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An Austrian State May Require Registration for Orthodox Jews to Buy Kosher Meats
When I read the headline, I felt nauseous. Visions of yellow stars drifted through my head. Before I completely overreacted, I thought I should check out the facts; after checking, I was less alarmed, but not by much.
In Lower Austria, Gottfried Waldhäusl, a cabinet minister and Freedom Party member in the state of Lower Austria, is in charge of animal welfare as well as other responsibilities. A draft decree has been issued there to ban sales of kosher meat except to those people who register for permits who can prove they are observant Jews. He insisted that these requirements were necessary from the point of view of protecting animals.
Critics of the production of kosher meats declare that the practices to produce kosher meats are cruel. Observant Jews, however, along with other requirements, require that the animal be killed in one blow, to prevent suffering.
Klaus Schneeberger, the regional leader of the ruling Austrian People’s party of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, has said the plan will not be implemented. Complications may arise since the Austrian People’s Party entered a coalition agreement with the Freedom Party or FPO last year following a federal election. The FPO was created by a former Nazi SS soldier in the 1950s. The party has been accused of using anti-Semitic rhetoric although it has most recently tried to distance itself from this kind of speech.
A couple of factors related to the current climate strike me: the focus of this decree has been on the Jews, even though it will likely affect Muslims, too. Some right-wing secret student fraternities, which have existed for many years, embrace anti-Semitic rhetoric. The Forum Against Anti-Semitism in Austria received 503 reported cases of anti-Semitism. On one level, anti-Semitic acts are hardly unheard of in Europe; on the other hand, this combination of factors is hard to ignore.
A politically correct tweet was issued by the Austrian Ambassador to Israel saying:
It has given rise to great concerns in Austria’s Jewish and Muslim community. Leading politicians from Lower Austria have thus gone on record and made it clear that they will find a solution together with these communities—and allay all fears!
Why am I not reassured?
Published in Politics
When you think about it, how can we do anything but guess about what an animal experiences? Torturing an animal before killing it is clearly out of bounds, but if the stunning technique is not done properly, the animal still suffers.
If everyone would just mind their own business . . . thanks for the links, FSC.
I am truly surprised that anybody is surprised. How did people think encouraging nativists in Austria (or anywhere in Europe) was going to end?
You don’t think this is an earnest policy proposed for the benefit of animals?
Not quite. For livestock, kosher slaughter (shechitah) involves a single, uninterrupted, unhesitating cut using a very sharp knife with a smooth edge. The cut must simultaneously sever the esophagus, trachea, carotid arteries and jugular veins.
This is best done with the animal standing, and (except for when the Temple stood) generally not done on a mass scale. Large scale operations with modern sanitation laws have tended to incorporate procedures like shackling and hoisting which, for unstunned animals (as required by shechitah) isn’t humane.
Livestock expert Temple Grandin wrote (in the wake of a major scandal)
Shamefully, as Grandin goes on to describe, there have been shameful abuses in the kosher meat industry. This has opened the door for politicians to ban shechitah while asserting that they are not antisemites.
The ritual slaughter page on Grandin’s website is a good source on the humane issues in kosher and halal slaughter.
I have no doubt that the main intent of the Austrian law is to force observant Muslims to register with the state. Inconveniencing Jews is a bonus for some pols – and realistically speaking, incorporating Jews helps it look even handed.
In a move showing that Putin is still a world class trollmeister:
I would also tend to blame those people who try to suppress nativists. What else would you expect when you push them underground, whack-a-mole fashion.
It is shameful, OTLC! But Jews can be as evil as anyone else, unfortunately.
Now I thought slaughtering cattle (or any animal) under duress ruined the meat due to excessive adrenaline . . .
Make no mistake, this is only the first step in the animal rights movements intent to ban all consumption of meat.
