Meat must be slaughtered kosher (shechita)

Jews affirm that permitted mammals and birds are lawful to eat only if slaughtered by shechita: a swift, uninterrupted cut across the throat with a flawless, razor-sharp blade, performed by a trained and pious slaughterer (the shochet). The rules derive from the Torah's command to slaughter as commanded (Deuteronomy 12:21) as elaborated in the oral tradition, and include inspection of the animal afterward for defects that would render it unfit (treifah) and the removal of forbidden blood and fats. A shochet trains for years under a master and must be examined and licensed (kabbalah) by rabbinic authority before slaughtering professionally; the Talmud (Chullin, chapter 3) enumerates categories of internal and physical defects, traditionally counted as eighteen, that render an animal treif, unfit, regardless of how the cut itself was performed.

Because Jewish law requires the animal to be whole and uninjured at the moment of the cut, shechita is performed without prior stunning, a point that has put it in direct conflict with animal-welfare law in several European countries: Sweden banned unstunned slaughter in 1937, and Belgium's Flemish and Walloon regions did so by decree in 2017, prompting legal challenges from Jewish and Muslim communities that the European Court of Justice rejected in a December 2020 ruling (Case C-336/19) upholding the bans. Where such bans apply, observant communities import kosher meat rather than compromise on the method.

The tradition explains shechita as minimising the animal's suffering through a single clean cut and as fulfilling the Torah's repeated prohibition of consuming blood, which the method drains. It requires real training and religious qualification, distinguishing the shochet as a communal office. The rite stands in evident parallel to the Islamic dhabihah, with which it shares the throat-cut and the draining of blood, while differing in that Jewish law requires a licensed slaughterer and a post-mortem inspection rather than an invocation at the moment of the cut.

Maimonides, in the Guide for the Perplexed (3:26), explained the requirement of a trained slaughterer and a sharp, flawless blade as a concession to compassion, minimising the animal's pain as far as possible; other authorities, following the Sefer HaChinukh, treat the rationale as secondary or unknowable, since shechita belongs to the class of chukkim, statutes obeyed because commanded rather than because their reason is self-evident, so that welfare is offered as an observed feature of the law rather than as its stated justification.

Modern kosher slaughterhouses often restrain the animal before the cut using pen designs developed by the animal scientist Temple Grandin, whose 1984 schematic for a kosher restrainer system is preserved by the Smithsonian; some ultra-Orthodox authorities have accepted such equipment and others have queried it on halakhic grounds unrelated to animal welfare.