Banning ritual slaughter is not religious persecution.

There is nothing “liberal” or “tolerant” about allowing the agonising animal slaughter of fundamentalist religion.

My response to Graeme Archer’s Telegraph piece, “This ban on halal slaughter is much crueller than it is kind. Persecuting adherents over the slaughter of their animals is a step towards proscribing their faith.”

Death can be a very painful process for human beings: particularly in those places, and at those historical times, where palliative care is/ was not available. Animals, too, generally have a rough time of things at the end of their lives. The Cartesian belief that, as animals do not have souls, they therefore cannot  experience pain, is one that is belied by biological research and empirical observation, at least in the case of more developed creatures. Just as we infer that other human beings have the same feeling of pain we have, by observing the similarity between ourselves and other beings in terms of their comparable behavioural responses to similar painful stimuli, including verbalisation when they are capable of this, we observe animals suddenly flinch and make loud, unusual noises when they are subjected to similar stimuli. Something that our kitchen table or our yucca plant do not do. And like humans, developed animals produce hormones that correlate with pain, and share very similar pain receptors and neuronal structures to humans. The evidence seems pretty strong that there is among developed animals a subjective conscious experience that corresponds with what we humans would describe as “pain” when they are subjected to what would be painful physical stimuli to humans. 

Our moral sensitivity takes into account the almost universal post-Cartesian belief that animals experience pain. We would not object to our neighbour throwing an old carpet on to a bonfire, but we would object to him doing the same with his trussed-up cat. Our community has an understanding that animals have rights to freedom from human cruelty and aggression, and this recognition is enshrined in our laws. Indeed, the very fact that we talk about “cruelty” to animals implies our universal recognition that animals can feel pain. It would make no sense to talk about “cruelty” inflicted on an insentient object, unless in a very figurative sense. 

How we decide to treat animals, and what we decide to allow other people to do to animals, is therefore something that falls within the parameters of a moral code. At this point, I would like to highlight the role that Christianity has historically played in encouraging appalling cruelty towards animals, with its teaching that animals do not have souls and can therefore not feel pain: a teaching that finds expression in the writings of Descartes. 

Graeme Archer’s 21 Feb 2014 piece for the Telegraph, “This ban on halal slaughter is much crueller than it is kind,” with the strapline, “Persecuting adherents over the slaughter of their animals is a step towards proscribing their faith,” seemed to me to display some of the undeveloped thinking about a cruel facet of two fundamentalist versions of religion that mainly characterises the Left these days, in its misguided and muddled attempt to depict the adherents of fundamentalist religious systems as victims of mainstream persecution. Graeme is not on the Left, so it was a surprise to read this piece from him, particularly as he is a vegetarian. What Graeme has neglected to weigh adequately in his evaluation is the fact that, for the reasons I have set out above, it is morally wrong for humans to treat developed animals cruelly. They have feelings, and can feel pain. Given their neuronal, biochemical and behavioural responses to what would be painful stimuli to humans, it seems as though they can even feel excruciating pain. Descartes would have disagreed, and suggested that animals were simply very complicated automata. This, of course, is theoretically possible; yet it is just as theoretically possible that I, as I sit here typing this, am the only conscious being alive, and everyone else who comes into my consciousness is an illusion. On the balance of probabilities, other humans exist and animals feel pain; and if this assumption is incorrect, then the outcome of this error is far less dire than mistakenly assuming and acting on the opposite.

Graeme reveals in his piece that he is a vegetarian, and it is clear that, to his credit, his dietary choices are informed by a wish not to contribute to animal suffering. But it does not seem to me that he accords very much importance to animal suffering when impeding that suffering would also impede the actions of those adherents of Judaism and Islam who believe that, when animals are slaughtered for meat, they must be hung up-side-down, have their throats slit while conscious, and be left to bleed to death. The catalyst for Graeme’s article was the recently-passed law in Denmark that makes this kind of slaughter illegal. This situation may well seem ironic, given the recent slaughter of Marius, a young giraffe, in a Danish zoo, that was fed to lions to public outcry. But as desperately sad and outrageous as this may seem, Marius was slaughtered in the same way that millions of land animals are slaughtered in the UK every year for food: by a bolt to the head. He was not subjected to the horror of ritual slaughter. We humans have become so inured to the discreet commercial slaughter, the sale and the consumption of certain animals, that a species bias has developed that gets highlighted whenever unconventional animals are killed for food.

