Religious slaughter: pre-stun, or go to jail.

It is legal in the UK to cut the throat of animals while they are still conscious, but only if this is done during religious slaughter (halal/ shechita). It is a practice that must be banned. It does not belong in any civilised country.

 

88% of animals slaughtered in the UK by the halal method are already pre-stunned. It is therefore only a small minority of Muslims who continue to insist on slaughter without pre-stunning. In shechita, the Jewish slaughter method, no animals are pre-stunned, but 10% are given a post-cut stun. All really horrible stuff.

It is hardly an extreme or unreasonable demand for the law to require that all animals be pre-stunned before slaughter. There are certain fundamentalist religious practices that do not harm any other beings, and for the sake of freedom, they should not be banned. But there are other religious practices that cause clear and significant harm to other beings, and these should be banned.

It generally takes adult cattle 22-40 seconds to lose consciousness after their throats have been cut. It can take some calves up to 120 seconds to die. This kind of mediaeval cruelty inflicted on animals is utterly unconscionable.

Just because something has happened for centuries, does not make it right. Slavery lasted for centuries. Women were subjugated for centuries. People were burnt as heretics for centuries. Gay people were oppressed into concealment for centuries. “Ancient religious traditions, handed down over centuries” supported all of these outrages. Just because something is an ancient religious tradition, doesn’t mean it should be allowed to happen in a civilised country.

There are certain traditional religious practices that are generally accepted as totally unacceptable and rightly illegal. Stoning people to death and execution for apostasy are two examples. Saying that a cruel activity must be given special legal dispensation just because it is demanded by the ancient traditions of a fundamentalist religion is therefore not a good enough justification. If those making this claim simply believe that animal suffering does not matter, then they should be honest enough to state this explicitly.

If banning unstunned religious slaughter is persecution of religious minorities, then surely so is not allowing religious minorities to execute apostates and adulterers. Yes, the latter is worse, and more shocking. But if someone has a special right to make another being suffer simply because of religious beliefs, this is where the argument takes us.

Calling the campaign to ban unstunned religious slaughter “Islamophobic” makes no sense. 88% of halal slaughter in the UK already involves pre-stunning, so it is only a small minority of Muslims who insist on the animal being conscious when killed. That 12% cannot claim to represent all Muslims in the UK. So, if anything, opposition to it can only be called “Hard-Line-Islam-ophobic”. Criticising the beliefs and actions of hellfire Baptists does not imply any criticism of Quakers. It is not “Christophobic.” Furthermore, a “phobia” is an irrational fear. I fear the cruel suffering inflicted on animals in unstunned religious slaughter. That is a perfectly rational fear; not a phobia. There is nothing “Islamophobic” about demanding all animals be pre-stunned before slaughter. In this context, “Islamophobia” is a lazy term used to silence valid criticism of certain unacceptable aspects of fundamentalist religion.

It is not “libertarian” to defend the right to carry out unstunned religious slaughter. As well as having a right to freedom to do certain things, sentient beings have a right to freedom from having certain things done to them. Both of these will be defended by a true libertarian. If animals have a right to protection from cruel suffering, then this must trump the perceived right of the fundamentalist to inflict cruel suffering on them. Some fundamentalists think they are divinely commanded to kill apostates and gay people, and are prevented from doing so by the law. Here is the precedent that demonstrates religious rights are not allowed to trump every other right. Why should they be allowed to trump the standard legal acknowledgment of animal rights?

Some claim that it is “not our business” to interfere in how other people want to live their lives, including how they kill animals for meat. Many would have had the same attitude towards their battered next-door neighbour prior to the 1980s when domestic abuse and marital rape were still legal. Just because everyone else, and the law, turn a blind eye now, doesn’t mean it will ever be right, or forever be legal.

One journalist recently wrote that the campaign to ban religious slaughter meant that Britain was set to become a country that prized animals more than Jewish or Muslim people. But there was a time when heretics were burnt at the stake: and indeed, in some countries, heretics and apostates are still executed. Cue the defence against outrage: “This country is set to become one where heretics are prized more than devout believers.” It is a stupid and vacuous line of argumentation.  

There is a distinct lack of precise thinking in much of the material that passes for a defence of unstunned religious slaughter. I have outlined some of it above. Another bogus counter-argument is that all animal slaughter involves cruelty. This may well be the case. But that is equivalent to saying that because someone has been tortured with thumbscrews, it doesn't matter if he is put on the rack as well. No doubt there is suffering associated with all animal slaughter. But at least stunning the animal first renders it unconscious to what comes afterwards.

