The WORD and the Circle of Willis — An examination of Shechita

Those familiar steel cylinders in which oxygen and other gases are stored in compact form — that is, at very high pressure — must obviously be flawless. Let there be somewhere just the beginnings of a fissure, and the stresses concentrated around it will make that cylinder a bomb waiting to explode. Modern non-destructive methods enable checks to be made on the integrity of the vessel, by X-ray, dye penetration, ultrasonics or what-have-you; but the checking apparatus must itself be flawless (Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? For those who have forgotten their Latin: ‘Who will guard the guards themselves?’) if it is to be believed. Some techniques are still rather unsatisfactory, others are dangerous, and all have their limitations. Sorry, but that’s technology for you.

In the old days — and we were using oxygen cylinders long before these fancy technologies came along — each cylinder was simply filled with water which was then subjected to a very high pressure whereupon a man hit the thing hard with a hammer. It was quick, it was cheap, it was safe; and that is science for you, based in this case on the knowledge that water is practically incompressible. It was little more than a couple of centuries ago that an English physicist demonstrated that its compressibility was in fact measurable. But in practice if a cylinder burst the depressurized water would not erupt explosively from it but would merely dribble out of the crack. Science is not fancy laboratories and elaborate formulæ, it is simply knowledge.

Do you need to know all this? Probably not. However, should you be forced to face the arguments of all that mistaken rabble of chumps and hooligans who are trying to abolish Shechita — and especially if, G-d forbid, you are tempted to align yourself with them — you ought to bear in mind that the apostles of technocracy often have piles of apparatus and loads of research with which to conceal their true ignorance and mislead others, while the people with real knowledge and hands-on experience actually know what they are talking about and get the job done surprisingly simply. You might remember the common saying that, ‘an engineer is somebody who knows his stuff and can do for five bob what the silly fool who doesn’t know what he’s doing charges you four times as much.’ Getting back to those cylinders, the point to remember is that liquids are virtually incompressible.

That includes blood. Although axiomatically thicker than water, it behaves similar to water. When it contains plenty of dissolved oxygen, it supports life; when it abstracts unwanted matter it cleanses; and when it is subjected to pressure it equalizes that pressure in all directions at every point within the vessels containing it.

‘The blood is life,’ we are told in the Torah, and that is one reason why we are forbidden to consume even the smallest amount of any animal’s blood. There are laws galore prohibiting shedding it, about covering the blood of the animals that we use for food (symbolically burying it) and even laws against making it drain from someone’s face by embarrassing him (tantamount, say our Rabbis, to a kind of murder and evidence that they knew about the circulation of blood in the body thousands of years before Harvey discovered it). In particular, we must not ingest it. Perhaps the first thing most of us learned about kashrus, after the washing of the hands, was that all blood had to be removed from meat and that even chickens’ eggs have to be examined to ensure that they do not have a ‘blood-drop.’

The kashrus of meat begins with Shechita, the slaughter of the animal, in strict accordance with Jewish law, by a shochet — a man of piety and probity, of ample learning supported by meticulous training so that he is competent not only to administer the creature’s end but also to inspect its carcass for any of the multitude of blemishes or signs of disease or injury which would disqualify it from being kosher, no matter how impeccable its slaughter. That calls for a lot of knowledge and training — there are approximately sixty categories of blemishes and other disqualifying symptoms in poultry alone, while the diseases and faults found in cattle are so numerous that at present they render half the beasts dispatched by the shochet’s knife unfit to be dispatched to the kosher butcher.

This sad fact is a sadder reflection on the cruelty suffered by the animals before they even reach the abattoir. It is common knowledge that slaughterers other than shochetim are brutalized by their trade, but their callousness and indifference to animal suffering is echoed by all too many livestock farmers, not to mention the men who transport the live beasts from farm to factory. Conscientious objectors to the abuse of animals should start at the batteries and breeding-pens; the last thing they should object to is the Shechita blade.

It is the keenest thing you ever saw, sharper and smoother than a barber’s razor or a surgeon’s scalpel. It has to be: Jewish law is quite emphatic in forbidding any tearing action (so there must be no nicks or irregularities in the cutting edge) or any pressure behind the blade (which means it must be perfectly sharp to effect the desired cut) as well as prohibiting any use of the blade in such a way as to tug at any of the tissues of the neck. The handle is quite small, because that prevents a lot of leverage being applied in contravention of the rules. The blade is fairly wide, to ensure that much of it remains uncovered during the cut, as is also required, and it is suitably long (anything from four inches for a pigeon to twenty-two inches for large oxen) so that the swift transverse stroke prescribed by the laws can be completed within its length. It is also surprisingly light; it is the edge that must do the job, without reliance on weight behind the edge such as is found in a Bowie knife or a Samurai sword.

