Swine carcasses strewn on Rishon Lezion street

Residents of Rishon Lezion in central Israel awoke to a gruesome sight Monday after 25 pig carcasses fell out of the back of a truck, covering a city street.

The refrigerated truck was transporting the pork from a slaughterhouse in northern Israel to a sausage factory in Rishon Lezion when a hinge broke on its back door, covering Lehi Street with nearly a ton of dead pigs.

Municipal veterinary services arrived at the scene around 8:30 a.m. Monday morning and collected the carcasses for disposal at a nearby facility.

“Since the event took place only a few hundred yards from the Veterinary Services offices, sanitation officer Tomer Cohen and I were the first ones on the scene and immediately began collecting pig parts,” Tomer Nissimian, a municipal vet, said in a statement.

A municipal veterinarian examines a pig carcass which fell off a truck on a Rishon Lezion city street on December 14, 2015. (Rishon Lezion Municipality spokesperson)

“All the parts collected were transferred to a disposal facility. At the same time, we stopped production at the [sausage] factory to make sure that none of the parts that fell on the road made their way to them.”

Although in 1962 Israel banned the raising of pigs for food, farmers have since found several legal loopholes in order to meet demand — much of it coming from immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

Kibbutz Lahav in the northern Negev raises pigs legally as part of a research center, selling excess slaughtered animals for consumption. Other pig farms can be found in Christian communities in the Galilee that are exempt from the regulations.