A former agriculture minister this week pressed the government to review the current legal exemptions for religious slaughter.

George Eustice, who resigned in February as Minister of State for Agriculture, Food and Fisheries, said MPs should be allowed a free vote on whether to require animals to be stunned before slaugher.

Pre-stunning an animal before shechita would render it unkosher by causing injury, according to Jewish law..

In a short debate in Westminster Hall this week, Mr Eustice said that although he would stop short of banning Jewish and Muslim methods of slaughter although, he believed “major improvements” could be made.

Mr Eustice argued that cattle took 40 to 45 seconds to fall off its legs after the slaughter cut and “between one minute 20 seconds and two minutes” to lose consciousness.

“We often hear from representatives of organisations such as Shechita UK that the cut is so precise and clean that it all happens very quickly, “ he said, “but there is not really any evidence to support that.”

One alternative could be simply to ban the “non-stunned slaughter of bovine” animals, he said. 

Another would be to require “post-stunning” after the slaughter cut - for which there was “some rabbinical support,” he said. “We know that some abattoirs producing kosher meat allow post-cut stunning of bovine animals.”

Mr Eustice also raised the issue of labelling meat produced by religious methods of slaughter entering the general food market.

“The simplest way would be to label meat as unstunned, because that is a clearly definable legal definition,” he said.

But he noted this would cause “some concerns” for Jewish communities. “They argue that if we did do that, we should also list whether an animal has been killed through anaesthetic gas or electrocution, or all manner of other things.”

The charity Farmwell, he went on, had proposed a labelling system “that all religious groups are willing to buy into: a coded approach of numbers from one to ten, denoting the method of slaughter. However, it does not deal with the problem of food entering the service trade, where unwitting customers would buy it.”

In response, David Rutley, a junior minister in the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, assured Muslim and Jewish communities “we respect their freedoms”.

Citing the participation of religious groups in a roundtable discussion held by his department in May, he said the government favoured dialogue.“We want to balance those religious freedoms with what more can be done to improve the welfare of animals. That is difficult, but not impossible, to juggle,” he said.

“We can focus more on labelling. We must engage with the communities and the industry to see how we can take this further forward. Our exit from the EU will provide an opportunity to do that with more conviction and at greater pace.”

A Shechita UK spokesperson said: "The science on religious slaughter is not conclusive and Shechita is supported by an ample body of scientific evidence. It is disappointing that Mr Eustace only presented one side of the argument.”