The Food Standards Agency has just handed us a gift. Its latest Animal Welfare Report finds “no clear evidence that animal welfare breaches are more or less likely to occur during non-stun slaughter compared to stunned slaughter.” For those of us who have spent years defending Shechita, that single sentence matters more than most people will realise.
Shechita UK is the communal campaign organisation that exists to safeguard the provision of kosher meat in Britain, Europe and beyond. Kosher meat is not a lifestyle choice. Its availability is a basic requirement of Jewish life. But protecting it is never won in one meeting, or one parliamentary intervention.
Advocacy is a slow burn. Anyone who has worked in public affairs knows it. Whether you're arguing for electric vehicles, a regulatory licence or planning permission, nobody changes their mind in one meeting. You make the case. You provide the evidence. You answer the objections. You keep coming back. Eventually, an argument that once seemed marginal becomes one that officials, journalists and policymakers can no longer ignore.
That is often the real goal. Good advocacy isn't about winning somebody over. It's about carving out enough space in legislation, guidance and public debate that your case gets a fair hearing instead of a reflexive dismissal, until, slowly, it becomes mainstream.
That is exactly what we have fought for with Shechita. Too much misinformation still rests on a crude, false distinction between “stunned” and “non-stunned” slaughter, as though the former were automatically humane and the latter automatically cruel. Shechita does not use a separate mechanical pre-stun. But we have long argued it meets the legal definition of stunning: a process causing loss of consciousness and sensibility without pain.
It stuns, dispatches and exsanguinates in one action. Meanwhile, the mechanical methods held up as the humane alternative including electric water-bath stunning for poultry, CO2 gassing for pigs are, as more organisations are now recognising, nowhere near as swift or comfortable as assumed. That's a story too large for this column, but it belongs in the comparison.
The science is moving too. In July, Shechita UK convened a closed seminar at the Langham Hotel in London with the Humane Slaughter Association and the Praxis Institute. Around 40 scientists, vets, academics and officials including from the FSA and Defra sat down to examine the latest evidence, as researchers presented newly published work from Britain, Canada and the United States.
The findings deserve attention. Peer-reviewed research in the American Journal of Veterinary Research shows the highest-quality evidence points to loss of consciousness within ten seconds, when the procedure is performed correctly under low-stress conditions. A separate haemodynamic study found a near-instantaneous, roughly 99 per cent collapse in cerebral blood flow and pressure after carotid sectioning. Other work has undercut claims that residual vertebral blood flow can sustain consciousness. And a systematic review of EEG evidence warns against mistaking neurological signs of nociception for proof of conscious pain. Taken together, none of this evidence lets anyone fairly call Shechita inherently less humane simply because it skips a separate mechanical pre-stun.
The FSA has now taken an important step by putting its own evidence on the record. The Government still says it “would prefer all animals to be stunned before slaughter.” Given the accumulating science, that line needs revisiting. Shechita should not be tolerated as a religious exemption from some supposedly superior standard. It is itself a humane method of slaughter and we said so long before the latest science arrived, defending it on political and practical grounds as well as religious ones. The point is simple: Shechita is not a fringe method of slaughter. It deserves to be treated as one of the mainstream methods of slaughter.
This October, we hope to be at the Humane Slaughter Association's conference in Newcastle. That matters too. Again, we want Shechita seen where it belongs: inside the mainstream landscape of animal welfare, farming, food production and slaughter science, not defended only by the religious, at the margins. So, we will keep turning up. Keep presenting the evidence. Keep making the case. That is how advocacy works: slowly, frustratingly, but the ground moves. The burn is slow but eventually success does begin to take light. Thank you, FSA.
Shimon Cohen is the campaign director for Shechita UK
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