Then there is the vacuous counter-argument that the stunning procedures in standard abattoirs do not always work, and that some animals are slaughtered unstunned there. But at least the law declares this is illegal, and abattoirs can be inspected, controlled, and reported when there are contraventions. And the hand of campaigners against animal cruelty is strengthened by the existence of such legislation.

Then there are those who say that ritual slaughter seems to be the most humane way to kill an animal. As it can take adult cattle 22 to 40 seconds to lose consciousness after their throats are cut, and as it will take some calves up to 120 seconds to die, such arguments lack credibility. After all, what human being faced with his throat being cut would turn down the opportunity to be electronically stunned first?

Let’s stand up for suffering victims of religious fundamentalism who do not have a voice to stand up for themselves.

For more about religious slaughter without pre-stunning, the RSPCA have produced a comprehensive information sheet.

© Gary Powell, 2014  

Time to slaughter ritual killing arguments

A reply to Telegraph writer Cristina Odone, who is outraged about demands for animals to be stunned before their throats are cut by religious slaughterers. 

The journalist Cristina Odone has nailed her colours to the mast on the issue of ritual slaughter, and they are dripping with the blood of animals whose throats have been slit while being denied recourse to any stunning procedure that would have spared them the terror and agony that some aggressive religious adherents have been inflicting on sentient creatures (including fellow humans) for centuries.

  

Mrs Odone has written an article in response to the demand from John Blackwell, president-elect of the British Veterinary Association, that ritual slaughter without pre-stunning either be stopped voluntarily, or be banned. Mrs Odone’s piece for The Daily Telegraph is entitled “I don't want to live in a Britain that prizes its cows more than its Jews” (6 March 2014) and has the staggeringly asinine opening line, “Britain is set to become a country that prizes a cow more than a Jew, an ox more than a Muslim.” 

Mr Blackwell’s position is hardly that of an extremist. His concerns are based on animals suffering as a result of religious slaughter where they are not stunned before the knife is applied to their throats. He said:

“They will feel the cut. They will feel the massive injury of the tissues of the neck. They will perceive the aspiration of blood they will breathe in before they lose consciousness.”

Explaining the sensation of blood in the trachea to be like the pain when food goes down the wrong way into your windpipe, Mr Blackwell said:

“When you check the lungs of these animals there is clearly blood that has been aspirated. People say we are trying to focus on the last five or six seconds of an animal’s life when it could be 18 months old. It’s five or six seconds too long.”  

Mr Blackwell also only advocates a legal ban should Muslim and Jewish religious leaders not comply voluntarily with allowing animals to be stunned before their throats are slit. (The Times, 6 March 2014.)

Yet Mr Blackwell’s mild, reasonable and humane request has been turned by some into an attempt to put the rights of animals above the “rights” of dogmatic religious adherents. Mrs Odone belongs to the camp that is trying to make it all so personal, all so much a matter of religious persecution. 

Just take Mrs Odone’s statements, “I don't want to live in a Britain that prizes its cows more than its Jews,” and “Britain is set to become a country that prizes a cow more than a Jew, an ox more than a Muslim.”  So, what about those (thankfully few) people who treat their pets, or farmyard animals, with wanton cruelty, some of whom get discovered, successfully prosecuted and exposed in the media? Shouldn’t they, by the same token, be allowed to inflict cruelty on a non-human animal, given that it is an action that gratifies some kind of impulse or warped value? Are we not “prizing” dogs more than human beings when we punish an owner for cruelty, according to Mrs Odone’s reasoning?  

If it would be illegal for someone to slit the throat of his conscious pet dog and leave it to die in agony and terror, why should a dogmatic religious adherent be given special rights to inflict such suffering on an animal? After all, there are plenty of rules, commandments and endorsements in religious books that their adherents are no longer legally permitted to follow in any decent country: stoning to death, execution for apostasy, and ruthless oppression of gay and lesbian people are just a few examples. The Liberal Democrat UK Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, also a defender of religious slaughter, stated that the Government should not meddle in “ancient beliefs handed down over generations.” But if being an ancient belief comes with a special licence to override the growing tide of reason and compassion that are gradually asserting themselves against centuries of religious oppression and stupidity, then Mr Clegg would have to acknowledge that many of the freedoms and protections his party claims to support, should never have been allowed to trump longstanding religious dogmatism.

