A lobby group defending Jewish religious slaughter has claimed new findings from Britain’s food regulator undermine animal welfare concerns about killing animals without first stunning them.
They do nothing of the sort.
Shechita UK campaigns to defend shechita – the Jewish religious method of slaughter, which does not permit animals to be stunned beforehand. This week, it welcomed a report from the Food Standards Agency (FSA), the body responsible for enforcing welfare rules in slaughterhouses, that included a line about it finding “no clear evidence that animal welfare breaches are more or less likely to occur during non-stun slaughter compared to stunned slaughter”.
The claim was promoted by Jewish News under the headline: “Food Standards Agency: ‘No clear evidence of greater welfare breaches from non-stun slaughter’.” The Jewish Chronicle declared: “Food Standards Agency says ‘no clear evidence’ non-stun slaughter is worse for animal welfare.”
The quotation is accurate. Shechita UK’s interpretation isn’t.
UK law generally requires animals to be stunned before slaughter, rendering them unconscious so they do not experience avoidable pain, suffering or distress. But religious exemptions allow slaughter without stunning to meet Jewish and Muslim religious dietary preferences for kosher and halal meat.
Whilst the FSA found no clear evidence that slaughterhouses using non-stun methods are disproportionately breaking the existing law, lawful non-stun slaughter is not recorded as a breach because it is expressly permitted under that religious exemption.
The finding therefore tells us nothing about whether killing a conscious animal causes greater pain and suffering.
Shechita UK nevertheless presented the report as vindication of shechita. Its campaign director attacked the distinction between stunned and non-stunned slaughter as “deeply misleading” and suggested the Government should reconsider its preference for stunning.
That conclusion simply does not follow. Finding no difference in the incidence of legal breaches is not the same as finding no difference in animal suffering.
Indeed, the FSA restated Defra and the Welsh Government’s preference for pre-slaughter stunning and committed to working with them to support efforts to reduce non-stun slaughter.
The FSA’s figures in the same report show why this matters. The proportion of red meat animals stunned before slaughter fell from 89% in 2022 to 85% in 2024. Among sheep, it fell from 77% to 71%. The overall picture is that non-stun slaughter is rising.
There is also a serious issue of consumer choice. In 2022, 51% of cattle slaughtered via shechita were subsequently rejected as not meeting religious requirements but deemed fit for wider consumption. The RSPCA has estimated that less than half the meat from animals slaughtered by shechita is ultimately sold through kosher shops.
This meat can enter the general market unlabelled. As the FSA acknowledges, there is no mandatory requirement for meat to be labelled as stunned or non-stunned.
Consumers may therefore eat meat from animals killed without stunning without knowing it. That must change. While religious exemptions remain, all meat from animals slaughtered without prior stunning should be clearly labelled.
If the scientific consensus were to conclude that stunning is unnecessary and does nothing to improve animal welfare, the requirement could fall away – and the religious exemption with it. But that is not the current position.
It is worth restating that the RSPCA, Compassion in World Farming, the British Veterinary Association and the Federation of Veterinarians of Europe, all support ending non-stun slaughter to improve animal welfare at the time of death.
Freedom of religion or belief is a fundamental right. But it protects people, not practices from scrutiny, and does not create an automatic entitlement to exemptions from otherwise universal animal welfare laws. The same evidence-based standards should apply to everyone.
The FSA found no evidence that non-stun slaughterhouses break the existing law more frequently than any other slaughterhouses. It did not find that non-stun slaughter is equally humane.
Shechita UK should stop pretending otherwise.