Dutch Authorities Recommend Banning Kosher Slaughter
Image by Flickr
The Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority advised the government to ban ritual slaughter of animals, citing pain and suffering caused to them in the process.
The recommendation appeared in a report by the authority’s risk assessment bureau, the NRC Handelsblad daily Friday.
“Ban, from a point of view of animal welfare, the killing of conscious animals and especially cattle,” the daily quoted from the recommendation. “If the slaughter of conscious cattle continues anyway,” the recommendation’s authors wrote, then slaughtered animals must not be handled as long as they display signs of life.
In 2012, the Dutch senate scrapped legislation passed the previous year that amounted to a ban on kosher and halal slaughter because it required all animals be rendered unconscious before they are killed. Both Muslim and Jewish religious law requires animals be conscious when their necks are cut.
The law had been submitted by the left-leaning Dutch Party for Animals supported by the right-wing Party for Freedom, which is opposed to Muslim immigration to the Netherlands.
The authority said it opposed ritual slaughter because it means that animals may take more than 45 seconds to die, during which time they may be subjected to stress and pain.
The Dutch Israelite Religious Community, on NIK, has argued that the strict rules of shechitah, the Hebrew word for kosher slaughter, assure minimum suffering that does not exceed that of non-kosher slaughterhouses.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
