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DomKen -> RE: Was a foreign invader on your dinner table this Thaksgiving? (11/27/2011 11:10:21 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: kalikshama
Netherlands set to outlaw halal and kosher slaughter
...Holland [has joined] Sweden, Luxembourg, Norway and Switzerland as the fifth European country to legislate against religious slaughter, something which has prompted Britain's chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks to warn of a "domino effect". Others, meanwhile, would support a spread of such legislation – animal rights groups broadly back a ban, as do groups like the British Humanist Association and the National Secular Society.
...I'm not comfortable with the idea of pursuing a specifically religious practice in such a way, particularly when it is framed as a humanist issue.
If the humanist reason for wanting a ban on religious slaughter is animal welfare, then the implication is that animal welfare is a humanist issue. Perhaps so... But if that is the case, then why should ritual slaughter be the only animal welfare issue pursued by humanists? The animal rights group VIVA state that, of the 900 million animals slaughtered for food each year in Britain, around 12 million are killed by Muslim or Jewish ritual methods. I think in order for me to want to throw my support behind a ban on ritual slaughter I'd have to be convinced that the suffering endured by that 1.3 per cent of animals at the moment of death is somehow greater than the suffering inflicted upon far greater percentages during the course of their lives through transport and living conditions. Otherwise, campaigning specifically on the issue of religious slaughter feels, for me, uncomfortably like scapegoating.
Halal and kosher slaughter is simply cutting the neck to sever the carotid, esophagus, trachea and jugular in one motion with a very sharp knife. That doesn't strike me as cruel or inhumane. It certainly compares favorably to driving a bolt into the skull which is a common industrial slaughtering technique.
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