Animal Slaughter (Religious Methods)

Matthew Offord Excerpts

Tuesday 4th November 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mr Lee Scott (Ilford North) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. Like others, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), not only on the report, but on the way he has conducted this debate, as others have as well, because it is an emotive subject and it is very important that we tackle it in a calm, collected way.

It will not surprise my hon. Friend to know that I do not agree with everything that he said, but the truth of the matter is that my constituents and I—I only eat kosher meat, as he knows—believe passionately that the welfare of the animal is vital. To that end and after earlier debates, I thought, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer), that it was necessary to visit an abattoir and see the process at first hand. We did that—I visited kosher and non-kosher abattoirs—and I am going to be very honest: as the hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood) said, anyone who says that there is a pleasant way of killing an animal is kidding themselves. There is not a pleasant way of killing an animal.

We must also consider the wider aspects of the issue. As my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly) said, what happened before the animal was killed is also important. Was the animal living in terrible circumstances? It could be killed in the most humane way possible, but if it lived its whole life in terrible circumstances, that is also not a pleasant thing to think about.

What is shechita? Shechita is the Jewish religious humane method of animal slaughter for food. It is the only method of preparing meat and poultry in accordance with Jewish tradition—meat and poultry that an observant Jew can eat. As was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman)—I call her my hon. Friend even though I should say “the hon. Member”—shechita is carried out by a trained person called a shochet, who has been trained for many years before taking up the profession.

[Dr Matthew Offord (Hendon) (Con)]

Can my hon. Friend confirm that the shochet holds two licences? One is issued by the Food Standards Agency and the other by the Rabbinical Commission for the Licensing of Shochetim. That rabbinical commission is a statutory body established by Parliament under the Welfare of Animals (Slaughter or Killing) Regulations 1995.

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[Dr Matthew Offord (Hendon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone, and to hear so many great speeches. In my constituency, I have two significant groups to which the issue of food labelling causes great concern: the Muslim community and the Jewish community. I speak mainly from the Jewish perspective, as I know more about shechita than halal meat production, but I also speak as someone who passionately believes in animal welfare and, having been a vegetarian for the last 35 years, I think that my actions demonstrate that more than my words.

As I said, I am more informed about the production of kosher meat through the shechita method. That is the only method of preparing meat and poultry in accordance with Jewish tradition. Both the hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman) and my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Mr Scott) went through the technical aspects of shechita, but one point that I want to clarify is that under the shechita method, the blood supply to the animal’s brain ceases immediately. Consciousness is irreversibly lost and, with it, the ability of the animal to feel pain. I believe that it is quick, effective and safe, and it ensures that the animal is not subjected to any avoidable pain.

That is in contrast to conventional mechanised slaughter, which uses industrial methods that I do not believe members of the public would be very enthusiastic about if they witnessed how an animal was incapacitated before its death. In conventional mechanised slaughter, a high throughput of animals must be maintained for commercial reasons. That creates many animal welfare issues, such as workers using cattle prods or kicking or pushing animals to usher them quickly along the production line.

However, the main difference between shechita and conventional mechanised slaughter is in the way in which the animals are stunned. I believe, as do other hon. Members, that shechita conforms to the EU definition of stunning:

“any intentionally induced process which causes loss of consciousness and sensibility without pain, including any process resulting in instantaneous death”

by causing immediate cerebral perfusion. Mechanical methods, on the other hand, may include captive bolt shooting, gassing, electrocution, drowning, trapping and clubbing. This is where I have a problem with the premise that mechanised slaughter is preferable to other methods, such as those termed as religious slaughter. Mechanised methods frequently go wrong, leaving the animal in great and prolonged distress.

Many people are unaware that mechanised methods were originally conceived by large-scale factory abattoirs to speed up the process and stop the animal thrashing around at the point of slaughter, so that the production line could move more quickly. Acceptance of the use of such methods has been adopted by those who express animal welfare concerns in order to allay their own conscience. The use of evidence on mechanised methods in support of the animal welfare benefits is inconclusive and—this is the crux of my concern—I consider the failure rates to be unacceptably high.

By contrast, the shechita process has to be slow and methodical. Any animal or bird that is even slightly harmed before slaughter is not considered suitable for kosher consumption. Special care is taken to ensure that animals are well treated and calm ahead of slaughter, not only because that is mandated but because any other approach would make kosher meat production near impossible.

The hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside, mentioned the European Food Safety Authority’s 2004 report on the “Welfare Aspects of Animal Stunning and Killing Methods”. That identified a failure rate of up to 2 million cows for penetrating captive bolt stunning in conventional mechanical slaughter and, with non-penetrating captive bolt stunning and electric stunning, it can rise as high as 10 million cows, so we are looking at 12 million to 14 million cows being mis-stunned each year.

In the Jewish community, the number of cows consumed through the shechita method is just 20,000, so I have to ask why there is this great concern about the 20,000 cows that pass through the shechita and kosher process when 12 million cows are possibly mis-stunned each year. No one seems to like to answer that question. Recently, the FSA was asked that very question.

[Neil Parish]

I think that my hon. Friend is mixing his figures. I think that he is taking the 20,000 cattle in the UK that are slaughtered under the shechita system and probably taking a European-wide figure for mis-stunning. I would not think the figure was anywhere near that for mis-stunning in this country, so that ought to be corrected. It is nowhere near 14 million; I hope to God it is not.

