(28 Jan 2021) A kosher slaughterhouse in southern Hungary has increased its exports to Belgium since the European Union's highest court last month upheld a law in the country's Flanders region that outlawed slaughtering animals without first stunning them into unconsciousness.
Jewish law forbids injuring an animal before it is killed, so the Belgian stunning requirement renders meat and poultry non-kosher.
The European Court of Justice ruling may have given the Hungarian facility a short-term business boost, but it has provoked fears of an eventual EU-wide prohibition on the production and sale of kosher meat.
Animal rights groups which pushed for the Flanders law argued that ritual slaughter without stunning is tantamount to animal cruelty.
But Slomo Koves, the Chief Rabbi of the Association of Hungarian Jewish Communities which owns the slaughterhouse in Csengele, Hungary, told The Associated Press that the increasing interrelatedness of European Jewish communities means the court's decision will reverberate beyond Belgium's borders, and that he fears the next step after banning ritual slaughter will be a Europe-wide prohibition on the sale of kosher meat.
"This court decision, which right now affects only Belgium doesn't only effect the Belgian Jewish community," he said.
Passed in the name of animal rights, the 2017 Flemish law - and a similar one in the Wallonia region of Belgium - joins a list of regulations in another six European countries which ban slaughter without stunning or sedation, which is most often performed through electric shock or a bolt gun to the animal's skull.
The practice, which often kills or irreparably injures the animal, is not permitted under Jewish law which forbids injury or damage to animals' tissues before slaughtering them for food.
Muslim groups have argued that the stunning requirements in Flanders and Wallonia preclude halal ritual slaughtering as well, and allege the laws have come from efforts by Belgium's Islamophobic far-right to harass their communities.
But according to Reineke Hameleers, CEO of the Brussels-based animal protection organisation Eurogroup for Animals, scientific bodies such as the European Food Safety Authority have demonstrated that animals "suffer tremendously" when they are slaughtered while conscious.
She believes that reversible stunning is the bare minimum to protect animals, and that animals should be rendered unconscious before being killed, using a temporary, non-fatal stunning procedure.
Some Muslim religious authorities consider permissible in the production of halal meat but Jewish authorities do not.
Rabbi Koves believes that the kosher slaughter method, known as shechita, is no less humane than the methods used in conventional meat production.
The method uses a sharp knife and is performed by a 'shochet' trained to make the cut in a single smooth motion, severing the animal's nerves and draining the blood from the brain in seconds.
Laws requiring the pre-slaughter stunning of animals appeared in some European countries as early as the late 19th century, with the EU requiring the pre-stunning of animals since 1979 while allowing member states to make religion-based exceptions.
Most do, but lawmakers across Europe have been increasingly open to either curtailing or doing away with the exemptions. Slovenia, Denmark and Sweden, as well as non-EU members Switzerland, Iceland and Norway, make no religious exceptions, forcing their religious communities to import kosher and halal meat from abroad.
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