But as we make our way through the tractate Chullin, there is no mention of the pain of the procedure. And with very few exceptions that we will come to, it was not until modern times that anyone made the claim that we slaughter animals using shechita because it is as close to being painless as possible. We do it because that’s been a part of Jewish tradition.

Shechita and the EEG

In 1994, Temple Grandin, the great champion of humane slaughter observed that cattle did not yank away their necks during shechita. “All of them stood still during the cut and did not appear to feel it” she wrote, though she also noted that “whether or not ritual slaughter conforms to the requirements of euthanasia is a controversial question.” Since then others have looked into the question of brain activity as a marker of pain during shechita.

In 2009 a group of veterinarians in New Zealand hooked up fourteen Angus steers to an EEG, which measures the electrical activity in the brain. They were lightly anesthetized (the cows, not the veterinarians) and then slaughtered with an incision across the neck, “severing all tissues ventral to the vertebral column including the major blood vessels supplying and draining the head.” During the 30 seconds following this incision, the EEG showed significant changes leaving the scientists to conclude that “…there is a period following slaughter where ventral­ neck incision represents a noxious stimulus.” In a slightly different study on calves, the group concluded that the EEG responses were primarily due to noxious stimulation and not mainly as a result of loss of blood flow through the brain.

Ari Zivotofsky (he of the exotic kosher banquet) claimed that these experiments had “…zero relevance to shechita because the conditions used did not mimic shechita in terms of the knife’s size, sharpness, and smoothness.” He continues:

It is possible that cutting a cow’s neck with a short, blunt, non-smooth knife is indeed painful, while a shechita cut may be significantly less so or even totally devoid of pain. Does the animal feel no pain? Might it even be a pleasurable feeling, e.g., are endorphins released? I don’t know. But many people who have gotten a paper cut or who have been cut by a scalpel can attest to the fact that while the cut is taking place it is essentially not sensed and it is only later that the pain kicks in. And in the case of shechita, the animal will be senseless by that point.

It would be hard to believe that the sensation of having your neck sliced open would be similar to that of getting a paper cut - and harder still to think that it might even be pleasurable. But here is a suggestion: do the experiment (though not on your friends) and let us know.

But don’t take my word for it. Temple Grandin herself wrote that “there is a need to do research with EEG measurements when the special…kosher knife is used by a trained person.”

In fact brain activity has been compared between shechita and captive bolt stunning, and the results did not bode well for shechita. Here is one study published in 1988 in the Veterinary Record:

Captive bolt stunning followed by sticking one minute later resulted in immediate and irreversible loss of evoked responses after the stun. Spontaneous cortical activity was lost before sticking in three animals, and in an average of 10 seconds after sticking in the remaining five animals. The duration of brain function after shechita was very variable, and particularly contrasted with captive bolt stunning with respect to the effects on evoked responses. These were lost between 20 and 126 seconds (means of 77 seconds for somatosensory and 55 seconds for visual evoked responses) and spontaneous activity was lost between 19 and 113 seconds (mean 75 seconds) after slaughter.

The authors did add a note of caution: “…evoked responses do not rep­resent a conscious awareness of the stimulus but are produced by neural activity at a rudimentary level which precedes con­scious awareness.” But even so, these findings must raise the concern that the animals had a degree of brain activity for far longer after shechita compared to captive bolt use. And back to Grandin again: “Penetrating captive bolt, when it is applied correctly, will induce instant insensibility and unconsciousness, because visually evoked potentials are eliminated from the brain.” So there it is again: instant versus not-so-instant.



Shechita and the time to loss of CONSCIOUSNESS