Legal aspects of ritual slaughter
The legal aspects of ritual slaughter include the regulation of slaughterhouses, butchers, and religious personnel involved with traditional shechita (Jewish) and dhabiha (Islamic).
[13][14][15] Lastly, recent debate in Switzerland has been contentious, in part, because of comparisons by a prominent activist between kosher slaughter and the methods used by Nazis in concentration camps.
[22][clarification needed] According to ShechitaUK, '[a]ll forms of mechanical stunning, which may include asphyxiation by gas, electrocution by tongs or water or shooting with a captive bolt gun, cause pain on application and are thus prohibited by Jewish law.
[citation needed] In the 1880s, anti-Semites joined forces with Animal Protection Societies to campaign for anti-shechita legislation to be passed in Switzerland, Germany and Scandinavia.
"Each Contracting Party may authorise derogations from the provisions concerning prior stunning in the following cases:– slaughtering in accordance with religious rituals..." Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which applies to all member states of the Council of Europe and came into effect in 1953, provides for a right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion which includes the freedom to manifest a religion or belief in, inter alia, practice and observance, subject only to such restrictions as are "in accordance with law" and "necessary in a democratic society.
[52] Moreover, on 17 December 2020 it ruled that member states of the European Union may require a reversible pre-cut stunning procedure in order to promote animal welfare.
[68] The 2004 Animal Protection Act (Bundesgesetz über den Schutz der Tiere; Tierschutzgesetz – TSchG) made post-cut stunning the nationwide mandatory minimum.
'[57] In February 2014, Minister for Food, Agriculture and Fisheries Dan Jørgensen signed a regulation which banned ritual slaughter of animals without prior stunning.
Although a motion to pass a law prohibiting shechita (on animal rights grounds) was defeated in December 1995, thereby allowing the practice to continue in Finland (on the condition that the slaughtering takes place simultaneously with a stunning blow), parties opposed to shehitah were not satisfied.
Furthermore, it is apparent from the written depositions and bailiffs' official reports produced by the interveners that a number of butcher's shops operating under the control of the ACIP make meat certified "glatt" by the Beth Din available to Jews.
It held that an exemption from laws that conflicted with this was therefore mandated: It is true that the consumption of imported meat makes such renunciation [of meat-eating] dispensable; however, due to the fact that in this case, personal contact with the butcher and the confidence that goes with such contact do not exist, the consumption of imported meat is fraught with the insecurity whether the meat really complies with the commandments of Islam....Under these circumstances, an exemption from the mandatory stunning of warm-blooded animals before their blood is drained cannot be precluded if the intention connected with this exemption is to facilitate, on the one hand, the practice of a profession with a religious character, which is protected by fundamental rights, and, on the other hand, the observation of religious dietary laws by the customers of the person practicing the occupation in question.
Without such exemptions, the fundamental rights of those who want to perform slaughter without stunning as their occupation would be unreasonably restricted, and the interests of the protection of animals would, without a sufficient constitutional justification, be given priority in a one-sided manner.
[citation needed] Following months of debate a last-minute concession was offered—the Muslim and Jewish communities would have a year to provide evidence that animals slaughtered by traditional methods do not experience greater pain than those that are stunned before they are killed.
[79] Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks visited the Netherlands in May 2011 to lobby against the ban, arguing that pre-stunning failed in up to 10 per cent of cases and that caused more pain than the swift cutting of the throat by a razor-sharp knife.
Rumours spread that some Islamic abattoirs had started to stun animals before the cut, prompting conservative Muslims in July to raise concerns whether the meat would still be halal.
[62] Poland banned slaughter of non-stunned animals in January, 2013, thus losing to neighbouring countries, such as Lithuania, an annual half-a-billion euro export trade to Israel, Turkey, Egypt, Iran and other Muslim-majority nations.
However, the Court unanimously upheld the Act in 2018, stating that 'the Constitution did not allow easily preventable suffering to be inflicted on animals without a justified cause', and that this provision did 'not disproportionally interfere' with religious freedom.
The slaughterhouse shall notify the competent authority that it will carry out this kind of slaughter in order to have it registered for this purpose, without prejudice to the authorisation provided for in the European Community legislation.
At the time, Jews had recently been granted full civil rights and some Swiss citizens feared an invasion of Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe, who they considered to be unassimilable, foreign, and unreliable.
[111][better source needed] Christopher Blocher, a cabinet minister for the Swiss People's Party, has supported calls to ban the import of kosher and halal meat.
Kessler has inflamed the controversy by publicly quoting vegetarian and literature Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer[115] comparing kosher slaughter to the methods used by Nazis in concentration camps, but denies that his motives are anti-semitic.
"[116] In June 2017, MP Matthias Aebischer (Social Democratic Party) proposed a bill to ban the import of meat from animals that have undergone ritual slaughter.
[citation needed] This elicited responses from shechita uk, and from Dr S. D. Rosen[119] This is a continuation of a public debate that dates back to the founding or the Animal Protection Societies in the 1890s.
[125][126] Vice-president Jonathan Arkush of the Board of Deputies of British Jews confronted Blackwell the same day on The Today Programme[124][127][128] by saying that "animals that are killed for the Jewish and Muslim markets do not bleed to death."
[21]: 4:13 Blackwell retorted that there is strong scientific evidence that, depending on the species, the animal remains conscious after the throat cut for an average of 7 seconds in sheep to up to 2 minutes in cattle, which is "unacceptable from a welfare point of view".
[123][21]: 3:38 However, the percentage of unstunned slaughtered animals within the British halal meat industry grew by around 60% in the ten months after this controversy began, following a Muslim campaign to change the practice.
While the City of Hialeah claimed that its ban on ritual slaughter "not for the primary purpose of food consumption" was motivated by concerns for animal welfare and public health, the Supreme Court held that ample evidence showed that it was in fact motivated by animosity to the Santería religion and a desire to suppress it:[citation needed] That the ordinances were enacted "'because of,' not merely 'in spite of'", their suppression of Santería religious practice is revealed by the events preceding enactment of the ordinances.
[citation needed] Temple Grandin, who is both an animal welfare activist and the leading American designer of commercial slaughterhouses, has outlined techniques for humane ritual slaughter.
Those methods have been condemned as unnecessarily cruel by PETA and others, including Grandin and the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, but are endorsed by the Orthodox Union,[146] which supervises the slaughterhouse.
Sholom Rubashkin as the highest ranking day-to-day corporate officer was charged with federal financial fraud and sentenced to 27 years in prison in June 2010.
