If one were casually to peruse the debate in Europe about Jewish ritual slaughter, shechita, one could easily come away with this impression:
The Jews have this ancient method of ritual slaughter. It was good for its time. But things are so much more humane now. We stun the animals. They feel no pain at all. Stunning renders them unconscious instantaneously, and only after that do we slaughter the animal. Unfortunately, the Jews insist on their old religious ritual, and it’s really not humane by today’s standards. But what can you do? We don’t want to be told we’re anti-Semitic, so with a very heavy heart we still allow shechita.
This impression is a fallacy. There is no instantaneous stunning. It is a piercing of the animal’s skull. We do not doubt that all this goes very quickly, but then again, so does shechita. In fact, for an act of shechita to be ritually valid, the knife is not allowed to have the smallest knick, so as not to cause the animal the slightest additional pain — the whole basis of shechita is humane slaughter. But still more — much more:
The assumption behind the humane character of stunning is that it works every time.That is, no animal subjected to stunning ever suffers. In fact, this is not true, because stunning does not work every time. In fact, it does not work a relatively high percentage of the time. There is a “fail rate.” This is typically in the 15-20% range. An animal subject to a failed stunning suffers greatly. In effect, a failed stunning means that the animal is attacked in a failed attempt at stunning, then stunned again.
On the other hand, from a humane point of view, there is virtually no fail rate in shechita. That is because the definition of a failed shechita is one of two possibilities: An act of slaughter with a knife that is then found to have the slightest knick. This invalidates the ritual act after the fact, but causes the animal only the slightest additional pain. Or, a failed shechita is one in which the animal is slaughtered not with an even, smooth, cutting motion. This virtually never happens. The “fail rate” in shechita is next to zero.
It is easy to miss this point because a relatively high percentage of animals subjected to shechita are declared “treif” or ritually invalid. This, however, is for a reason entirely separate from the act of ritual slaughter. Under Jewish law, an animal is declared treif if it is deemed to be so unhealthy that it would not live for 12 months. This declaration is made on the basis of an examination of the lung, other internal organs or the skull of the animal after it is dead, that is, after shechita is over. An animal with a valid shechita can still end up treif due to its state of health. There is no contradiction between a near-zero “fail rate” in shechita and between a relatively high percentage of animals found to be treif after the animal is dead, after the shechita is complete.
The bottom line is that there is a far, far larger number of animals today that suffer from failed acts of stunning than animals killed via shechita; and even that statistic assumes that stunning, when it does work, is less painful than the act of shechita, which itself is debatable and probably impossible to measure definitively.
Keep all this in mind the next time you hear about the ancient Jewish method of animal slaughter that was “good in its time” as opposed to the supposed “modern and more humane” method today. Animal welfare has always been, and remains, the theme of the Jewish laws of shechita.
Copyright © 2016 by the Intermountain Jewish News