Graeme writes:

“It is easier to order people about, when they are “people” only in the abstract. Swish! goes the legislative cane, and the dietary needs of Jews and Muslims are nullified.”

But halal and kosher meat – i.e. meat that has been produced by cutting a conscious animal’s throat and letting it bleed to death – is not normally what is referred to by the phrase “dietary need”. The very phrase “dietary need” implies at the very least some degree of legitimacy in seeking out the particular foodstuff in question. For instance, taking an extreme example merely to illustrate the philosophical point, a psychopathic serial killer who likes to cannibalise the flesh of his victims could not be satisfactorily described as having a "dietary need", because the term "dietary need" implies a degree of legitimacy. Ritually-slaughtered meat is not a “dietary need”, but a religious preference. It is not legitimate to expect animals to undergo such suffering before they end up on a plate. Gluten or dairy intolerance, or vegetarianism, or nut allergies, are "dietary needs". A choice only to eat animals that have died in agony is not a "dietary need". And it is particularly not a “dietary need” as its satisfaction conflicts with the right of sentient animals to be spared cruel and needless suffering. Furthermore, even someone who is a fundamentalist religious adherent could forgo meat entirely without suffering anywhere near as much discomfort as the many animals whose agonising, terrifying and protracted deaths are thereby prevented.

Graeme also refers to the "dietary needs" “of Jews and Muslims,” as though Jews and Muslims represented two internally homogenous groups with overwhelmingly shared values. This is patently not the case. Firstly, just as there are cultural Christians and observant, believing Christians, there are cultural Jews and observant, believing Jews, and cultural Muslims, and observant, believing Muslims. There is the same quality of difference between being an observant Muslim and a cultural Muslim, an observant Jew and a cultural Jew, as there is between being an observant Christian and a cultural Christian. I would imagine that many people who have grown up in a Jewish culture or a Muslim culture don’t even believe in God – or at least in the God as He is presented in their religion, (even if they might be too frightened to admit it to anyone for fear of repercussions). They may believe in certain tenets of their religion, and not in others. This is exactly the case with people who grow up in a Christian culture. It is therefore sloppy to write about ritual slaughter representing the “dietary needs of Jews and Muslims,” as though one size fits all. This kind of generalising blanket statement also gives the false impression of a “them and us” situation: as though the culturally Christian mainstream is ganging up on the Islamic and Jewish minority. I have known people who described themselves as Jewish or Muslim, and who approached their faith in a non-fundamentalist, non-literalist way. Some of them even ate bacon and had gay sex, (not at the same time, I assume). Identifying yourself as Jewish or Muslim does not mean that you will only eat ritually-slaughtered meat. Professing beliefs that identify you as a dogmatic, fundamentalist Jew or a dogmatic, fundamentalist Muslim is a different matter entirely.

Europeans had to deal with the misery of fundamentalist Christianity for many centuries. Just as fundamentalist Muslims have a literalist belief in the Koran as the infallible word of God, fundamentalist Christians had (have) the same belief in the Bible: and indeed, as we can see from the influence of evangelical Christianity in Africa and parts of the USA, it still has a strong foothold. In the West, scientists and social progressives have had to fight tooth and nail for centuries against Christian fundamentalism in order to bring about the social freedoms and intellectual enlightenment we currently enjoy – which includes Graeme’s freedom to live with his partner, Keith, without them being dragged to prison or the scaffold, as they might well be in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Uganda or Nigeria. The kind of religious system that demands animals be ritually slaughtered is the kind of religious system that has become desensitized in its dogmatism and literalism to the suffering of humans and animals caused by its tenets. It is a profoundly illiberal and oppressive form of religion when it is allowed to have the political power to become so: a political power it still currently lacks in the UK, and that it possesses in such places as Iran. It does not need to be appeased, and it must not be appeased. We have not progressed morally, culturally or scientifically by appeasing fundamentalist religion, and allowing its adherents to cause terrible needless suffering to sentient beings with the justification that they were just obeying their “religion”.

There is no reason why saying one has some belief system or other that one calls a “religion” should give a person a special right and dispensation under the law to cause grievous unnecessary suffering, whether that be to another human, or to any sentient animal, just because a fundamentalist reading of their religious text demands it. At the moment, those practising religious slaughter in the UK are given a special legal dispensation to do so. And this should not be the case. 

