The 'Hindu' bull condemned to death by the Welsh Assembly was today saved from slaughter by a High Court judge in Cardiff.

The judge ruled that the decision to slaughter Shambo, the six-year-old Friesian who tested positive for bovine tuberculosis, was “unlawful and will be quashed”.

Killing the bull that lives at the Hindu Skanda Vale Community would be a “serious infringement” of the community’s rights, the judge said.

The Welsh Assembly has lodged an appeal against the decision and farmers' unions in Wales attacked the decision. Dai Davies, President of National Farmers' Union, Cymru said the judgment was “an absolute kick in the teeth for all those farmers who have had animals destroyed as part of the bovine TB controls”.

Mr Justice Hickinbottom said the Assembly Government “have adopted the wrong approach in this case” and would have to rethink the matter. The Welsh Assembly said last month that it had decided to give the go-ahead to vets to put the animal down. Monks at Skanda Vale subsequently sought a judicial review of the decision.

The judge said the Government had been preoccupied with “entirely eliminating, as opposed to minimising such risk” and had not considered the actual danger posed. He had “grave doubts” as to whether there was enough evidence to require slaughter of the bull, he said.

A spokesperson for the Welsh Assembly Government said they were disappointed by the decision. "There are serious public and animal health issues in this case that need to be resolved urgently. As a result we are appealing the judgement as a matter of urgency."

The judge added that the Government would be "obliged" to reconsider the public health objectives behind the surveillance and slaughter policy and decide whether slaughter would be "proportional" given the "serious infringement of the Community’s rights under Article 9" that it would involve.

Article 9 of the European Convention of Human Rights guarantees the right to “manifest” religious beliefs.

But the judge said the ruling did not guarantee Shambo would be allowed to live on until he dies of natural causes. He said that on the basis of evidence before him, it is “very likely” that Shambo is infected, despite the Skanda Vale Community's claims to the contrary, but he emphasised that animals with the disease have been cured in the past.

“This judgment merely rules that the decisions of 3 May and 3 July to issue the slaughter notice and to pursue the slaughter under that notice were unlawful and will be quashed.”

During the judicial review of the decision to kill the "sacred" bull, Clive Lewis, for the Assembly government, said on Thursday that Wales’s Rural Affairs Minister, Jane Davidson, had considered the matter carefully before deciding that Shambo should be slaughtered.

He said: “We understand how difficult this is going to be for the community. We know they are not commercial farmers but we also know that an animal, using the internationally-approved test, has tested positive for exposure to M bovis.”

The judge said that his ruling would not interfere with the Assembly Government’s ability to exercise its duties in future, relating to Shambo or any other animal, under the 1981 Animal Health Act or The Tuberculosis (Wales) Order 2006.

Concluding his written judgment, Mr Justice Hickinbottom said: “I appreciate that the issues in this case have engendered much public interest and considerable strong feeling.” More than 20,000 people have signed a petition on the Skanda Valewebsite to show their support for Shambo and a webcam trained on the bullock allowed supporters to track his every move in the isolation pen at the temple.

Brother Simon, a monk at the Skanda Vale Community in Llanpumsaint, Carmarthen, West Wales, said the community were "absolutely delighted" by the judge's decision. "We don't know what it's going to mean in future but we want to thank everyone who has been so supportive and who has prayed for us. We are very happy that the judge has decided to protect the sanctity of life." He said that in celebration Shambo would be given some extra dairy nuts tonight and was sure Shambo knew "what was going on".

Ramesh Kallidai Secretary General of the Hindu Forum of Britain said: “This is a historic judgment…A key criticism of the earlier decision to slaughter Shambo had been the subjectivity, and hence unreliability, of the test. This is a landmark judgment in the history of religious worship in the UK.”

The next hearing in the Shambo case has been listed for appeal at the Court of Appeal in Cardiff on Friday - when the Welsh Assembly Government will try to get the execution order put back in place.