Animals should be stunned before they are slaughtered, a Reform report has recommended, calling into question the traditional practice of shechita.

It suggested that some Jews might feel conflicted between eating meat from an animal that had been organically reared and stunned before slaughter and one that had undergone shechita without being stunned first.

The author of the working party behind the report, Rabbi Jonathan Romain, of Maidenhead Synagogue, insisted Reform rabbis were not advocating changes in government policy.

The report, discussed at the Assembly of Reform Rabbis and Cantors UK on Tuesday, was about “laying out options and opening up possibilities”, he said.

The working party “had investigated whether in the shechita world, change can be made,” he said. But there was not “an overall mood” at the Assembly “that we ought to change the system. On balance, pre-stunning is better - but we are really only talking about a few seconds. We are not calling for government action.”

Muslims and Jews remain exempt from UK requirements for the pre-stunning of animals. Defenders of shechita say that the swift cut made by shochtim results in an almost immediate loss of consciousness for the animal.

But stunning methods would cause damage to the animal, rendering it non-kosher.

Rabbi Romain said that most of the discussion revolved around the conditions in which animals were raised and “how they lived rather than died”.

“There is a whole new set of criteria the rabbis of old never had to wrestle with,” he said.

The growing view that eating less meat was better for the environment raised questions of whether meat consumption should be limited to Shabbat, for example. He also observed that “a lot of the younger generation have gone vegetarian or vegan”.

Rabbi Mark Goldsmith, senior rabbi of Edgware and Hendon Reform Synagogue, commented: “In every generation we have to define kashrut including what we know about animal welfare, environmentally sound practices and labour practices and combine that with traditional Jewish understandings and then work out what kashrut means for each individual person.”

“However, we also respect the right of Jews to keep the form of kashrut that they feel commanded to do.”

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