News/Press releases
EU FUNDED BODY DEFAMES SHECHITA AND PUBLISHES AGENDA-BASED FLAWED RESEARCH
Shechita UK has lodged an official complaint with the EC Directorate-General for Health & Consumers regarding the DIALREL project that they have funded.
DIALREL purports to be a dialogue between faith communities yet Shechita, the Jewish religious humane method of slaughtering permitted animals and poultry for food has been defamed by DIALREL.
Shechita UK Chairman Henry Grunwald OBE QC said; “Despite our protestations, those responsible for DIALREL refuse to remove defamatory information from their websites.”
A notice posted on the IRTA website (Institute for Food and Agricultural Research and Technology of the Government of Catalonia) describes the DIALREL project and its findings. Under the section entitled “RESULTS”, the following information is posted: “Shechita: Animals are slaughtered without stunning. Before slaughter, all cattle are restrained and mechanically turned on their back and all poultry shackled.”
Mr. Grunwald continued: “to claim that cattle are restrained and mechanically turned on their back and all poultry shackled is factually incorrect and defamatory and to allege that animals are slaughtered without stunning denies the most effective stun which is actually incorporated in the shechita procedure."
Representatives of Shechita UK Chanoch Kesselman and Shlomo Winegarten raised this matter at a DIALREL meeting in Brussels in November 2008, but despite their protestations direct to Antonio Velarde, one of the academics responsible for the research, and despite his admission that these results came from one survey response which he had misread, he published and maintains that publication on the IRTA website.
DIALREL allegedly aims “to explore the conditions for promoting the dialogue between interested parties and stakeholders and facilitating the adoption of good religious slaughter practices”.
“This matter has tainted DIALREL and Shechita UK can have no confidence in what is supposed to be an academic study. DIALREL cannot promote a dialogue with interested parties when it so clearly has an anti-Shechita bias. It has rapidly diverted to a pseudo-academic survey publishing agenda based untruths.” said Henry Grunwald.
Shechita UK has also objected to the EU claiming that DIALREL is investigating subjects outside of its funding agreement such as the economic consequences to the Jewish community of labelling animal products, a policy issue and not a science issue, alongside its attempts to promote old, outdated, and irrelevant "research" results.
“We are calling on the EU to fully investigate and, if necessary, intervene to ensure that this project is not able to abuse EU funding to promote its own agenda by purporting to present academic research”, said Mr. Grunwald.