Note: The findings of this study should not be used as an excuse to target the Jewish community or any other group. Animal exploitation is not unique to any one culture or religion. Respect for all living beings, both animals and non-human animals, is paramount to creating a more just and compassionate world.

Within the Jewish religion, animals cannot be pre-stunned or numbed when they are slaughtered for food. Instead, Jewish law describes a specific method of slaughter in which a sharp blade is used to cut through an immobilized animal’s trachea, esophagus, and blood vessels all at once. Theoretically, this method of slaughter should kill the animal quickly and relatively painlessly. 

However, this claim is not universally accepted, as some people believe that the animal does not lose consciousness right away and suffers more as a result. In order for the meat to be certified as kosher (fit for consumption according to Jewish law), the animal must pass a pre-slaughter health inspection as well as a post-slaughter inspection that checks the animal’s internal organs for signs of disease. The slaughter itself is also inspected in real-time to make sure that the cut that kills the animal is performed according to the specifics of Jewish law. Failure to pass any of these inspections means the meat cannot be considered kosher, in which case it is instead sold to the general public as conventional non-kosher meat. 

This study, published in Meat Science, aims to investigate how often meat from cows killed via the kosher slaughter method fails to meet kosher certification standards, and for what reasons it most commonly happens.

The study was conducted between May 2015 and March 2016 using cows from farms of the Apulia region of Italy. Rabbis from Rome and from Milan observed the slaughter of a total of 727 cows and made the determination of whether the resulting meat qualified as kosher. The study found that of the 727 cattle, a little over 50% (381 cattle) did not end up qualifying for kosher designation. Most of the rejections occurred during the post-slaughter inspection, upon finding excessive lesions in the animals’ internal organs, especially in the lungs from pneumonia and other respiratory disorders. The authors of the study note that the Milan Rabbis appeared to apply stricter standards, leading them to reject 71.2% of the slaughtered cattle that they examined. By contrast, the Roman Rabbis rejected 44.1% of the slaughtered cattle that they inspected. 

With such a high rejection rate for kosher certification, the authors point out that many of the animals killed following kosher slaughter procedures end up being sold as conventional meat. The authors believe that this creates an ethical issue in which consumers who are concerned about the welfare implications of slaughter without pre-stunning could unknowingly be eating animals that were killed in this way. Advocates for animals will recognize the larger ethical issue: regardless of the method of slaughter, both conventional and kosher meat comes from animals raised in the same cruel conditions with the same fate of an early death. In fact, the cows slaughtered in this study were only up to 12 months old. Based on their high rates of disease, they were also likely to have been raised in unhygienic conditions without adequate care. 

Jewish advocates can bring these issues to the attention of members in their community, some of whom may not be aware that the production and sale of kosher meat has the same major ethical consequences as non-kosher animal products. Ultimately all animal products fund the same exploitative system of animal agriculture. Advocates of all faiths can use the findings of this study to educate the public about the abundance of disease in domestic cow populations. Discussions about the reasons for the prevalence of disease in farmed animal populations can open up a wider conversation about how farmed animals are commonly treated and how society’s insatiable demand for animal products affects the wellbeing of animals.