Here are the regulations from the UK, I’d like to see them be tightened up as well as stipulating the most humane method of slaughter be used, regardless of religious implications.
Silly? Surely slaughter methods fit in perfectly alongside those regulations above. If the current best evidence is correct and there is less suffering using the stunning method then why wouldn’t you mandate that method?
Me or Jackmannii?
If me, I stand by my comments as one only needs to read the full story to understand why it was done. This is not throwing a donkey from a steeple this was a pragmatic sensible decision that protects the welfare of future generations.
If ** Jackmannii**, then yes…agreed
Jackmannii.
The OP is about Denmark, not Norway. AFAIK, the Danes are not into whaling.
When I was a kid killing chickens was considered one of the fun chores precisely for this reason. I wonder how the law will (or more precisely if) affect people in rural areas.
You are making an assumption here that the animal “suffers” during the 10 to 30 seconds between proper throat cutting and insensibility. That is not clear to me. I’ve fainted a couple of times in my life, which is fair approximation of death by blood loss to the brain. I don’t recall experiencing any suffering–everything went black and then I, thankfully, woke up.
It seems to me that the most important part of the slaughtering process in terms of animal welfare is the lead up to the killing blow, whether captive bolt or ritual incision, not the blow itself. As long as the actual killing is not needlessly tortuous, the animal is dead at the end in any case.
No, I’m not.
You are making an assumption that getting your neck cut and bleeding to death while you kick and gurgle on your own blood would be the same as your experiences with fainting.
What I remember seeing looked similar o the way it looks in the following video:
One being more important does not negate the other. If I were a prisoner on death row, I’d want to be treated humanely both while imprisoned and an terms of how my death is performed.
That’s the whole point.
All things being equal, i.e. The animal is correctly restrained & handled to minimize panic and discomfort; it still seems like a bolt that instantly destroys the brain is superior to a bleeding out while consciousness persists for sometimes as long as a minute.
But you’d agree that stunning, then throat cutting gives a greater guarantee that they don’t suffer?
Set priorities.
I’ll assume you’ll stipulate that pigs are not a “lower” life form than cows. Read a little about the life-style enjoyed by pigs. It is baffling that people focused on humane treatment of food animals would worry about a few seconds of slaughter delay, while pigs experience life-long torture.
Set priorities. Emotionally I’d like to side with animal-rights. It’s hard when the priorities are laughable.
“Superior” is a moral value-judgment in this case. You’re assuming that the animal is experiencing suffering due to pain and/or awareness of its impending death, and that this suffering, if present, is so large as to outweigh the interests of the people who have particular religious requirements on the manner of slaughter.
I understand that many people place zero (or negative) value on anything associated with religion, and therefore any non-zero suffering by the animal instantly outweighs any religious interests. But that’s an assumption that should be stated explicitly in this discussion.
Read what you quoted him on again. He didn’t make any assumptions.
What exactly is that religious requirement? What is said in the Qur’an and/or Hadith that forbids rendering an animal unconscious before slaughtering it? How much pain is necessary to outweigh appeasing others with religious requirements?
Suppose I grant that. So what? Halal slaughter may permit stun-then-cut, but I don’t think kosher slaughter does–kosher animals, IIRC, must be uninjured and disease-free at time of slaughter. Even if the throat cutting causes some non-zero amount of suffering, which has not been (and probably cannot be) objectively proven, that amount of suffering must be weighed against the interests of the Jews and Muslims who require particular methods of slaughter.
That interest-balancing is not possible to do completely objectively (though some economist will undoubtedly try). But, as others have pointed out, this seems like the tiniest piece of the livestock-animal-suffering problem, and has the side-effect of stigmatizing outsider groups of people in the name of animal welfare.
One is tempted to make a decidedly not Jewish/Muslim reference to the mote in god’s eye.
Set priorities? Do you think animal welfare groups or governments are silent on factory farming?