Is it more cruel to bleed out an animal by slitting it’s throat than to slam a bolt in to its brain? I doubt it, but that is the basis for all this. But even if they get what they want and force all slaughter to be done their way, they will soon declare that method cruel as well. Because, lets face it, they consider meat to be murder and thus all farming and slaughter involved in the consumption of meat to be cruel.
The problem of a major party making room for open antisemitism, is much closer to home, already.
Whilst the topic is abused by a silly potentially rightwing stinker of an Austrian regional secondary politician, the underlying is actually not an issue.
In Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Germany as well as Austria any form of slaughtering animals without rendering them unconscious for any reasons, supposed religious ones or otherwise, is prohibited as it is considered inappropriately cruel to the creature. Austria does, however, for a long time have certain exemptions, notably more catering to their newly imported muslim underbelly than the small and undeterred Jewish community.
Without bothering you with too many details to start with, the cultural and butchery conundrum has been there for hundreds of years, started to be codified in various bodies of law and, as everything grabbed for, was then easily abused by fascists in the early 1930s.
Fortunately, there is strenuously intense veterinary research into the matter in the aforementioned countries. The Swiss took the biscuit in this regard. The underlying controversy is not anti-Semitic, the arguments made against Schechita or שחט šacḥaṭ are actually quite valid, because the technique requires both skill and zero tolerance for technical mistakes in any event, though non biased boring research, practical experience (yes, please ask) and testing increasingly shows that beyond obvious signs one may individually experience there is a measurable severe, undue neural impact on the animal.
Yes, we can argue to tidbits as to whether the religious imperative requires to rate the desire to not have blood infest your diet as per whatever scroll may tell you higher than the animal’s pain impact whilst being killed for being eaten. But it does not matter as to current legal issue: the selected aforementioned eight sovereign countries in continuation of longstanding traditions have outruled this practice in various forms. As an example, Germany prohibits it but allows the import of kosher and halal butchered animals. So, there is no shortage of availability of product. However, you must not kill the animal in that form within the border of the country. We still respect borders, culture, and law here, I take it.
P.S.: The gratuitous swipe at German student fraternities across the German speaking countries is a tad overdrawn and seems uninformed, beyond their historic and cultural dimension across the German speaking nations and unhelpful. The student fraternities in general do not resemble the few fascist outfits ultimately referred to in regard to member fo the current Austrian coalition government.
We can to a large extent. There is sufficient science.
As it is otherwise fully down to the individual’s skill, technique and daily form, just like you stated, wherever the proponents of this religiously motivated form of killing the animal for food have not been in the majority stunning the animal has been the key to solving the issue since the middle ages and became culturally preferable.
That’s why stunning the animal works. Known to many cultures including e.g. Germans since at least the early middle ages.
Kosher slaughtering does not do that. Stun the animal and then kill it. That does it. Notably, the traditional Christian-European way of killing the animal post stun still kills it with one bolt or cut.
Given the past millennium of European history, this comes to mind:
We respect fundamental rights like religious liberty a whole lot more. Now, what actual rights (which by definition preclude animal ‘rights’) or compelling state interests necessitate that kosher butchers be outlawed?
I wonder if @jameslileks is aware of this person?
Point taken re bringing them up in relation to the government. Regarding your points on ritual slaughtering within Judaism without stunning, I’ll have to investigate this further.
Which says that shechitah, done properly is humane. And says that stunning, done improperly, is not. There are many critical processes in society which are good if done well and bad if not. The critical difference between humane and inhumane has to do with how the animals are handled and moved through the process, and if the slaughter is done standing, how they are restrained.
Here is a link to highly relevant articles from Temple Grandin a veterinarian widely recognized as an expert in this.
Here’s my perspective:
First off, slaughter is clearly far preferable than a death in the wild by exposure, predators, or disease.If we did not raise and slaughter meat, there would be far fewer animals in the world (see the shortage in endangered species, and massive numbers of pigs and chickens and cows). So slaughtering meat means more animals – whether the manner of slaughter is via the knife or stunning.
