I have been studying Jewish dietary laws over the past couple of months. I have no doubt that they were created for a slower and less aggressive world than the one that we now inhabit. I recently read that a farmer would raise and fatten a pig (no, not a kosher example) for two years before it reached the point where it could be profitably slaughtered. But now, we have condensed that once natural process to six months! Jewish dietary laws concerning animals focus on the humaneness of slaughtering (shechitah) but we have to wonder if the Author of these laws had any concept of the life that we would one day afford our animals prior to their slaughter? In biblical days or even talmudic times, who raised chickens in tiny metal cages and slaughtered them after only one month of rapid growth? The examples are too numerous to mention but they do force us to ask whether or not kashrut itself needs to be revisited in light of modernity.
