European rabbis defend ritual slaughter

“Rabbis worried over ban on ritual slaughter,”headlines De Volkskrant. On 12 April, a group of senior rabbis from several European countries organised a press conference in Schiphol (near Amsterdam) to express their opposition to a proposed ban on ritual slaughter that will be debated by the Dutch parliament on 13 April. As it stands, abattoirs are obliged to anaesthetise animals before slaughtering them, but an exception is made for ritual slaughter, used by Jews and Muslims, which forbids the use of anesthetics. For this reason that a number of political parties are arguing that ritual slaughter causes unnecessary suffering. The newspaper reports that in the Netherlands, approximately two million animals are slaughtered without anesthetics every year. Several European countries, including Sweden, Norway, Austria, Estonia and Switzerland, have already introduced similar bans.