By Janis Siegel, JTNews Correspondent
For Adam Karp, it’s usually about the animals. This time, religion has gotten involved.
That’s how Karp, a Bellingham-based attorney who pioneered the field of animal law in Washington State, waded into church/state issues. Karp told members of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle’s attorneys’ affinity group the Cardozo Society of Washington State at its Dec. 1 meeting that his client wants to see the Washington Humane Slaughter Act, which exempts religious ritual slaughterers from meeting state guidelines and criminal prosecution, changed.
Representing Pasado’s Safe Haven in a lawsuit filed in King County Superior Court against Snohomish County and the State of Washington, Karp said that if they prevail, all religious ritual slaughterers would lose their religious exemption and be required to “stun” an animal before slaughtering them.
“The question is whether the state has created an unconstitutional exemption in favor of religion,” said Karp, who founded the Washington State Bar Association’s Animal Law Section.
“Eliminate, ‘In accordance with the ritual requirements of any religious faith,’” said Karp, who disclosed he is a strict kosher vegan and that his personal views would prohibit slaughter entirely. “That phrase could be excised from the statute.”
By allowing the slaughtering of an animal without stunning it first, he said, the law also unconstitutionally prescribes different punishments to groups and individuals according to their religious practices.
“Washington’s Humane Slaughter Act violates its religious establishment clause by allowing a religious person or group to conduct ritual slaughter without the threat of criminal prosecution,” Karp told the attorneys, “while secular slaughterers must conform to the stringent rules against animal cruelty set forth in the state law.”
The suit would affect not just the Jewish community, but observant Muslims as well, whose meat is similarly slaughtered for it to be considered halal. Washington State currently does not have any slaughterhouses that kill animals for kosher or halal consumers.
Presenting the view that kosher slaughtering laws are humane and that the legal exemption should remain was Rabbi Moshe Kletenik of Orthodox congregation Bikur Cholim-Machzikay Hadath in Seattle.
Kletenik is also president of the Rabbinical Council of America, and a board member of the Va’ad HaRabanim of Greater Seattle, the state’s kosher-certification body.
“The proposed change would require stunning the animal first,” Kletenik told JTNews. “If the animal is stunned, that would render the meat not fit for kosher use, even if slaughtered afterwards. In order to be kosher, the animal must be healthy and uninjured at the time of slaughter and must die as a result of the slaughter.”
Kletenik also said that Jewish slaughter laws are in compliance with Washington’s Humane Slaughter Act because Jewish law puts the highest priority on slaughtering practices that would prevent the needless suffering of the animal.
Currently, Washington State law exempts ritual religious slaughter from the guidelines detailed in the Humane Slaughter Act. It states: “Nothing…shall be construed to prohibit, abridge, or in any way hinder the religious freedom of any person or group…. Ritual slaughter and the handling or other preparation of livestock for ritual slaughter is defined as humane.”
The law allows two humane methods of slaughter for livestock: The first requires the animal to be rendered insensible to pain by “mechanical, electrical, chemical or other means that is rapid and effective.”
The second is “a method in accordance with the ritual requirements of any religious faith whereby the animal suffers loss of consciousness by anemia of the brain caused by the simultaneous and instantaneous severance of the carotid arteries with a sharp instrument.”
This second method, according to the Pasado lawsuit, would be a misdemeanor when not performed as a religious ritual. They argue that if a Christian were to use the same kosher slaughter technique as the Jewish method, the Christian slaughterer would be criminally charged and the Jewish slaughterer would not.
“If you’re not religiously qualified,” Karp asked, “is the state qualified to judge who is religious and if their methods are in accordance with the religious laws practiced by that sect?”
When a Jewish ritual slaughterer approaches an animal to take its life, the requirement to cut the carotid arteries quickly, with a surgically sharp knife, is only one of the many laws found in the Hebrew Bible, The Torah, and its commentaries, said Kletenik.
These laws, he said, must be closely followed to spare the animal any pain and render the meat kosher.
“The Talmud, Maimonides’ Code of Jewish Law, and the Code of Jewish Law, the Shulchan Aruch, discuss the five basic elements of slaughter,” Kletenik said. “If there is any pause in the act of the slaughter, that disqualifies the act…. There has to be a back and forth motion, with a surgically sharp instrument — there cannot be downward pressure against the esophagus or the trachea. The knife has to be long enough to always be seen and not covered by the feathers or the skin or another object that would obscure the view…. The slaughter will almost inevitably cause the blood to be removed from the brain, the trachea and the esophagus have to be cut, and if the knife is not without nicks and imperfections, that would disqualify the slaughter.”
The rabbi referred to several studies and university experiments that showed that once the carotid arteries are severed, the blood flow out of the brain is catastrophic, taking no more than two seconds to kill the animal.
“There is much scientific evidence to support the notion that, very, very quickly, stunning does occur through the act of shechitah [Jewish slaughter], and the animal does not sense any pain,” he said. “The Torah and Jewish law are certainly very, very sensitive to avoid imposing pain, if possible, on animals.”
In addition, said Kletenik, it’s not until an inspector verifies that the esophagus and trachea were severed, that the vital organs were not diseased, and that there were no perforations in the lungs that the animal is then pronounced kosher. If the slaughter has been done improperly, he said, it is sold as non-kosher meat.
The plaintiff, Pasado’s Safe Haven, is an animal rights and rescue organization created in memory of a donkey named Pasado who was beaten and hanged by teenagers in Bellevue in 1992.
In a November ruling in the case, the court decided in favor of the state, saying they had no jurisdiction in the case, that Pasado is not hurt by this law, and that the suit was not ready for review. The appeal will be heard in the Division 1 Court of Appeals.
The evening’s final speaker, Rabbi Jacob Fine from Hillel at the University of Washington and Jconnect Seattle, discussed the expanding debate on Jewish food ethics that not only tackles animal cruelty but also focuses on worker rights, fair labor practices, and food sustainability.
“As consumers, we cannot just wash our hands of these issues and say that we aren’t implicated in them,” Fine said. “We are complicit in the act by, in any way, supporting it.”