Multiple people have raised the idea that schecting goats, as Hazon plans to at the Food Conference next week, doesn’t really expose participants to the true horrors of conventional animal slaughter. What would really be effective, they say, is to show a film that conveys the brutality of factory farming.

They have a point - the way in which the Food Conference schecting will happen is not by any means a mainstream practice. But that’s exactly the reason why we’re doing it and also why showing a film just isn’t enough.

Factory farms are one of the worst and most infuriating things I can think of, and they’re a huge part of the reason I’m a vegetarian.  And Hazon has no intention of hiding the realities of the conventional meat industry during the Food Conference.  Quite on the contrary, in fact.

But there are people - including a growing number of people in the Jewish community - who are seeking out the ethics and practices of responsible and ethical meat eating.  They are certainly not mainstream, at least not yet.  But to say that the work they’re doing is not part of the “real world” denies them the potential to - God willing - influence the larger Jewish community to eat less meat and to eat it with more kavvanah (intention) and respect. 

Perhaps its time to move beyond our outrage towards factory farms and start ”being the change” we want to see in the Jewish community - or at very least, supporting the people who are.

Below the jump, Adamah Program Director, Shamu Sadeh, talks about the realities of “Animals, Life and Death on the Farm.”

Animals, Life and Death on the Farm

If you raise animals for eggs and dairy, like we do at Adamah, killing some of them is an unavoidable step in the cycle of agricultural work. Hens get old and stop laying eggs. We need to replace them with young laying hens who need space and feed. Laying hens require no rooster to start laying eggs and more than one rooster for every 12 birds will lead to lots of nasty, aggressive behavior in the flock. Each spring, bucks (male goats) are born. To keep the goat dairy going, the bucks need to be placed in separate pasture from the does (female goats). The presence of bucks in the pasture with milking nannies will cause breeding problems and breeding at inopportune times. Another problem is the fighting over food and space. For breeding dairy goats we need one buck for a two-hour visit once a year. In other words, for producing eggs and dairy, male animals are, for the most part, not only unnecessary but demand more work, more land, and more feed. Unless somehow your land base is continually expanding, the math of reproduction quickly overwhelms the pasture.

For the eaters of the world we are all taking part, however distantly, in killing old hens and roosters, bucks, bulls, rams not to mention field mice, corn-eating deer, and anything else that gets in the way of growing corn, wheat, soybeans, or tomatoes. As Jewish farmers, we know that our tradition (a tradition codified largely by farmers!) both restricts and sanctifies meat eating. To paraphrase, the tradition says: eat mostly plants. When you need to kill animals do it carefully, in the strict bounds of kashrut. Kosher laws require that animals be killed in a specific way by a trained shochet, or ritual slaughterer.

The goats we are planning to shecht (ritually slaughter) at the Hazon Food Conference are two locally-raised bucks who eat organic feed and browse a beautiful little pasture. If we did not kill and eat them someone else would. (Again, the impossibility of the ever expanding land base to absorb the exponential math of herd reproduction). Shechting the bucks is an opportunity to take the work of stewarding the land and feeding ourselves – the spiritual, physical, and ethical work – into our own hands. The shechting represents a difficult agricultural task, an irreplaceable educational opportunity, and a powerful religious and ethical challenge to all who will take part in it.