You are correct! Jewish law requires that an animal:
—be fed and watered before you eat
—be put under shelter before you hide in a storm (keep in mind these rules were originally written for desert nomads)
—be given all appropriate medical care
To be kosher, it is ALSO necessary for an animal to be “unblemished.” Means no injuries or diseases, which are best avoided not through battery-farm “just shovel in more antibiotics” practices but rather through good food, clean water, and plenty of roaming space to allow animal-appropriate exercise. “Okay, but Nina, what if they just don’t slaughter until it’s obvious it’s not sick—” Won’t help. That animal was ill and its liver was scarred by the illness? Unclean, must be discarded or sold to a nonkosher butcher (for a price much, much lower than the shochet, or kosher butcher, could have expected to make had the animal been kosher, because now it’s at wholesale). It looked just fine but then you get to the cutting-it-into-meal-sized-pieces stage and discover it had undiagnosed parasites? Theoretically you could sell it to a nonkosher butcher who can use varying procedures to kill the parasites and render the meat edible, but more likely, the whole animal is a loss. You take off the hide and find scarring where the animal was left in a too-small enclosure? Not kosher. Now you’ve lost three animals out of your herd, and you’re a small time butcher with a limited clientele. What has that done to your business? Can you even keep it open? You probably just lost ten thousand dollars or more. You can very quickly see why a shochet has every interest in treating his herd almost better than his children.
So moving on, we’ve established the meat will be well-treated while it’s still on the hoof or wing. (I didn’t touch on this, but—one of the easiest ways to prevent the kind of infighting that causes pecking injuries among chickens is to give them plenty of food and outdoor space. They don’t have to get vicious to have their own territory and they’ll use up some energy gleefully chasing bugs instead of each other.) What happens when it’s slaughter time?
The rules for a kosher butcher are thus: the shochet must be a Jew well-versed in Torah, to ensure the rules for kosher slaughter are being followed; his tools must be kept clean; his blade must be razor-sharp; and he must have extensive training, because if he fails at even one of the next steps, the animal is rendered nonkosher, and we’ve already gone over why that is Not A Good Thing not just in terms of following kosher practice but also in terms of the shochet not having a whole lot of room for loss.
The animals must be kept in an area free from stress, where they can neither see nor hear the slaughter and thus have time to fear their own death. (This is considered to count as animal cruelty.) When an animal is brought to the slaughter block, the shochet must kill the animal with a single stroke of the blade, which must sever the artery, the corresponding vein, and the windpipe. Done correctly, the animal will be unconscious before it even knows it should be feeling pain.
Now the bit that’s probably on your mind: how do you know it was done, and they’re not just saying it’s “kosher” the way some farms will slap “organic” on things?
First, kosher meat is almost exclusively purchased by religious Jews. If you don’t do your job right, you’re causing them to break the mitzvot. (Which, by itself, is breaking a mitzvah. There’s a whole lot of cultural stuff going on here that’s the purview of another post, so suffice to say this is A Really Big Deal and you Just Don’t Do That.) If anyone finds out you haven’t been doing the job right and calls you out on it, guess what: you don’t have a job. Pick up and move to another Jewish community? They’re going to ask who your presiding rabbi was, and you’re going to have to admit you lost your certification. Get slovenly as a shochet and you’re done. Permanently.
Second, that thing about a presiding rabbi: in addition to the local health board doing their thing, you have to get your premises and your procedure overseen by a rabbi. This rabbi, by virtue of the nature of kosher meat, will be Orthodox, meaning “as by the book as you can possibly get.” He will be as serious as a heart attack about you doing this right, and if there’s even a suspicion you’re not, you will not receive his certification—which means even if you do everything right, your meat will not be considered kosher and people will not buy from you. So you have to do it correctly, and you also have to be aware that the rabbi may come at any time he chooses just to check in. You’re not going to cut corners. There’s too much at stake.
Also: if you’re struggling to find a kosher butcher, see if you can find a local halal market. I’ve actually had a couple of Muslims pop onto posts where I’ve explained this before to be like “you literally just described halal slaughter.” The only real difference is the blessings that are said (and halal meat must be butchered by a Muslim, not a Jew).
And finally: our communities are very small. There are only 16 million Jews worldwide (to put that in perspective: before the Holocaust, there were 18 million Jews. We still have not recovered to pre-Hitler levels). Purchasing from a kosher butcher gives business to a community that could use the support and, contrary to stereotype, is actually more likely to be quite poor than to be rich. It’s an act in which everyone wins: you get cruelty-free meat and a local business belonging to a vulnerable minority gets more funds.
