Food Standards Agency: ‘No clear evidence of greater welfare breaches from non-stun slaughter’

Shechita UK, the cross-communal advocacy body for shechita, has welcomed a statement from the Food Standards Agency finding “no clear evidence that animal welfare breaches are more or less likely to occur during non-stun slaughter compared to stunned slaughter.”

Currently, the UK does not legally require the practice before slaughter; the findings in the report appear to contradict a key argument made by campaigners calling for the practice to be banned in the UK. Shechita requires animals not to have anything regarded as a “blemish” prior to slaughter – thereby ruling out the different forms of stunning, which cause significant brain damage before the slaughter itself in an attempt to ensure the animal feels no pain while it is being killed.

In its findings, the government re-stated that it “encourages the highest standards of animal welfare at slaughter and would prefer all animals to be stunned before slaughter but respects the rights of Jews and Muslims to eat meat prepared in accordance with their religious beliefs, which includes the use of permitted methods of non-stun slaughter.”

While Jewish communal leaders argue that shechita is lawful and humane, a heated political debate over the practice includes both calls and petitions for an outright ban; one that has attracted more than 51,000 signatures will close on 30 September.

An earlier petition reached more than 100,000 signatures and sparked a parliamentary debate in June 2025 that saw Great Yarmouth MP Rupert Lowe, leader of the far-right party Restore Britain, call for the religious exemption to be scrapped.

Responding to the finding, Shimon Cohen, campaign director of Shechita UK, said: “For far too long, the debate around Shechita has been dominated by misinformation and by the deeply misleading distinction between ‘stunned’ and ‘non-stunned’ slaughter, as though one were inherently humane and the other inherently cruel.

The organisation argues that the practice conforms to the legal definition of stunning itself: ‘any intentionally induced process which causes loss of consciousness and sensibility without pain, including any process resulting in instantaneous death’, and that “shechita stuns, dispatches and exsanguinates in one action, bringing about the rapid and irreversible loss of consciousness. Recent peer-reviewed scientific research has further strengthened the evidence for this.”

Cohen adds the practice “should not be regarded merely as a derogation granted to Jews from some supposedly superior standard of animal welfare. Shechita is itself a humane method of slaughter.”

“The Government continues to state that it ‘would prefer all animals to be stunned before slaughter’. In light of the accumulating scientific evidence, and now the FSA’s own statement, we believe the time has come for the Government to reconsider that position. We thank the FSA for following the evidence and urge the Government to do the same.”

Shechita UK has long engaged closely with the FSA, DEFRA (The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) and successive governments on animal welfare and religious slaughter.