killing pen with their windpipes dangling out, slamming their heads against walls and soundlessly trying to bellow. One animal took three minutes to stop moving.
The scenes caused a furor among Jewish organizations around the world. Soon after, the plant changed its practices under pressure from the Agriculture Department, and the department told the plant that in light of those changes, “legal action will not be instituted at this time,” but warned that future violations could lead to it.

After a six-month internal investigation, the Agriculture Department suspended one of its own inspectors for 14 days and gave warning letters to two others, a department spokesman said.
The inspector general’s office gave its report to federal prosecutors, but “based on the information presented to us, we decided there was not a prosecutable case,” said, a lawyer in the United States attorney’s office for the northern district of Iowa.