The JTA reports:
Joe Regenstein, a professor of food science at Cornell University, advises Jewish groups and the meat industry on issues of animal welfare. He is part of a two-person negotiating team that is working to develop guidelines for humane practices amenable to the two dozen or so fervently Orthodox rabbis who are responsible for the glatt kosher industry.
A year ago, he says, the two sides reached consensus.
"They agreed to put it in writing," he says. "I am still waiting for that document."
That's no surprise to those of us who follow the kosher meat industry and the rabbis who supervise it. I told Regenstein then and in the year before that the rabbis would not come through.
What can we do about it?
Well, we could choose to eat humanely produced kosher meat, but this is a hard to find commodity and those producing it are not always, shall we say, truly interested in humane slaughter:
Rachel Wiesenfeld, who owns [Wise Organic Pastures] with her husband and son, says that as far as she's concerned, all kosher slaughter is humane. But when Whole Foods offered to carry their chickens if they were certified by Steritech, a company that verifies humane food production methods, the Wiesenfelds quickly agreed.
"Everyone was into this humane, humane, humane, so we went along with it as well," she says.
Understand this well. The owner of Wise Organic believes this is humane kosher slaughter.
I'm truly sorry to say this but, as things now stand, your only true option if you care about humane slaughter and humane growing of chickens, cattle and other kosher food animals is to go veg. That shouldn't be the case. Sadly, however, it is.