By Rabbi Avi Shafran
A legal challenge to two Belgian regions’ effective outlawing of shechita has been rejected by the European Court of Human Rights.
That decision, which is final, ruled that requirements that animals be stunned before slaughter do not breach the European Convention on Human Rights. Stunning involves either gassing, administering a strong electric shock or shooting an iron bolt into an animal’s skull, and renders subsequent shechita invalid.
European Union law permits ritual slaughter without prior stunning but does not prevent member states from imposing their own obligations to stun animals before slaughter.
The court found that “the protection of public morals… could not be understood as being intended solely to protect human dignity in the sphere of interpersonal relations,” and that the ban is “proportionate to the aim pursued, namely the protection of animal welfare as an element of ‘public morals’.”
Animal rights activists expressed hope, and not unreasonably, that the verdict upholding laws in the regions of Flanders and Wallonia will open a door for enactment of stunning requirements throughout Europe, like those that already exist in Sweden, Slovenia, Finland, Denmark and Greece.
Some charge that antisemitic or anti-Muslim sentiments lie behind the stunning requirements. And, indeed, in the 1880s, antisemites joined forces with animal protection societies to campaign for anti-shechita legislation to be passed in a number of countries. And shortly after Hitler came to power, shechita was banned in Germany.
But, whether the stunning rules are motivated by ill will or just overwrought sensitivity to the wellbeing of animals, they are deeply misguided.
Shechita immediately deprives the animal’s brain of blood, quickly rendering it unconscious. An article, “Physiological Insights into Shechita,” published in the British peer-reviewed journal Veterinary Record on June 12, 2004, concludes that “after a review of the physiological issues involved and the experimental data, it is submitted that shechita is a painless and effective method by which to … dispatch an animal in one rapid act.”
The famed animal handling expert Temple Grandin agrees. She wrote of shechita that “the animals don’t even feel the super-sharp blade as it touches their skin. They made no attempt to pull away.”
Which is why the United States not only permits shechita but has actually codified the fact of its humane nature in federal law. The Humane Methods of Livestock Slaughter Act of 1978 states that explicitly.
What’s more, regulations that make shechita impossible will only end up undermining the EU’s professed desire to foster Jewish life in its member countries.
Three years ago, the pan-European body released a document titled “EU Strategy on Combating Antisemitism and Fostering Jewish Life (2021-2030).” The 46-page paper, amid other measures, reiterated the union’s recommendation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism in education and teacher training.
Despite its aim of “fostering Jewish life,” though, the document made no mention at all of shechita bans, one of the most important bars to allowing Jewish communities to exist, much less thrive.
And other Jew-unfriendly measures may well follow.
In 2021, Pinchas Goldschmidt, the former Chief Rabbi of Moscow and current president of the Conference of European Rabbis addressed a meeting of the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah. He told the rabbonim that “It starts with shechita, continues with mila, and then they start to close down Orthodox Jewish schools.”
Whether or not that fear will, chalila, prove prescient isn’t knowable. What is clear, though, is that shechita, as in times past, is endangered in Europe.
