Shechita UK again publishes false and misleading information about Jewish ritual slaughter and kosher food in general.
The chairman of Shechita UK writes in the London Telegraph:
SIR – Jews have always labelled food (“Shoppers will be told how their meat has been killed”). Our strict system of supervision ensures that meat labelled kosher is kosher and meat labelled beef is in fact beef.
Shechita conforms entirely to the EU definition of stunning: “any intentional process that causes a loss of consciousness and sensibility without pain, including any process resulting in instantaneous death.” So labelling meat stunned or unstunned would be misleading.
What Huw Irranca-Davies, the shadow environment minister, suggests is fair and would be informative. Consumers should know whether their meat has been shot by a bolt, asphyxiated by gas, electrocuted by tongs or water or slaughtered by the Shechita or Zabiha methods.
Jews do not say a prayer when slaughtering an animal. Nor do we claim that Shechita “kills animals instantly”. Scientific evidence bears out that Shechita does what the law requires; that the animal is rendered insensible to pain without unnecessary suffering, something that the approved mechanical methods do not.
Henry Grunwald
Chairman, Shechita UK
London NW5
Shechita UK is an extremely dishonest organization, as I've reported several times previously. It relies on decades-old discredited 'studies' – almost all of them paid for by the Jewish community and carried out by a sympathetic person who is not a large animal biologist or a veterinarian – and when that isn't enough, it lies outright.
Lets list the falsehoods in Grunwald's letter:
1. "Our strict system of supervision ensures that meat labelled kosher is kosher and meat labelled beef is in fact beef."
What kosher supervision actually does is make sure that in most cases the beef is really beef and is really kosher. But in some cases, the beef could be treife or a mixture of kosher and treife, and in other cases it may not even be beef at all. Why? Because the laws of kosher food rely on bittul and rov (negation of non-kosher foods accidentally mixed into kosher food and the majority wins, meaning that with pieces of meat the size you would bring home and make for dinner, if non-kosher meat was mixed up with kosher meat and can no longer be identified, and if the kosher meat is in the majority, all the meat becomes kosher, even those non-kosher pieces.
2. Shechita conforms entirely to the EU definition of stunning: “any intentional process that causes a loss of consciousness and sensibility without pain, including any process resulting in instantaneous death.”
In reality, almost all shechita done commercially fails this standard. It can easily take a steer one or even two minutes to become insensate, and as most of us saw in the horrific PETA undercover footage from Agriprocessors, kosher slaughtered cattle even get up and try to run away as their throats dangle outside their bodies.
3. "Jews do not say a prayer when slaughtering an animal. Nor do we claim that Shechita 'kills animals instantly'. Scientific evidence bears out that Shechita does what the law requires; that the animal is rendered insensible to pain without unnecessary suffering, something that the approved mechanical methods do not."
a. Jews do say a blessing when slaughtering.
b. Science does not show that kosher slaughtered animals are rendered insensible to pain without unnecessary suffering.
c. Modern mechanical bolt stunning renders animals unconscious and effectively brain dead almost instantaneously with only a tiny error rate. And when there is a mis-stunning, the animal is immediately shot and killed. In kosher slaughter, the process of dealing with a mis-slaughtered animal can take several minutes if not longer, meaning the animal suffers intensely.
What type of Jewish organization lies in this fashion?
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