The design and manufacture of cutting blades is a fascinating study, as it happens. Without diverting into it here, suffice it to say that nobody anywhere makes a blade as keen and as sharp as the shochet sharpening his knife. The Aztecs used obsidian for their human sacrifices and the structure of that stone permits it to be even sharper than steel — but it also allows it to be used roughly, with tearing or stabbing actions that would send a shochet back to his precious sharpening and honing stones for a few more hours’ patient restoration of the edge.

The secret may lie in the unique blade section, which is a blend of what, a few thousand years later, became familiar in the hollow-ground German and wedge-section French open razors used by barbers. The Shechita blade section is defined by two ogees or reversed curves: it is like an extremely slender version of the shape that you may have admired when you looked up to see the Concorde supersonic airliner cleaving the skies. Unlike the Concorde, it is not a product of modern technology but of real, hands-on knowledge, made by a cutler who knows his stuff, who knows the arts of alloying and heat-treatment and grain orientation, and who can forge the best cutting edge anywhere, even in the wilderness.

The action with which the shochet makes the cut is a single rapid transverse slicing of the neck, occupying a fraction of a second, followed by the immediate retraction of the blade. This action actually has the effect — just as has the swept-back wing of a really fast aircraft — of simulating an even more slender blade section (aerodynamicists would describe it as a finer thickness : chord ratio) than the knife actually has. In other words, the blade acts as though it were even sharper than it is. Have you ever discovered from an ooze of blood that you have cut yourself with something pretty sharp (a razor, say) and yet felt nothing till you actually saw the bleeding? Quite. The cut of the shochet, with a blade that is so sharp that it can cut a single unsupported hair, cannot be felt.

Mark you, he has to make the cut in the right place. Just below the pharynx (the cricoid cartilage of which would offer too gristly a resistance) is where, after washing or shearing the fur to get rid of dirt, he starts; and just short of the spine (which might damage the blade’s edge and invalidate the operation) is where he stops. Between these limits he severs all the soft structures in front of the cervical vertebrae. Only those animals that are thus slaughtered correctly (the word kosher means ‘correct’) are permitted to be eaten by us.

Some people question the ‘moral right’ to eat meat, and maybe they are right. Our Rabbis say that an unworthy human being has no right to take the life of an animal. The human who rebels against G-d is perhaps on a lower moral level than the animal which is doing the Will of its Creator by simply being an animal. Be that as it may and before we lose ourselves in that debate, let us recall that meat-eating has been permitted by G-d since after the Flood. Nobody is obliged to eat meat; whether a satisfactory diet can be achieved without it depends on what else happens to be available, and on one’s own constitution.

Choose as you will if you have the choice, but at Sinai G-d made it clear to Moshe that we are permitted to eat meat provided that we comply with all His relevant laws. Among them, as Moshe noted in Devorrim (12 : 21) is a crucial instruction: ‘You shall slaughter of your herd and of your flock, which G-d your L-rd has given you, as I have commanded you.’ ‘As I have commanded you’ — but where? Search from ‘In the beginning’ to ‘in the sight of all Israel’ and you won’t find another word about how to slaughter. So where is the command? This is one of those instances where the Torah is seen to function as a Divine shorthand note-book, to be amplified by the wealth of explanation communicated orally by G-d to Moshe and relayed to us by him as the Oral Law. Later, this was all written down in the Talmud and it’s codified into today’s Codes of Law. The laws specific to Shechita were part of this explanation, they are absolutely binding upon us, and that is that. However, examining and seeking to understand them is perfectly in order. So, let’s find out: what does the shochet achieve with the fatal kiss of his blade?

Severing the trachea or windpipe doesn’t kill; one may actually save the life of somebody choking by slitting open the windpipe and allowing him to breathe. No, the trachea just happens to be there, and must be transversed. The same applies to the oesophagus, or gullet, the interruption of which merely interferes with the animal’s diet. Then there are the vagus nerves, which run directly from brain to stomach to give the latter its acid drive: I can tell you from experience that having those cut leads to a wonderful calmness and freedom from ulcers, but that is hardly the object of this exercise. The real targets are the major blood vessels, the jugular veins and most especially the carotid arteries.

Merely to press on the two carotids will induce unconsciousness in a human in about five seconds: this is a standard jiu-jitsu technique. A sharp blow with the edge of the hand against one of them, as in karate, induces unconsciousness immediately. I have done it, and discussed the experience with my antagonist afterwards: no pain was felt before loss of consciousness, and the only discomfort after recovery a couple of minutes later was some initial difficulty in breathing. Compared with Shechita, such unarmed-combat tricks (and some more subtle ones, such as the paralyzing finger-touch to the neck) are crude blunderings. Cutting through the carotids does everything that could be desired.

