Following the Westminster Hall debate yesterday on the “Non-stun Slaughter of Animals,” Shimon Cohen of Shechita UK, the Jewish community’s campaign group for the protection of Kosher meat provision, released the statement below.
Statement
Shimon Cohen, Campaign Director of Shechita UK, stated:
“We are extremely grateful for those MPs, cross-party, who supported the provision of Kosher meat in the Westminster Hall Debate yesterday, correctly referencing the legitimacy, regulation, and high animal welfare standards in the Shechita method, as well as the glaring inconsistencies and problems with mechanical stunning methods.
We are dismayed about those MPs that perpetuate the myth of stunning being a kind and woozy procedure, assuming that mechanically-stunned cows, sheep, pigs and chickens are gently induced into a comfortable sleep in a warm cosy, calm procedure. Mechanical stunning methods include asphyxiation by gas, electrocution using metal tongs strapped around the animal’s head, immersion upside down into electrified water and shooting a captive bolt through the skull. These mechanical stunning methods are not welfare processes. They are abattoir processes design for economic efficiency as they enable increased speeds of killing in factory abattoirs. Unlike the Shechita method, all the mechanical stunning methods inflict some degree of pain prior to insensibility.
Shechita is essential to continued Jewish life in this country, and we are grateful to the government for its commitment to protect it.”
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