A communal leader has criticised the British Veterinary Association for being “obsessed” with attacking religious slaughter.

Shimon Cohen, campaign director of Shechita UK, said the BVA’s focus on the issue was preventing the organisation from tackling more serious animal welfare concerns.

He said: “The BVA has been obsessed with removing the right of religious communities to carry out religious slaughter, without conclusive evidence that it is less humane than conventional, industrialised mechanical slaughter. That they continue to campaign on this issue, despite the government’s repeated assurances that it will not be swayed, is a dereliction of their responsibility to focus on far more severe welfare issues such as mis-stunning and animal cruelty.”

Mr Cohen was responding to new statistics on non-stun slaughter methods derived by the BVA from analysis of surveys by the Food Standards Agency.

The statistics indicated that kosher and halal abattoirs collectively cut the throats of 2.4million sheep and goats without stunning them first.

In an interview with The Times last year, BVA president John Blackwell called for religious slaughter to be banned if Jews and Muslims did not adopt a different method.

David Bowles, head of public affairs at the RSPCA, has called for a ban on non-stun slaughter.

The latest FSA survey, from 2013, indicated that animals killed by the shechita method accounted for only 1 per cent of the total figures in each survey.

The BVA’s petition to the government, calling for a ban on non-stun slaughter, has generated more than 100,000 signatures and may be debated in the House of Commons.