Slaughterhouse rejected on 5-0 vote -- again

            WAXAHACHIE – Nothing like a courtroom TV drama to reject a slaughterhouse.

            Ellis County commissioners met an angry resistance to a proposed halal slaughterhouse and multiple television crews in their Monday, Nov. 23 meeting, causing the proposal to be rejected for the second time in two years.

            The vote passed unanimously, but over the weekend, at least one county commissioner notified his constituents that County Judge Carol Bush had accumulated the three votes needed to pass the slaughterhouse.

            Bush ultimately sided with the majority in rejecting the slaughterhouse planned for Slama Road in Southern Ellis County.

            Had it been approved, a permit applied for and received would have allowed the Muslim-owned facility to increase their business by allowing for 400 animals to be slaughtered a day up to 10,000 per day.

            Halal, much like the Biblical kosher laws, spell out the process of what animals are clean and unclean. Pigs and other “unclean” animals found in the Koran or Bible would not be slaughtered there, according to Shamsul Ahmed, who applied for the permit to build on the road southeast of Lake Bardwell.

            David Hunnicutt, the Republican precinct chairman for Precinct 125 near the proposed slaughterhouse, gave a 15-minute presentation on halal and sharia law, the section of Muslim law that he said would pave the way for other foreign laws to be accepted in the county.

            Hunnicutt, who gave the presentation last year when the slaughterhouse was proposed near Maypearl in Western Ellis County, credited the opposition and the Dallas TV media for reversing what was a 3-2 vote to pass the slaughterhouse to a win in rejecting it.