How are kosher animals supposed to be slaughtered?
They are supposed to be slaughtered with a single blow of a sharp knife across the throat. There’s a virtually instant loss of consciousness, because the brain loses blood so quickly. That’s the idea, anyway. But when you see this video, it’s so far from that, I really did find it quite shocking. You mention in your book that cows today produce three times as much milk as they did 50 years ago. That’s a great advance, isn’t it? It is an advance, but you have to consider how this has been achieved. Fifty years ago, cows were basically fed on grass. They walked around and selected their food themselves, food that we can’t eat, chewing it up and producing milk that we can eat. Now cows are confined indoors, and a lot of their food supply is grown specifically for them, on land that we could have used to grow food for ourselves. So it’s actually less efficient, in that we could have gotten more food from the land if we didn’t pass it through the cow. Most of us have an idealized notion of
