According to Kosher Today, the OU's Rabbi Menachem Genack has written an op-ed article on the Postville Rubashkin Shechita-gate Scandal.
Here is a quote from that article, courtesy of Kosher Today:
[T]he OU continues to vouch for the kashrut, which was never compromised, of all the meat prepared by Agri Processors…As Torah Jews, we are imbued with the teachings which require animals to be rested along with people on the Sabbath and fed before the people who own them, and that the mother bird must be sent away before her young are taken to save her grief. These and similar statutes make it clear that inhumane treatment of animals is not the Jewish way. Kosher slaughter, by principle, and as performed today in the United States, is humane. Indeed, as PETA itself has acknowledged, shechita is more humane than the common non-kosher form of shooting the animal in the head with a captive bolt. The Humane Slaughter Act, passed into law after objective research by the United States government, declares shechita to be humane. For Torah observant Jews, it cannot be any other way.
Please note Rabbi Genack's careful parsing of the English language. While Rabbi Genack writes that "the OU continues to vouch for the kashrut, which was never compromised, of all the meat prepared by Agri Processors," he does not write that the OU does the same for humane treatment of animals at AgriProcessors. Instead, he relys on the definition of shechita found in the US Humane Slaughter Act to prove the humaneness of properly done shechita.
But the Humane Slaughter Act defines shechita as the immediate severing of both the carotids and jugulars. Shechita that does not do this – like much of the shechita shown on the PETA video – is thereby by definition inhumane.
But if that shechita is inhumane, if both the carotids and jugulars are left intact by the shochet's cut, how could that shechita be kosher? How could Rabbi Genack write "the OU continues to vouch for the kashrut, which was never compromised, of all the meat prepared by Agri Processors"?
The answer is the US Government definition of shechita – a definition supplied by rabbis in 1905 and repeated by the OU, Agudath Israel and other Orthodox groups for 100 years – is not the actual Halakhic (Jewish legal) definition of shechita.
According to Jewish law, shechita must sever the trachea and esophagus. If a shochet has done this, and no defects are found in the knife or the animal, the animal's meat is kosher.
According to PETA and sources in the food industry, until new food safety laws were passed during the Clinton administration, a USDA inspector regularly oversaw shechita. If the carotids and jugulars were left uncut and the animal showed signs of consciousness, the inspector would act. But, because the new food safety laws mandated so much extra paperwork, the lead inspector who oversaw shechita is now found most often in an office pushing paper.
Writing in the Forward, Rabbi Adam Frank of the Conservative Movement claims to have gone in 1999 with Dr. Temple Grandin to meet with the OU's Rabbi Genack.
The topic of the meeting?
Inhumane treatment of animals at OU-supervised slaughterhouses, including AgriProcessors.
According to Rabbi Frank, Rabbi Genack dismissed their concerns out of hand and "cautioned" them to keep their concerns to themselves.
Rabbi Genack told me that, if he had seen the throat-ripping at AgriProcessors take place, he would not have been concerned and would not have stopped that practice. For Rabbi Genack, all concerns of mistreatment of animals ended as the shochet's knife touched the animal's neck.
Perhaps the lesson from this should be the following:
The OU, the KAJ and many other kosher supervising agencies can not be relied on to supervise tzaar baalei hayyim (animal mistreatment) issues. For that, the Jewish community must rely, not on our rabbis, but on activist groups like PETA.
A sad lesson, indeed.