[Dr Offord]

That helpfully illustrates my next point, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that. Statistics produced by the Food Standards Agency on the number of mis-stuns are a requirement under legislation and—recent parliamentary questions have asked about this—they show that an unrealistically low number of mis-stuns have been reported in the UK. For example, in 2011, just six cattle were officially reported as having been mis-stunned. My hon. Friend will accept that that is an unrealistic number, too. Following a series of follow-up questions to the Department, the previous Minister conceded that those statistics may not be complete and may represent only a fraction of the actual numbers. I look forward to the Food Standards Agency reviewing its reporting methods.

Many researchers believe, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North said, that shechita is at least as humane as other methods, if not preferable in light of the animal welfare benefits, although others, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), believe that conventional animal slaughter is preferable. However, there is agreement that making any assessment of the pain felt by an animal is incredibly difficult. As a result, the Government’s position has always been that the scientific evidence in this area is inconclusive. No study has ever replicated shechita in a laboratory environment, and therefore no accurate scientific assessment of shechita has ever been carried out. It seems incongruous to me to presuppose that consumers do not have a right to know that an animal has been slaughtered by mechanical methods, or mechanically stunned prior to slaughter by one of the legal methods that I have mentioned. All of those, including the mis-stunnings, as I have said, are supposed to be recorded in slaughterhouses but are not. Labelling a meat product as not stunned before slaughter suggests that no stun takes place at all, when shechita in fact incorporates an effective stun at slaughter.

Some Muslims accept stunning as being consistent with halal, provided that the stun only renders the animal unconscious but does not kill it. That means that the animal will be alive but unconscious at the point of throat cutting. It will die from loss of blood, not from the stun. It is crucial for Muslims that the stun does not kill the animal, so they want to be assured that the stun is recoverable—that if the stun was not followed by throat cutting, the animal would recover consciousness.

I believe that labelling meat as not stunned before slaughter is pejorative and discriminatory, because it effectively places religious slaughter methods in a second-class category. I call on the Government to end the constant criticism of religious practices by introducing comprehensive food labelling, or rather by producing religious food labelling. The EU strategy on animal welfare from 2012 to 2015 states that the Commission plans to study the issue of labelling meat that comes from animals that have not been stunned before slaughter. The study is likely to be published shortly. I urge the Government to seek the introduction of a fully comprehensive food labelling scheme, and not simply to use the half-truth about “meat from slaughter without stunning”.

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[Huw Irranca-Davies]

The hon. Gentleman has corrected the record appropriately. I am not aware that clubbing is a legitimate method sanctioned within UK slaughterhouses, so I am not sure where it came from. The methods that I listed are legitimate, sanctioned and overseen by veterinarians, the Food Standards Agency and others.

[Dr Offord]

If that was me, it was certainly not my intention, and I apologise for making that assertion. I have been told that fish can be killed that way.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for clarifying that on record.

To return to the issue of labelling, how it could be done and the difficulties involved, should labelling focus on the issue of stunning or the absence thereof? That seems to be the crux of the consumer argument as well as the animal welfare argument. If that or any alternative labelling proposals are to be taken forward, Labour believes that any implementation of proposals affecting meat slaughtered in accordance with religious rites must involve full engagement with the faith groups affected, as well as with other interested parties. But—this is a significant “but”—surely that is best done at European level. I ask the Minister for an update on progress in European discussions on the issue. I will be raising it in my discussions with European colleagues this evening and tomorrow in Brussels, and it would be helpful to know what progress, if any, has been made.

The Minister will want to respond in detail to the points raised and to the recommendations in the report. I draw his attention to a couple of specific points. Recommendation 5 relates to concerns about the accuracy of recording of mis-stunning and mis-slaughtering in slaughter practices unrelated to religious slaughter. A written answer to the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton on 24 March 2014 revealed that under the FSA recording procedures, in the whole nation only nine cases of cattle mis-stunning were recorded for 2013-14, as well as one duck, three pigs, three sheep and one turkey. The Minister told the hon. Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer) on 1 April this year that a study into the accuracy of the data was unnecessary, but when pursued by me and others in written questions, he responded to me on 26 September:

“The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is due to complete a review into its monitoring and reporting of breaches of welfare legislation by the end of October. Previously”—

this may explain things—

“only major and critical breaches were recorded, along with the actions taken to correct these. The FSA review is now also looking to strengthen recording of minor breaches.”

I look forward to the results of that review, as many people look at the figures with disbelief.

I say to the Minister that if the principle is animal welfare, that principle must extend across all forms of slaughter, not simply slaughter done in accordance with religious rites. We look forward to hearing the results of the FSA review and what actions might follow.

Finally, what work has the Minister carried out to assess consumer awareness of the issues raised in this debate, such as meat slaughtered in accordance with religious rites or stunned and non-stunned meat production? It cannot be left to the tabloids or rabble-rousers to set the agenda. We must have, as we have had today, a well informed and calm public and policy debate that proposes appropriate solutions that apply the highest animal welfare standards, provide clear and appropriate information for consumers and recognise and respect the cultural and religious practices of our diverse communities.