The unkindest cut of all

Barbaric methods of killing animals are set to become big business, according to a story in the Australian newspaper The Age.

More than 200 food manufacturers in Victoria are gearing up for a big project to establish a premium brand for halal products to cater to the world’s 1.9 billion Muslims.

Halal, like the Jewish shechita, involves killing animals without prestunning. It’s reckoned to be barbaric by many experts and animal-welfare campaigners. And it’s done in the name of religion.

Four years ago, Britain’s Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC) produced a report (it’s a PDF, so ensure you have Acrobat Reader) that, among other things, had this to say about what can happen at the moment the sentient animal has its throat slit:

When a very large transverse incision is made across the neck a number of vital tissues are transected including: skin, muscle, trachea, oesophagus, carotid arteries, jugular veins, major nerve trunks (e.g. vagus and phrenic nerves) plus numerous minor nerves. Such a drastic cut will inevitably trigger a barrage of sensory information to the brain in a sensible (conscious) animal. We are persuaded that such a massive injury would result in very significant pain and distress in the period before insensibility supervenes.

In ordinary language, when the knife slashes into the flesh it bloody well hurts.

This report is worth reading and passing along to others who are interested in farm animal welfare, and who may not realise that their children could be being fed halal meat at school. (Once you have the PDF, search on any string of some of the words above, and you’ll find the relevant section on slaughter without prestunning.)

One of its recommendations is this: “Council considers that slaughter without pre-stunning is unacceptable and that the Government should repeal the current exemption.”

It didn’t, of course. Well, it’s a religious thing, ennit? This is what the National Secular Society (NSS) had to say the following year:

We consider it indefensible that the Government disregarded the advice given by FAWC Report on the Welfare of Farmed Animals at Slaughter or Killing in recommendation 61 that slaughter without prior stunning be ban banned, as it is in many other major meat producing countries. The pretext the Government gave for justifying its actions was so weak, illogical and unconvincing it was clearly a subterfuge to hide the real reason: that it is much more concerned about upsetting religious groups than in preventing unnecessary pain to defenceless sentient animals.

Now, give it a brand, put some money behind it, and slaughter without prestunning is set to rake in the dollars.

What is worrying is that halal meat may be found in our schools, because it’s not in the school’s interests to source from two different suppliers – and it’s hardly going to tell the religious that they can go and eat cake if they don’t like meat that’s been humanely slaughtered. Also, we don’t know whether it’s in supermarkets, and not labelled as such. Some, of course, is labelled:

Both Sainsbury’s and Tesco currently have 64 stores in the UK that sell a range of fresh halal poultry and red meat as approved by the Halal Food Authority, while Asda has more than 150 stores selling halal meat. [Guardian]

But some is not labelled, and the NSS had this to say (in the document cited above):

We consider a labelling system to be absolutely essential, as we believe all consumers (not just religious ones) should have the right to choose what kind of meat they are purchasing and how it was killed.

Perhaps it’s time to start haranguing your supermarkets to tell you unequivocally whether the joint of beef or lamb you’re about to buy was killed humanely or made, wide-eyed with terror and pain, to witness its own death.