Consider what the carotids do. Ascending asymmetrically from beneath a collarbone, they carry freshly oxygenated blood under pressure from the heart to the brain. A few trivial branches part off from them to serve other localities passed en route, but the bulk of the flow is pumped up to the brain, which needs lots of oxygen if it is to work properly. The vitiated blood falls back through the jugular veins which run roughly parallel to the carotids; but between arteries and veins there is a whole network of irrigation for all the compartments of the brain. Serving it is a sort of manifold or ring main called the Circle of Willis, not truly a circle but rather an irregular heptagon. Distinguished in the hallowed pages of Gray’s Anatomy as ‘this remarkable anastomosis,’ the Circle of Willis is a fairly large-bore circuit at the base of the brain, fed by the arteries and distributing incoming blood through numerous branches to the brain’s subsystems.

Now mark this well. As soon as pressure fails in the Circle of Willis, consciousness is lost. As soon as the carotid arteries are severed, blood pressure is no longer contained and therefore falls to zero; and because of the nature of pressure transmission and distribution in a virtually incompressible fluid (remember the man with the hammer?) the pressure of blood in the Circle of Willis will drop virtually simultaneously to zero, whereupon consciousness is lost. As soon as the carotids spout their cataracts from the slit, oblivion is instantaneous. Right?

Not necessarily? Oh, you too have been reading Gray’s Anatomy, and Harvey, no doubt, and all the textbooks on hydraulics and hydrostatics and the draining of the Pontine Marshes? What, you ask, about the vertebral arteries?

A good question — because it has a marvellous answer. Admittedly, if you look at the diagrams of human anatomy in Gray and elsewhere, you will find another pair of arteries coming up the spine, inside the vertebrae and protected by them, to feed the brain by running directly into the Circle of Willis.

Even though the carotids were cut asunder, blood might still flow by momentum as much as by what little pressure remained for a matter of seconds, and so oblivion would not be prompt, although it would still come pretty quickly. But ‘pretty quickly’ is not good enough, as you rightly say, for we are forbidden by the Torah to cause suffering to any animal. Does that not strike you as strange? If G-d directed us to slaughter our food animals according to His specified directions, we should be able to assume that the method must be one which causes the animal no distress. Absolutely right: the Torah is and must be wholly consistent with itself. And, as you should have expected, it turns out to be exactly so.

Look elsewhere in the Torah and you will find stipulated those laws of kashrus which enjoin us to eat meat only from those animals which are, amongst other things, chewers of the cud. Ruminants, we call them; and those of us who engage in that modern science called comparative anatomy may have noticed something remarkably significant about their circulatory systems. The vertebral arteries of ruminants, unlike those of other animals, do not lead into the Circle of Willis. Instead they appear to peter out in the muscles at the back of the head, but in fact they link up with some of the branches put out by the carotids on their way up through the neck. So when the carotids of a ruminant are severed by the knife of the shochet, any residual flow in the vertebrals is dumped back in the carotids to drain out through the slit. The Circle of Willis is left depressurized. As stated, oblivion is instantaneous.

Note that I am not saying that this is the reason why we are commanded to confine our animal diet to ruminants. The reasons for G-d’s laws are known but to Him. What I am saying is that here is yet another of those amazing correspondences between apparently unconnected ordinances, one which cannot have been known until recently, but one which marvellously illustrates the inner consistency and cohesion of the Torah. For anyone of weak faith or faltering observance, such little jewels of evidence may be more convincing than the biggest of epic miracles.

For anyone not acquainted with death-dealing, there may still be doubts. Admittedly observers have often told how the animal is utterly still immediately after Shechita, not even twitching, let alone kicking as a hurt animal would. But then what happens after 25 or 30 seconds? It starts to twitch and to kick. Horrible! The poor thing has not been killed after all, for it is still reacting violently to the pain! No, it is not, for it is dead, dead, dead. Had its head been chopped right off, it would still twitch and kick. Were you to cut it up into smallish bits and hang them from hooks, each chunk would still twitch. These convulsions are not the deliberate protestations of an anguished soul; they are automatic consequences of oxygen deprivation, and they may be measured as electrical activity which is, in the end, a merely chemical reaction in which oxygen plays a vital role. People who claim that Shechita is cruel on the evidence of electroencephalograms recording such electrical impulses are inferring illusions: they would find similar measurable electrical jerks in those twitching lumps of butchered meat.

What, then, of those observers who have commented that animals slaughtered in non-kosher abattoirs are often seen to be perfectly still throughout the aftermath of execution? The 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?