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.”
“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 17th 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
