SHECHITA CALLED “BARBARIC” IN BRITISH HOUSE OF LORDS

Shechita Called “Barbaric” In British House Of Lords
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com

During what the London Jewish Chronicle called a “fierce debate” in the House of Lords, shechita (Jewish ritual slaughter of cattle, chickens, turkeys, etc.) was called as “barbaric” and “absolutely unacceptable.” before Jewish peers rallied to defend the practice.

The debate over shechita centers on the lack of stunning or anesthesia for the animals before slaughter. Animals slaughtered for general consumption in the E.U. are stunned before slaughter, just as they are in the U.S. But kosher- and halal-slaughtered animals are not normally stunned or anesthetized.

The debate in the House of Lords was reportedly prompted by a question from Lord Trees, who is a professor of veterinary medicine.

Trees reportedly quoted a Jewish veterinarian who wrote him a letter claiming that she had “never witnessed anything as horrific as shechita slaughter.” She called the non-stunned slaughter “barbaric” and said seeing it first hand had caused her to stop eating kosher-slaughtered meat.

Trees reportedly concluded that while he respected Jewish and Muslim religious practices, “unnecessary suffering is being caused to a very substantial number of animals by slaughter without stunning.”

Another member of the House of Lords, Baroness Parminter – a strong supporter of animal welfare causes who chose to wear vegan faux-ermine robes at her installation – called for the government to back “E.U.-wide mandatory labeling of non-pre-stunned meat.” Un-stunned animal slaughter by throat-cutting is “absolutely unacceptable in animal welfare terms,” Parminter said.

Jewish member Lord Winston disagreed.

“The notion of animal protection is stronger in Judaism than in any other world religion. Shechita is a much more humane method than stunning,” Winston reportedly said, citing no scientific evidence or facts to back up his assertion because there really isn’t any. Most studies of the issue cited by supporters of shechita are decades old, were conducted at the request of the Jewish community, cherry-pick data, were not peer reviewed, and compare very controlled shechita slaughter of one or two animals with stunning done by a mallet blow to the head or by first generation stun guns, which were notoriously inaccurate. Modern stun guns are highly accurate and rarely fail.

That might be why former Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks chose a different tactical approach during the debate.

“If a case is made for labeling meat to indicate how the animal was killed, this must apply to all methods of slaughter, not just to some,” Sacks reportedly said.

Baroness Deech, who is also Jewish, and Lord Palmer, who isn’t but who has a degree in farming practice and whose family owns a large British food producer, attacked stunning. Deech pointed out that the European Food Safety Authority found 12 million cows had suffered in the E.U. as a result of failed stunning – a terribly large sounding number until you realize that 2 million cattle are slaughtered in Britain alone each year.

Deech’s claim seems to have come from a seven year old report that itself relied on older data. It found that “mis-stuns occur relatively frequently with this technique. Research indicates that 4% to 6.6% of captive bolt stunning in cattle requires a second stun. Often this is attributed to insufficient head restraints, wrong positioning of the operator, and the maintenance of the captive bolt gun.” It would seem by the age of the data and the economic conditions in many E.U. countries, many of those captive bolt guns referred to in the report were older first-generation guns.

Jewish supporters of un-stunned shechita rarely mention the throat-ripping at Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa – the world’s largest glatt kosher slaughterhouse until its bankruptcy in late 2008. Animal welfare experts and veteran meat industry workers called videos shot of Agriprocessors’ kosher slaughter horrific and the worst institutional animal abuse they had ever seen. Animals with their throats slit open and their tracheas and esophagi hanging out wobbled, slipped on a blood-drenched floor, stood and tried to run away as slaughterhouse workers and rabbis stood by and watched.

Yet Agriprocessors and its owners the Rubashkin family of Chabad hasidim were defended by leading haredi and Modern Orthodox rabbis and by dozens of kosher supervision agencies, including the Orthodox Union (OU), the world’s largest kosher supervisor, and the Chief Rabbis of Israel.

Despite this, the government’s food spokesman in the House of Lords, Lord De Mauley, reportedly assured Jewish and Muslim members.

The government “would prefer to see all animals stunned before slaughter,” De Mauley reportedly said, but the production of kosher and halal meat would continue to be protected.