There are so many lessons that we can learn from the laws of Kashruth: about health and kindness, order and ecology, life and death and even lessons about ourselves.
Long before humankind understood the categories of life from mammal to plant life, our Torah made clear that we are not so very different from animals. The same systems that are evident in the body of an animal our evident in our own bodies. Those systems work in the same way for the same purposes.
A shochet, one who slaughters animals according to Jewish law, must check the lungs of the animal. Consequently he must understand that the function of the lung of the animal is the same as the function of a lung in a person. He believed that blood carried the sol of the animal just as he understood that blood carries the soul of man. He knew that teeth were for chewing in both man and animals, and he found parallels in the gastrointestinal systems of both.
The schochet understood that, like people, animals feel pain. He knew that if one caused an animal pain during the slaughter or while the animal was raised, the animal was unkosher. No one had to define the causes of that pain. They are the same for man and animal alike.
The schochet and the farmer, the herder and the housewife all understood that for this world to exist, we had to have a symbiotic relationship with animals. Unless we treated them and their environments well, they would be forbidden to us. Unless we recognized that they, like us, had a right to life, we had no right to slaughter them.
In time we began to understand that eating the meat of animals was a compromise, because we were killing them. However, we understood that we could not easily survive without killing them. So we demanded conscious reflection before we took the life of an animal. We had to remember that every animal is part of God’s creation, and that killing an animal—if practiced for no particular reason—was a destruction of God’s world.
One of the primary lessons that we learn from the practice of kashruth is that we are all part of the same eco-system. Kashruth assures that we always protect that system by recognizing our living connection to other animals and consequently to all creation.