OK then, let’s assume that all of us concerned with animal welfare want to see factory farming outlawed and a return to hoppity-skippity lambs and daisy in a straw hat with a ribbon on it. I agree…yes…that is where the biggest push should be because that is where the most harm is caused. I’m not sure you’ll get any complaints about that.
Excellent, let’s crack on with it. I expect it will take some time to dismantle the current system and legislate and regulate our way to a better future. You are looking 10-25 years I would suggest.
Now then, I ask myself, in the meantime are there any actions we can take that are quick and easy? that requires no additional infrastructure? no additional cost? I suspect there are many and on current evidence a change to the method of ritual slaughter is one of them. I see no good reason no to do it.
There are definitely assumptions being made, even if unstated. In order to say one method is “superior” to another based on reduction in suffering (and that’s nominally what this is all about), one must assume that the cut-and-bleed-out method of slaughter is causing some non-zero amount of suffering to the animal. I think the quoted post also assumes that the animal must be conscious of impending death and feeling fear and pain during the process of bleeding out. Has this been established objectively? On the other hand, perhaps the assumption is that the suffering is of the human witnesses?
I am not familiar with halal slaughter requirements, other than knowing that kosher slaughter meets those requirements for Muslims who cannot access explicitly halal meat. The converse is not the case.
Kosher slaughter requirements are Talmudic/Rabbinic, and a fair summary is available at the Temple Grandin site linked above. I don’t think it permits stunning first.
I was quite clear where I stand in a previous post
You say in a later post
Why? You state this as if it is objectively true and that a religious requirement for slaughter trumps animal welfare concerns.
No.
No. One must “assume” that being rendered unconscious instantly and then having one’s neck cut is superior then having one’s neck cut and being left to bleed to death while kicking, screaming and gurgling on his own blood because the latter is more likely to cause suffering. One can not say for sure what either experience is like, but we look at the evidence and make pretty good evaluations that I’d call more than making assumptions.
Has it been established objectively that a cat being kicked across the room feels pain? If not, I’m going to err on the side of caution and take appropriate action if I see it happen.
If you were going to be executed in one of the two ways discussed, which would you think would be less painful? Never mind, you already answered. You’ve concluded that getting your neck cut and bleeding to death is a fair comparison to the painlessness you’ve experienced when fainting.
Nope.
http://www.isaiowa.org/content/Halal-Information/Halal-Education/Why-Kosher-is-not-Halal.aspx
Then they need to make changes when technology allows for animals to be rendered unconscious instantly before slaughter.
Why must we balance animal welfare interests with human interests? Because that’s what we always do. We humans have an interest in eating meat (as a group; individuals may differ). We eat meat for a lot of reasons. For one, it’s nutritious. That’s objectively true, but there’s nothing in meat that is exclusive to it. We can substitute vegetable sources of nutrition that are just as good. We don’t all do that for reasons that are both rational and irrational: perhaps it’s more time-consuming and difficult to get a balanced vegan diet, or maybe we just like the taste so much we don’t want to give it up.
It is not “objectively true that a religious requirement for slaughter trumps animal welfare”. But it is also not objectively true that this particular method of slaughter impacts animal welfare negatively. Nor even if it does that the banning of it increases animal welfare more than it marginalizes minority communities.
If we’re raising and killing animals for food, we’ve already said that human interests trump animal welfare in some circumstances. Now you’re arguing that some human interests are morally inferior and should not be considered at all. That may be so, but I’m not sure this particular human interest causes so much reduction in animal welfare that it sinks to that level of moral inferiority. Your mileage obviously varies.
The impression I get is that it is always easy for a majority to find objective-appearing reasons to ban the practices of a minority - particularly where that minority is otherwise disfavored.
Granted, this alleged concern for animal welfare does appear rather thin, even by the undiscriminating standards of justification such measures are usually subjected to by majorities. The headscarf ban in France had more legitimacy to it, which isn’t saying much.