I used the medium of Twitter to ask Graeme whether there would be any level of animal suffering that he would proscribe a religion inflicting, and posited a hypothetical religion that said animals had to be slowly tortured to death, asking him whether that would be justified on the basis of it being a religious stricture. I asked him, assuming he would not regard such torture as acceptable, why he would then draw the line at a place that made cutting a conscious animal’s throat acceptable. I also told him I thought there was not a very thick line between giving “religions” a special licence to cause needless pain to animals, and giving “religions” a special licence to cause needless pain to humans. In reply, Graeme wrote:

“I almost wish that I had your certainty. Would you believe that you have described the article I thought I would write?..”

I didn’t understand what Graeme meant by this reply, and asked for clarification, which resulted in the message:

“You are very clear in what you believe to be right, and I almost never am, and I sometimes, sort of, envy that. That's all.”

But I remain confused by Graeme’s replies. I had asked him a specific question about whether he would defend a religious “right” to torture an animal to death, and if not, then why he thinks there should be a religious “right” to cut a conscious animal’s throat and let it bleed to death. Instead of answering the question, he simply replied that, unlike him, I was very clear about what I believed to be right. 

Yet, in his article, as you will see if you read it, Graeme seems very clear indeed about what he feels to be right on the matter of ritual slaughter. He believes that it should be tolerated, and not legally prohibited. Not only that, but he writes, “This ban on halal slaughter is much crueller than it is kind,” and “Persecuting adherents over the slaughter of their animals is a dreadful, dangerous step towards proscribing their faith altogether, one I find intolerable,” and he describes politicians who would ban ritual slaughter as “deal(ing) with humans in the abstract; as inhumane a practice as any devised for the slaughter of livestock.” It seems quite bizarre that Graeme should express “envy” of the solidity of my convictions, when he expresses such strong convictions of his own in his article. “Intolerable”, "dreadful" and "dangerous" are quite strong words, after all. They surely express a very clear certainty of conviction: at least as strong as my own.

How Graeme can describe banning the cruel ritual slaughter of defenceless animals as “persecuting” religious adherents is beyond me. It is not “persecution” to be prevented from enacting the tenets of a specific religion if by so doing one would be causing significant harm to another sentient creature. Some fundamentalist adherents believe their religion requires anyone who leaves their religion to be put to death, or that gay people should be put to death. The law in this country thankfully prevents both of these occurring, regardless of whether those adherents feel they are being “persecuted” by not being allowed to do what their understanding of their religion requires them to do. I know that the rights of animals are different from the rights of humans, but I give these examples to demonstrate that obstructing a cruel religious act is not a prima facie case of religious persecution. And in his article, and in his Twitter exchange with me, Graeme has failed to explain how the rights of animals to freedom from cruelty at the hands of fundamentalist religionists can be treated with such contempt, and just where he would draw the line, and why.

His piece expresses a serious concern about imposing his own concerns about animal welfare in relation to food on to other people:

"I don’t feel the slightest urge to judge the choices that the human to whom I am closest makes about food. Not even when he eats meat which has been “ritually slaughtered”."

"So extend that outwards, a bit, from the person next to me, whom I know, to the rest of the world. If Keith can eat kosher meat, and I don’t feel the urge to interfere, by which mechanism could I declare that kosher or halal be banned, from the diets of those I will never know or meet?"

