Australia To Allow Shechita Practices to Continue

AUSTRALIA — According to media reports, the findings of a review into ritual slaughter, which have been leaked, will allow shechitah to continue, even though Australian standards require that animals be electrically stunned immediately after ritual killing.

Shechitah, or Jewish ritual slaughter, has historically been asserted as the most humane method of killing animals for food.

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) made this claim in its submissions to the review, initiated by the former government in 2007.

Despite the findings, the ECAJ argued in its submission that shechitah, which involves slitting an animal’s throat, minimises the animal’s pain before death and there is no proof that electric stunning reduces any pain felt.

ECAJ president Robert Goot said his organisation requested that the inquiry preserve existing regulations for animal slaughter that allow for shechitah, as well as for Islamic ritual slaughter practices.

“The ECAJ has been in active discussion with the government departments responsible for these matters for almost 12 months,” he said.

Religious authorities are presently exempt from using electric stunning during slaughter, a practice that is stipulated by the standards but not permitted by kashrut.

Animal rights groups, support electric stunning during slaughter, with no exemptions.
Leaked results stated the inquiry found that ritual slaughter causes animals “pain and distress”, but did not oppose the practice.

Meanwhile, Goot has rejected discontent among some rabbis that the ECAJ submissions had not been comprehensively sourced.

The AJN understands there is some dissatisfaction among rabbis, who claim that the roof body did not consult widely enough with rabbinical experts on shechitah before making its submissions.

However, the Rabbinical Council of Victoria, whose rabbis have been among the ECAJ’s critics, released a statement saying its members have been involved in negotiations with the ECAJ on the matter.

Goot said the ECAJ’s stance reflects Australian Orthodox rabbinical opinion.

“The ECAJ position, as most recently put to the Primary Industries Ministerial Committee, is a submission with which the Organisation of Rabbis of Australasia concurs, and its members concur.”

He said there had been wide consultation with the rabbinate on the matter and “to my knowledge, there is no disagreement with the position that has been put as recently as September 18, 2009, by the ECAJ”.