A bill that would have banned kosher slaughter in Belgium was voted down by the Brussels Regional Parliament on June 17 by a majority of 42 to 38.
Had it passed, the ban would have “placed a potentially terminal obstacle to continued Jewish communal life in Europe,” according to World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder.
Kosher slaughter is already effectively banned in Belgium’s other two states, the French-speaking Wallonia and the Dutch-speaking Flanders, where like many other European countries it has become popular to require stunning animals before slaughter.
Stunning an animal with the current methods available makes the animal unkosher and therefore cannot be part of the shechita ritual.
“There are a lot of misnomers going around that shechita [the Hebrew word for ritual slaughter] is cruel and does not align with the modern concept of animal welfare,” explained Prof. Ari Zivotofsky, a professor of neuroscience at Bar-Ilan University, who presented a talk on shechita at the European Jewish Association’s annual conference in Budapest on June 21 and spoke to The Jerusalem Report on the sidelines of the event.
“We have people all over Europe that are ignorant,” he said. Parliamentarians don’t know how the slaughterhouse works.” Zivotofsky argues that shechita should be considered an acceptable form of slaughter and that parliamentarians would agree if they only understood the way the practice works.
A smooth, quick slice
In shechita, the slaughterer severs the primary vessels of the neck of an animal – something which must be done in a continuous cutting motion, using an exquisitely sharp and absolutely smooth knife. The knife is checked before and after every animal is slaughtered to ensure it has no nicks and will not tear the animal’s skin. The shochet (ritual slaughterer) cuts through the vessels of the animal in a smooth, slicing manner.
Moreover, unlike every other method of slaughter, in the case of shechita, the practitioner is a highly trained, respected and well-compensated member of the Jewish community, Zivotofsky said.
“When you cut yourself with a razor, you don’t feel any pain from the cut itself.”
Prof. Ari Zivotofsky
“When you cut yourself with a razor, you don’t feel any pain from the cut itself,” Zivotofsky told the Report. “Right after, you feel a lot of pain because the pain receptors are now exposed and when the two areas of the cut rub together, the pain receptors are stimulated.”
In a slaughterhouse, the neck opens wide and there is nothing touching those pain receptors and thus no pain from the cut.
The animal dies from blood loss, known in scientific terms as “exsanguination,” which he said is considered a “pain-free” way to die.
“A human in a car accident who is bleeding out from a severed artery, as they lose consciousness, there is no pain,” Zivotofsky said. “They are suffering due to the knowledge that they are dying. A cow is assumed not to have knowledge of its impending death.”
Moreover, he said, it takes less than 10 seconds for a sheep to lose consciousness after shechita and no more than 30 seconds for a cow or larger animal. Any later convulsions that might continue afterward are not because the animal is alive or its brain is functioning, but only muscle twitches because sometimes some of the muscle cells are still alive.
Judaism, he stressed, has also recognized the need to minimize animal suffering.
The Shulchan Aruch, the authoritative code of Jewish law written as far back as the 1560s, ruled that if after a proper slaughter, a particular animal or bird is slow to die it must not be allowed to suffer; a fatal blow to the head should be delivered.
Xenophobia vs. animal rights
Nonetheless, a Belgian court ruled that a ban on slaughter without stunning “responds to a pressing social need and is proportional to the legitimate objective pursued of promoting animal welfare.”
To date, nine percent of European countries (Austria, Estonia, Greece and Latvia) require post-cut stunning, 15% of countries (Belgium in Wallonia and Flanders, Denmark, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland) require pre-cut stunning, and in one country – Slovenia – there is a total ban on ritual slaughter regardless of stunning.
The mandate to stun is not new but has rather been recommended for hundreds of years. Switzerland banned slaughtering animals without stunning in the 1800s and Germany required it as far back as 1903.
Today, there are four main methods of stunning, Zivotofsky said. The first is supplying a penetrating captive bolt – “basically, putting a bullet through the skull of the animal into the brain. That is not a method of stunning, but a method of killing the animal.”
The second is providing a non-penetrating captive bolt, which is the method of hitting the animal on the head with a sledgehammer.
There is also the choice to electrocute the animal or gas it.
A new method known as diathermic syncope was recently developed in Australia, which essentially involves “microwaving the animal brain until it has a seizure.”
Zivotofsky argues that none of these practices are more humane than shechita, though he does not believe shechita is the only humane way of slaughtering animals.
He believes that the push for stunning is being done more for economic than humane reasons.
In a slaughterhouse where cows are stunned before cutting them, around 385 animals can be butchered per hour. In an efficient kosher slaughterhouse, that number is around 85.
And there may be other reasons too, stressed Zivotofsky – such as xenophobia or antisemitism.
“Attempts at banning shechita in Europe may stem from antisemitism, xenophobia, ignorance, or some other source but are NOT pure animal welfare issues,” he said, noting that a ban on shechita is also a ban on Muslim halal and there is “certainly some xenophobia against Muslims in Europe.”
Muslims can eat meat that is shechted too. The vote in Brussels, he said, was largely stopped due to the work of the country’s chief rabbi, Rabbi Avraham Gigi, who personally met legislator after legislator to explain why shechita is a good method of slaughter.
The ruling came despite a campaign waged by animal rights groups such as GAIA against Jewish and Muslim slaughter of animals. One of its top advocates was Belgian film star Jean-Claude Van Damme, who had urged parliament to “put an end to the cruel suffering of animals.”
Zivotofsky said he would not be surprised if some other European countries with smaller Jewish or Muslim populations try to enact similar bans against religious slaughter, and he urged European Jews to stay alert and act to educate parliamentarians.
“In this era of the COVID pandemic we are constantly urged to heed science,” he said.
Decisions to require stunning of animals or ban shechita, Zivotofsky argued, are ”ignoring science and religious law in favor of populism.” ■