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PETA Offers Restaurants Faux Animal Heads After Moose Incident at Lower East Side Eatery

By DNAinfo Staff on January 1, 2010 3:04pm  | Updated on January 1, 2010 3:27pm

A stuffed moose head mounted on the wall of Lower East Side restaurant White Slab Palace.
A stuffed moose head mounted on the wall of Lower East Side restaurant White Slab Palace.
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Flickr/Peter Sheik

By Suzanne Ma

DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

MANHATTAN — After a 150-pound stuffed moose head came crashing down on a diner at a Lower East Side restaurant, PETA is offering eateries an alternative to animal busts.

They're offering an inflatable moose head, a handcrafted faux deer bust and even a teeth-bearing T-Rex.

"Few sights are more off-putting at dinner than a dead head looming over the plate, and who wants to be reminded of blood sports while they're sipping a Bloody Mary," wrote PETA co-founder and president Ingrid Newkirk, in a letter addressed to the National Restaurant Association. "Perhaps it was bad karma – the departed moose's way of taking revenge on restaurant owners who are disrespectful enough to display their remains."

The Associated Press reported that Raina Kumra filed a negligence lawsuit last week, describing her Oct. 4 encounter with the stuffed moose head mounted on the wall of a White Slab Palace, a Scandinavian-themed restaurant on Delancey Street.

She is seeking unspecified damages and filed the suit in State Supreme Court in Manhattan.

The 32-year-old says she suffered a concussion, lost cognitive skills and suffers chronic neck pain, dizzy spells, fatigue and anxiety, after she was hit by the moose head, adorned with 3-foot-wide antlers, according to the Daily News.

"It was the bar's fault," Kumra told the paper. "I was injured and in an embarrassing way."

Meanwhile, an anonymous source has come forward, telling the News that he witnessed another restaurant patron tugging on a balloon tied to the moosehead's antlers before it came tumbling down.

"She was pulling on the balloon. I thought, 'That looks dangerous,'" the source told the News. "The girl [Kumra] was sitting right under it."

But the witness, a 44-year-old Brooklyn artist, said he briefly turned away and did not actually witness the moose head fall on Kumra.

When he turned back, he saw that Kumra was in obvious pain.

"She was holding her head," he told the News. "She said her head hurt."