Cavdir Slaughterhouse is a very large abattoir where 100 cattle and about 200 sheep are slaughtered daily. It is a privately owned slaughterhouse. The owner, Mr. Ilhan, states, “I don’t interfere in the slaughtering process. The animals are slaughtered here according to the customers’ preferences.” Unfortunately, the animal owners were not in agreement with using the captive bolt method for slaughtering their animals, believing it to be taboo in Islam. The veterinarian of the plant was initially sceptical of stunning but, when Asalet pre-stunned several cattle, he saw the reduction it made to the level of suffering and supported it.
Although their Trip-floor restraint box had an opening for extending the animal’s head, it lacked a restraint mechanism. It was just an opening, nothing more. The animals entering this box vary in size, with some being so small that it’s impossible to reach their heads from outside the box to safely and correctly stun all of them. This plant even had an old pneumatic captive-bolt stunner from the company Jarvis in their storage room (!), but they never used it because their conservative customers were not receptive to stunning. This is most unfortunate, as cattle continue to be forced to fall down in their trip-floor box, have their leg chained and are hoisted from the floor by their legs and then get their necks cut all while fully alert and fully sensitive to pain. In our opinion, this is cruel and not the essence of Halal at all. Since their box is not suitable for safely stunning all the different sized animals passing through and since their customers will not accept stunning the animals first, we cannot do anything to help reduce animal suffering yet at this plant. We are very disappointed and incredibly sad but we will not give up in Turkey.