The other serious problem with the statement, “Britain is set to become a country that prizes a cow more than a Jew, an ox more than a Muslim,” is that it treats Jews and Muslims as though they were 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. There are cultural Muslims, and observant, believing Muslims. There is a world of difference between being an observant Muslim and a cultural Muslim; between being an observant Jew and a cultural Jew; 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 many 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. Mrs Odone’s 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 do not believe that the majority of Muslims or Jews living in the UK truly hold the kind of fundamentalist beliefs that are represented by such teachings as the importance of ritual slaughter without pre-stunning, the evil of homosexuality, or the punishment of sinners by being burned alive in hell for eternity. These kinds of views are dogmatic, fundamentalist views that are not held by anyone who has had enough psychological and social freedom to develop a basic level of compassion and insight, and reset their moral and intellectual compass. Identifying yourself as Jewish or Muslim does not necessarily mean that you will only eat ritually-slaughtered meat, or that you think homosexuality is evil. Professing beliefs that identify you as a dogmatic, fundamentalist Jew or a dogmatic, fundamentalist Muslim is a different matter entirely.

The remainder of Mrs Odone’s article continues in the same fluffy vein. There are “millions of Muslims and Jews whose religion dictates that they eat only animals that have been killed in a particular way.” Those demanding a ban on ritual slaughter are saying, “Let them eat cake.” Halal and kosher slaughter have been practised “for millennia”. Ritual slaughter is “Not for the faint-hearted, but religion seldom is.” (Maybe the latter statement might have appeased the friends and families of mediaeval heretics being burnt alive at the stake.) Mrs Odone states that we have a culture “where animals matter more than people, and a lot more than religious people.” (Of course, we have all witnessed animals being given state education, NHS treatment, welfare benefits and legal protection from cruel violence: privileges so blatantly and so unjustly denied to “religious people”.) People are only objecting to ritual slaughter because lambs are “cute and cuddly” and “soft furry creatures”. (So does she really believe we would not object to cruelty inflicted on an ugly dog? And since when have religiously slaughtered cattle been soft and furry?)

Mrs Odone’s final paragraph even raises some doubt that animals feel pain at all: “Banning a religious ritual because an animal may (who knows) feel some pain before its killing, is a nonsense value.” “Who knows” that animals feel pain? Would she only be convinced if they phoned to make an appointment with the vet? That animals could not feel pain, as they did not have souls, was the view of her fellow Roman Catholic, René Descartes. Such views have no doubt encouraged a great deal of animal suffering at the hands of religious humans over the centuries. But at least Descartes has the excuse that he was writing in the 17^th century: an excuse Mrs Odone does not have. One might have hoped that religious adherents would have learned a thing or two over the last three centuries: not least because of the similarity between human and animal nervous systems, and the fact that animals exhibit clear pain responses to stimuli that would result in human pain responses. Even if a sophistical philosopher or theologian were able to make a theoretical case for animals not feeling pain, the fact of very strong – overwhelming – empirical and biological evidence that they do feel pain must support legislation for their protection.

So, can anyone invent a religion, which then comes to have a special status in law and confers a right to cause suffering to animals that non-adherents do not have? I couldn’t imagine many Pastafarians (members of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster)  supporting a religious right to be cruel to animals. But what if another new religion took hold that claimed its deity demanded the trussing-up of cats and dogs, and their being thrown alive onto bonfires? Let’s remember that the Christian God used to be understood to command the trussing up of human “heretics” and their burning on bonfires. Was preventing people being burned at the stake an example of prioritising heretics over religious believers? Or was it a case of limiting the cruelty that humans are permitted to inflict on other sentient beings in the name of fundamentalist religion?  

Bogus arguments, red herrings, sloppy thinking and straw men from opponents, hinder the progress of those campaigning for an end to religious slaughter without pre-stunning. In modern, liberal, secular societies, religious dogmatism will not win religious dogmatists the support they need from the majority population, which has a healthy disregard for fundamentalism and for any claims to be able to quote God verbatim from religious texts that contain a great deal of cruelty and absurdity. Instead (with apologies to F. H. Bradley), the religious apologists for discrimination found bad reasons for what they believed upon prejudice: and those reasons were weak and flawed, and were blown out of the water by their opponents. The arguments to continue allowing religious dogmatists a special dispensation to inflict cruel deaths on animals are based on similar attempts to find bad reasons for what is believed upon prejudice, and the feeble attempt to present fundamentalist religious adherents as poor, persecuted victims, treated worse than animals, features large in these arguments.

The vast majority of the general public have learned to put natural compassion above the strident demands of fundamentalist religious beliefs that have caused no end of misery throughout history. Many people are unaware of what ritual slaughter involves, and that the president-elect of the British Veterinary Association is simply asking for animals to be stunned before they are slaughtered, as they must already be in all places where non-religious slaughter takes place. As the campaign to end non-prestunned ritual slaughter gains increasing attention in the public domain, the flimsy arguments of its religious proponents will buckle under the tide of opposition that has already removed so many obscene fundamentalist religious practices from the civilised world.

© Gary Powell, 2014