Gentile corpse-croppers have a trick for ensuring this immobility: they insert a wire into the spinal column, and it paralyses the animal, dead or not. Assuming, as they usually do, that it is dead, they want to get the blood out of it quickly: everybody in the meat trade is at least agreed on this principle derived from Torah, that the blood must be drained as soon after death as is possible. If it is not, the meat can be spoilt. So far, no faster, better or more complete way of draining all the blood, before it can possibly coagulate, has been found than the Shechita method.
Nevertheless, there are some who object to it. Some object on humanitarian grounds that are, in sentiment, erroneous — even if they are sincere. Some simply find it difficult to believe that so simple and old-established a method can possibly give results as quick and clean as all the marvels of modern science should. The majority are prompted simply by antipathy to Jews. All are grievously misled by accidental ignorance and deliberate misinformation. If only they knew what horrors accompany other methods of slaughter and which can never happen with Shechita! With Shechita, the animal is very dead very quickly but Shechita is very bloody. You see, after the cut, the blood gushes out and there is blood all over the place — there’s a lot of blood in a bull. With the other methods of killing, there isn’t so much blood around (till later) and it all looks that much cleaner and not so “primitive.” The animal might take longer to die, but it looks so much more humane. Never mind the animal — the human beings feel better.
One of the worst is electrocution. The lay public like to think it is one of the best, if only because it would worry them to think about all the criminals who have gone to America’s electric chair and that the method was less clean and instantaneous than they suppose. Forget it! What happens in the electric chair is that the convict’s brains are slowly boiled ...
With electricity, it is amperage (or rate of current) which kills; not voltage. Voltage merely jolts. I have subjected myself to 40,000 volts, but as the amperage was negligible, I jumped, as forecast, but came down still alive, with no after effects except some sore muscles. High voltages have been tried for killing animals — not as high as this, because insulation is difficult (especially in the wet conditions of an abattoir) but at ordinary mains pressure and with adequate current to kill. The effect, as far as the butchers were concerned, was disastrous: the violence of the convulsions smashed the animals’ bones.
Muscles are much stronger than we realise. There is no need for vast bulk, for the strength comes from properly energizing the fibres, not from thickening them. If we could exert all the potential strength in our muscles, the skinniest weed among us could break his own bones by the applied leverage. That is what happens in animals electrocuted at high voltages. So instead, the slaughterers turned the voltage down but kept the current running for several seconds until eventually death seemed to have occurred. Seven or eight or more seconds, it took, and the animals suffered piteously — but never mind, there were no longer any bones broken. The lungs might look as though a bomb had gone off inside them, mark you, and in all that pulmonary mess it would be quite impossible to see whether there had been any previous lesions or disease such as the pneumonia which often affects farm animals. What did that matter, except to a bunch of cranky Jews? (Lesions on lungs render even a kosher-slaughtered animal not kosher.) The only real trouble was that electrocution caused muscular convulsions which increased the secretion of lactic acid in the tissues, hastening putrefaction of the meat.
The same objection applied to hunted meat, or any meat of animals suffering muscular exertion or fatigue immediately before death; but the answer was simply to get the carcass away from the electrodes, past the circular saws, and into the freezer, fast. After that the problem was the customers’, not the packers’.
Swine are often killed by electrocution. So are lambs, the electrodes being applied in what are euphemistically called earmuffs, so that, as the current arcs across, the poor things’ brains are slowly boiled. Of course a high voltage first might stun, but sometimes it only induces paralysis, which is confusing, and always there is the danger of shattered spines and split shoulder blades. No, let the beast suffer: the results are much more certain that way, and the net profits are higher.
Poultry are regularly killed by electricity, in circumstances which are often the most nauseating of all. The creatures are knocked about in the batteries, in the transporters, in the handling as they are grabbed from their boxes and fed into the factory system. Many a wing or leg is broken, or worse, before the bird ever gets through the door. Then it is hung up by the feet from a moving conveyor, an overhead rail which carries the hapless bird head-down to the electrical contacts. Immediately afterwards there is an automatic throat-cutter to see that the blood is shed. If all chickens were the same size, and if they all kept still, everything would work as it was meant to (which is not the same as saying ‘as it should’). But birds are birds, maybe as dim as most other creatures bred for the pot, but individual nevertheless: they are not all the same size, and they do not all keep still. So sometimes the electrical contacts miss, and sometimes birds go alive into the processing machinery further down the production line. Stop the line? Don’t be silly, think what that would cost!
Now how are you feeling, all you humanitarians and well-wishers and Jew-baiters and would-be Shechita-forbidders? Would you like to hear about some of the other methods which callousness permits and hypocrisy commends as alternatives to the way of the Jews? There is always the captive-bolt pistol, the so-called ‘humane killer’ which is a pole-axe modified by technology. It has to be applied at exactly the right spot on the skull if it is to pierce it and strike the right spot (the medulla oblongata) in the brain. That does not always happen and even when correctly placed it does not always kill. The animal drops to the floor forthwith, oh yes! But there is no proof that it feels no pain: the bolt merely pierces the centres of respiration and communication, including the blood pressure, but it does not travel all that fast. Experience in the hunting field has shown that tissue destruction, often accompanied by death from hydraulic shock, needs a purpose-designed bullet with an impact velocity that exceeds Mach 2. Hunters prefer big bangers to small-bore high-velocity ammunition, finding it easier to aim vaguely for the chest than to place the bullet precisely in the neck or head. So hunted meat is suspect, too.
Guns are hazardous in an abattoir, however admirable they might be in the field. Statistics for the pole-axe are even worse than for the captive bolt; so is the plight of the animal. Gas or other chemical anaesthetics are usually too slow, too dangerous to the workers, and leave unpurged poisons in the meat for the consumer to survive if he is strong and lucky. Then there are tales to tell of tails twisted and flanks goaded and torsos kicked to bring recalcitrant animals under control as they enter the slaughterhouse; of steers that have broken away being chased across the stockyard by men wielding hammers to beat them on the head; of ‘sticking’ by farmers who string a beast up by its hind legs, slit its belly from groin to ribcage, and then stand back to listen to it die. And we won’t talk of how lobsters are killed by simply tossing them alive into boiling water. Confound all the campaigners for the ignorant hypocrites they are! Far from objecting to kosher meat, any truly conscientious person would flatly refuse to eat any meat that was not kosher!
You have heard of a shochet making an error, and that worries you? It worries him too, but what really perturbs him is his failure to observe the ordinances of G-d. Being human and fallible, the shochet makes a mistake about once in every hundred cases, when of course the meat cannot be considered kosher. A failure rate of one per cent is much better than any other methods can boast.
Yet that is not the point. We must learn to accept that what G-d has instructed us to do is the right thing to do, and that His reasons are for Him to know, not for us. The earnest ignoramuses who recently pronounced that, if some other method of slaughter could be scientifically proven (whatever that may mean) to cause less suffering than Shechita, it should be adopted, entirely missed the point. We do not know that the avoidance of suffering is the reason for Shechita; we only know that G-d has forbidden us to cause suffering, and in a separate ordinance has demanded that we slaughter in this particular way, from which we can deduce that it does not cause any suffering. This much we have always known, and have always been able to deduce; and now that we know how neatly the method relates to yet another law, about ruminants, we ought to see that we were fools ever to question Him. Now, could we please stop this clamour against Shechita and take G-d at His word?
