Aleph Farms, an Israeli food-technology company, claims to have cultured slaughter-free meat in space.
Great news for animal welfare campaigners, who say meat eating should be criminalised, but aggravating for those who argue that so long as animals bred for slaughter are reared, then killed with kindness, they are all talking tosh.
Inevitably caught in the crosshairs of this irreconcilable and increasingly acrimonious international conflict over human health and animal welfare are Muslims and Jews, significant religious minorities, whose broadly similar yet markedly different ancient methods of ritual slaughter both suffer from ever-escalating external attack.
Scores of authoritative papers appear regularly on opposing sides of the debate. But what seems clear is that while the (religious) minority communities try to present a united front on the contentious issue, they are internally divided while facing hostile outsiders whose genuine humanitarian concerns barely conceal an inherent antipathy to both.
I turn first by example to how the UK anti-Jewish riots of 1947 began in a north-west abattoir and then to an analysis of New Zealand’s 2010 ban on Jewish kosher slaughter by anthropologist Hal Levine of the Victoria University of Wellington. In it, he compares what happened in NZ to the ill-treatment afforded the Canadian Inuit who, after being barred from practising their traditional trade of whaling and sealing, were then subjected to an examination of their very culture.
So, argues Levine, the shechita ban similarly destabilised New Zealand’s small, unassuming Jewish community; forcing members to consider their position as equal NZ citizens “free to practise their religion in a country with an international reputation for tolerance. The issue developed in a context involving animal welfare interests, meat exporting, and local Muslim halal (‘correct or proper’) slaughter, itself the subject of similar proscriptions in Europe”.
The concept of any animal slaughter is abhorrent to a growing international vegetarian-vegan population but for those still eating meat, the main argument against shechita and dhabihah is that both methods customarily forbid animals to be pre-stunned before slaughter although some more lenient Muslim authorities do allow several stunning methods.
Will the UK’s imminent departure from the European Union affect Jewish and Muslim practice? The feature linked here states:
“While making it clear their concern does not relate to the expression of religious belief but the welfare of animals, Britain’s biggest animal welfare charity, The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and many leading veterinary organisations are lining up to support a total ban on non-stunned meat”.
Although less urgent, it may also mean a difference to any such products’ organic status as earlier this year, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that non pre-stunned meat could not bear the EU organic label.
Meanwhile, there now remain very few countries worldwide where religiously observant Muslim and Jewish citizens are not adversely affected by tough welfare regulations as the many papers and websites available suggest that outside Muslim countries and Israel, halal and shechita are performed by way of sullen concession at abattoirs used for general slaughter.
There exists an enduring, uneasy peace among everyone involved in the trade and it is unsurprising when petty resentments swell into open hostility.
While secular abattoir managements may view minority community requests as an impediment to swift, smooth production, religious leaders argue that religious laws may be ancient but they are not outdated.
Indeed, barely two months ago, Rabbi Jacob Siegel of the JLens Investor Network recommended that the increasing public pressure to ban non-stun slaughter may be solved by “engaging as responsible investors” in relevant food production corporations.
But would money speak louder than fine words?
The answer is ‘no’; not when we read opinions like those of Christian Methodist scholar Cyril S Rodd, whose Glimpses of a Strange Land takes an apparently hostile view of the Hebrew Bible, arguing, inter alia, that it is “mined for texts which support current ecological concern. This is, however, a very late development, and it has been pointed out that far from being in the van of caring for the natural world, the reality is that the Christian Church has at last almost caught up with the secular world”.
Rev Rodd’s view is quoted critically by Jonathan Burke of Monash University, Melbourne, Australia in a paper, Does God Care for Oxen? Animal Welfare Ethics in the Bible.
During his study, Burke charges Rodd with presenting “… revisionist readings of passages which have typically been understood as illustrating ethical concern for animals. Finding support in the Bible for a more enlightened ethics of animal welfare has demanded a highly selective approach. The history of the attitude towards animals within the Church should alert us to the fact that the teaching of the Bible is highly ambiguous”.
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My own view is in my headline.
As a Jew, fundamental shechita practice must have my full support.
However, as a lacto-ovo vegetarian of more than 30 years’ experience and a journalist once privy to the petty scandals, intrigues and power mongering that still beset the tiny world of shechita in the UK - and beyond – I am reminded that the Hebrew Bible suggests we are supposed to be vegetarian – even vegan – and that meat consumption is said to be an indulgence granted to frail humankind by Heaven.
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With best wishes for a Succot sameach – happy Festival of Tabernacles – to all who are celebrating.
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