The Unkindest Cut

The recent undercover operation by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) at AgriProcessors, Inc., a kosher slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, was a public-relations coup for the militant animal-rights group. A volunteer who got a job at the plant used a hidden camera to videotape the slaughter of animals, which PETA posted on its Web site in late November.

In one stroke, the activists simultaneously managed to sicken people with graphic images of animal carnage and enrage them about the practices of Jewish ritual slaughter, or shechita. To boot, the group promoted itself as the fearless and innovative champion of animal rights, prepared to stage clandestine operations to protect animal welfare.

To be sure, the spectacle that PETA's undercover cameras captured looked bloody, deadly, and inhumane. But while the end result of shechita of course allows the first two, it positively prohibits the third. Although I agree that AgriProcessors can do more to minimize animal suffering, the impression given by PETA's video--that shechita is inhumane--is completely false.

My area of expertise is Jewish values and ideas, not Jewish ritual slaughter. So I will not defend AgriProcessor's seemingly incomprehensible practice of removing the animal's trachea after its throat is slit, or the company's practice of using upside-down pens, in which the animal is held in the air by its feet, to facilitate the shechita. Apparently, the rabbinate in Israel insists on this method in order to ensure that the animal's throat is as open and accessible as possible, thereby providing for the smoothest cut which in turn minimizes the possible suffering to the animal.

However, I can state unequivocally that Jewish law requires AgriProcessors, like all kosher slaughterhouses, to do everything it can to reduce any animal suffering. And to that end, the rabbinical body that supervises the company, the Orthodox Union (O.U.), has been in consultation with them about making changes.

A close look at PETA's priorities reveals that its compassion begins and ends with animals. Its radical ideology goes far beyond concern for the welfare of animals to equate animal life with human life.

Arguably the most offensive example of the group's selective sensitivity was PETA's 2002 campaign "Holocaust on Your Plate," which juxtaposed gruesome scenes from Nazi death camps with photographs from factory farms and slaughterhouses. One pairing places a starving man in a concentration camp next to a starving cow.

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