Slaughter is not designed to increase cruelty. Indeed, Jewish law considers “tearing the limb from a living animal” to be a noachide stricture, one of the seven sins that every person (not just Jews) is forbidden from doing.
In the specific question, I would automatically defer to libertarian principles: if the thing in question is not clearly barbaric, then government has no role determining what should and should not be acceptable. The market – people – can choose for themselves, using the information that is freely available.
So if you think that stunning is preferable, then you should be able to choose food butchered on that basis. If, on the other hand, you prefer a slaughtering method that conforms to your cultural or religious or other beliefs (but is, in any event, far less cruel than an animal’s death in the wild), then what business is it of the government?
So true. That’s why these idiots who free minks from fur farms are sentencing them to a much crueler death on the outside than they would have had on the inside.
The Jewish population of Austria today: <15,000 (<0.2 % of the total population; 100 years ago, it was ~300,000 and ~4.5%)
The Muslim population of Austria today: > 700,000 (~ 8% of the total population – up from 0.3% in less than 50 years.)
The primary purpose seems to be the official registration of halal consumers as a proxy for the registration of sharia compliant Muslims – with that illiberal measure justified by opposition to cruelty to animals. Jews must be included because of the similarities between the two methods of slaughter.
That’s not to say that Jews won’t be collateral damage of any measures the Austrian government takes against Muslims, or that there are no antisemitic Austrians who will be happy that Jews are once again made to feel unwelcome, or that the whole thing doesn’t resonate with the antisemitism that led to the murder of Austrian Jewry.
By the way, hunting is legal in Austria. Certainly hunting is less “humane” than either forms of slaughter.
My thanks to @iwe and @ontheleftcoast for articulating so well the information that I couldn’t do well. Thanks to both of you for providing a broad and thoughtful perspective.
Not sure, but the Power Line team has been all over the story. Perhaps they will do an episode of the Power Line Blog podcast on the subject.
I agree with most of what you wrote, except for this sentence. I’m applying this to my own death, of course.
It hasn’t kept me from slaughtering chickens in our back yard, and from trying to keep predators from getting to them first. But this preference is for my benefit, and not the chickens’.
No, Sir. Just wrong, pursue some boring neural scientists and look at the tests (not that those are very appetising, ‘humane’ whatever that is in this context, or simply adequate to a living being).
‘Done properly.’ Q.E.D. The method is difficult, delicate to execute, prone to risking torturous impact on an animal which can simply be stunned and killed.
See: Dtsch Tierarztl Wochenschr. 1978 Feb 5;85(2):62-6.
[Objectivization of pain and consciousness in the conventional (dart-gun anesthesia) as well as in ritual (kosher incision) slaughter of sheep and calf].[Article in German]
Schulze W, Schultze-Petzold H, Hazem AS, Gross R.
If your German works have a look at the results of the Bundesamt für Lebensmittelsicherheit und Veterinärwesen of the oldest, continuously free democratic republic on the planet: Switzerland. https://www.blv.admin.ch/blv/de/home.html.Pursuant to a review in 2001 in which the corneal reflex being one solid test criteria could not be found lacking in many test animals killed as per Jewish and Muslim custom in a large butchery in Besancon they continued to text and research the matter further. The technicality is a non-topic. Since 2001 neuroscience has advanced massively. Pain can be measured better and more accurately in humans and animals today. Why expose animals to excess extra pain? A bolt shot to stun them sorts the issue. Just because some tribes in long forgotten times before the Romans and then again in early medieval times in the same hot, arid, regions where and when some things simply were neither known nor understood about food, animals, biology, hygiene etc. stipulated some rules and customs which we can now show that they do not apply or matter, we do not have to create pain gratuitously to the animals we anyway consume.
I suspect you are not a religious man, @balticsnowtiger, since you show such disdain for guidance that was established not just as “rules or customs,” but because they were considered holy. So to say they do not matter or apply is your right, but the acts were/are not done gratuitously. Please offer your disrespect elsewhere.