If Graeme can see no fault in his partner's eating ritually-slaughtered meat, and even buys it for him, he is right to consider himself in a weak position when it comes to suggesting that halal and kosher slaughter be proscribed. But what he fails to recognise is that his failure to object, and his condoning ritual slaughter, may say more about his own moral blind spot and inconsistency than about the merits of condemning the practice. There are some actions that are so morally repellent that it is simply not sufficient to abstain from them onself while defending another person's legal right to indulge in them on the grounds of "tolerance" and "liberalism". An example of this was the historical tolerance of domestic violence at a time when the police and the law took no interest in it. It was not good enough to say, "I don't beat my spouse, but it is none of my or the state's business if my next-door neighbour does so," even though, for many years, it was customary for people to turn a blind eye and to not get involved if the woman next-door was getting a beating. Most people would not have "felt the need to interfere" then, which does not entail that their urges were attuned to a proper moral conscience instead of being attuned to contemporary convention and not wanting to rock the boat. The merchandising of ritually slaughtered meat is so sanitised and divorced from the cruelty that has been inflicted on the animal, and its purchase so widespread and so casually condoned by a good proportion of an indifferent public too self-absorbed to want to bother about it, that it is very easy not to "feel the need to interfere" to try to stop the practice happening. The parallel with the pre-proscription blind eye that was turned to domestic violence is a valid one. As is the blind eye that was turned to marital rape, which also used to be perfectly legal in the UK. And to bring the focus back to animals rather than humans, condoning the legal ritual slaughter of animals whilst abstaining from eating such meat oneself is no better, no more enlightened, no more courageous, than condoning the legal abuse of house pets by one's next-door neighbour while treating one's own pets with kindness and consideration. What is needed with ritual slaughter is a wake-up call; deeper and more considered thought; an attempt to bring some consistency into one's moral spectrum in the place of convenient complacency; and an end to lazy, half-baked attempts to justify the indefensible. This is exactly what was needed in the case of legal domestic abuse and legal marital rape, but that was impeded for so many years because the prevailing injustices seemed so "normal" at the time, and it seemed to violate the principles of libertarianism to expect private citizens, or the state, to do what then seemed to many like interfering in the private life of a married couple, and taking away a stronger person's liberty to abuse a weaker person in this context. Just as marriage must never be an excuse for legal rape and legal domestic abuse, espousing a fundamentalist religion must never be an excuse for heinous and shocking legal cruelty towards animals.

Graeme writes in his piece, “This is no way to build the society we claim to desire: the one of mutual respect and tolerance,” and in a tweet to me, “But, while I'm not religious, neither would I like to wish it away (pointless and illiberal.) We need to live together.” All of this is a red herring. We do not have to “respect” or “tolerate” anything in our society that we find outrageous and cruel, regardless of whether or not it is enjoined by a fundamentalist religion. There are certain categories of beings that do not have a voice, and are unable to defend themselves or write influential pieces in the Daily Telegraph when their rights are seriously violated: abused children, including children growing up in fundamentalist families who are taught they risk being burned alive in hell for eternity, especially if they are gay or lesbian; asthmatic babies in cars subjected to the cigarette smoke of irresponsible parents; unborn children who will be torn apart by a surgeon’s forceps; and animals who suffer the agonising and terrifying death of ritual slaughter. It is very easy to talk about being “tolerant” and “liberal” towards people who are doing cruel things to those without a voice to complain, so long as we push the suffering of their victims to the back of our minds. We can pick up “a few slices” of kosher salt beef in the supermarket for our loved one, with its sanitised packaging and attractive presentation, in the context of what feels like an innocuous, humdrum routine activity shared by many others, to the comforting strains of shop muzak. All of these help to prevent our empathic moral consciousness from imagining the squeals and agony of the terrified animal as the knife slices across its throat and it is left hanging to bleed to death.

There is no suggestion of “wishing away” religion, and prohibiting religious slaughter is not in the slightest a step towards proscribing religious faith. This is hyperbole and fantasy. There are certain actions that are cruel, immoral and unworthy of any human being: and just because someone calls their belief system a “religion” does not confer special moral rights, and must not confer special legal rights. There are plenty of atrocities that have been committed historically in the name of the Christian religion, that are now regarded as utterly unacceptable and are illegal. This has not led to the Christian religion being “proscribed”, though particular elements in the cruellest versions of it, or at least the ability of the cruellest versions’ adherents to inflict the suffering on others they would like to inflict, have indeed been proscribed. It is not the whole religion that has been proscribed, but some of the specific cruel actions within its most inhumane and oppressive versions. Such proscriptions have not led to Christianity being proscribed altogether. Mainstream Christianity continues to evolve into something more thoughtful, compassionate and liberal, and less dogmatic. It has made a great deal of progress on this journey already. Until the fundamentalist versions of Islam and the fundamentalist versions of Judaism develop the same way, we have a moral duty to protect those beings vulnerable to the kind of cruel religious superstition that blighted the European Middle Ages, and that is still rife in so many places today. 

There is no place for animal cruelty in the U.K., even when it has a fundamentalist religious packaging and is mislabelled “tolerance”.

© Gary Powell, 2014