Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [77]
Philip Schein’s Story: The Question of Kosher Meat
I am a cruelty investigator for the world’s largest animal protection group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA. It’s a life I never could have imagined. I grew up eating meat, not protesting it. I am Jewish and I was always told that kosher meat was humane. I was told that how we treated those beings in our power mattered greatly, that it was what defined us as human beings. It was a way of approaching daily life that made me proud to be Jewish.
Today I have conducted more than ten undercover investigations at major kosher slaughter facilities from Nebraska to Uruguay. This firsthand experience on kill floors quickly shattered any naïve hopes I held out that kosher meant humane.
In South America, which supplies a large percentage of kosher beef to Israel and the United States, the standard method of kosher slaughter is the “shackle and hoist” technique, in which cattle are chained, tripped, and restrained on the ground while their throats are cut, and then they are hoisted immediately into the air to be bled out while still conscious and struggling. In the U.S., at what was at the time the world’s single largest kosher slaughter facility, I’ve seen workers systematically hacking out the tracheas and esophagi of conscious and wide-eyed cattle. I’ve seen workers shock animals in the face with electric prods and let animals languish for minutes as the result of sloppy religious slaughter techniques. All these violations are a matter of public record now and they were widely reported on in the media. You can see the videos at www.humanekosher.com. These practices are not standard and certainly not required by kosher law, but I’m ashamed how many other examples I could give of egregious cruelty at kosher facilities. And even more shameful than any of these abuses is the response to them by kosher certification authorities.
I expected these violations of the Jewish principle of compassion to animals to be condemned. I also expected that the meat from these slaughterhouses would be declared unkosher, but that is not what happened. Many in the Jewish community protested, but the leadership of the kosher industry insisted and still insists that the flesh of animals who die torturous deaths—even animals dismembered while conscious—can be perfectly kosher. It’s not that the situation is necessarily worse in kosher slaughterhouses than in conventional slaughter facilities—the problems with cruelty at mainstream slaughterhouses are arguably worse overall. But I expected kosher production to reflect a higher ethical standard. Sadly, what I witnessed in both kosher and nonkosher facilities is that suffering and cruelty is systemic in all forms of industrialized slaughter.
And regardless of what happens at the slaughterhouse, almost all the animals killed for kosher meat are supplied by the very same cruel factory farms that supply animals for conventional slaughter.
If kosher was once supposed to be an honorable compromise with the vegetarian ideal depicted in Genesis, it’s long ceased to be. I’m still proud of Jewish dietary traditions, but today it’s the growing movement of Jewish vegetarianism that I find inspiring. I’m not against kosher, but I am against what passes as kosher today. As the Nobel Laureate and Yiddish writer I. B. Singer put it, “I’m not against organized religion, but I don’t take part in it… when they interpret their religious books as being in favor of meat-eating…. [Vegetarianism] is my protest against the conduct of the world. To be a vegetarian is to disagree—to disagree with the course of things today…starvation, cruelty—we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it’s a strong one.”
The Jewish leaders I’ve researched unanimously agree that the ideal of kosher slaughter is to create a quick and painless death—something the laws of kosher share with the Muslim dietary laws, called Halal. They also agreed with Philip that the reality today is far different.
Muslim Teachings
The same unfortunate