Good reply. It opens a lot of venues of discussion in the context. But being an atheist, not really for me.
Scientifically, is the Muslim 'halal' way of animal slaughtering more humane than contemporary ways?
I once ran into a site for the maker of equipment used in cattle slaughter.
The animal is led into a space, and within a second or two:
Heavy steel fencing is raised
For non-Kosher, the head is forced straight ahead
A captive bolt (1" diameter steel rod) is driven into the brain
The fencing is lowered
The manacle on the right rear leg picks up the critter and takes it for processing.
For Kosher: the head is pushed upward, exposing the throat.
The (?) uses a vicious-looking knife to slit the throat.
The hardware was shown in drawing. The man with the knife was wearing a holster with 5 more knives on it - the knife has to be changed often, it seemed.
In New Zealand, the majority of industrial slaughterhouses produce meat that is certified as halal (supplying middle eastern and east asian markets).
However, stunning is mandatory and (as far as I am aware) electrical stunning is most commonly used - I believe that captive bolt stunning has a much higher risk of killing the animal unintentionally. The animal is not hoisted until after slaughter.
I posted:
and the response:
I am sincerely trying to understand Sage Rat’s point. Do you mean that when they stun the animal, the hoisting and slaughter happen so quickly that the animal never feels the pain of the stunning?
That doesn’t make sense to me. For it to make sense, all these things would have to happen almost simultaneously. Measuring the time from the beginning of the stun, through the rest of the stun, the hoisting, and the slaughtering, until unconsciousness occurs, it would have to be milliseconds - or less. If that’s how fast these things occur, then I’ll have to reconsider. But do they really occur that fast?
Please note what it says on pages 250-251 of this document (pages 9-10 of the linked PDF): “Pigs- Studies to determine the voltages and amperages required to stun 180-250 lb (80-112 kg) market weight pigs indicate that with application times of 1 to 5 seconds, a minimum of 1.07 amps and 180 volts was required … … The average amperage varied from 70 to 150 milliamps while the voltage varied from 65 to 280 volts. The duration of application had to last an average of 13 to 26 seconds in order to be effective … It is not recommended (Hoenderken, 1978a) because if the stunner fails to produce unconsciousness, a pig would have to withstand the shock for up to 20 seconds instead of only 1 or 3 seconds.”
Please note how long the stunning takes: The average was 13 to 26 seconds, and the preferred time is 1 to 3 seconds. Even this shorter time is NOT instantaneous! Is it really admirable when the pig has to “withstand the shock for … only 1 or 3 seconds”?
I concede that the animal is unconscious later on when the slaughter actually occurs. My argument is that the stunning itself is very painful.
It seems that even when using electrocution to kill condemned criminals, nobody every really figured out for certain how to build an electric chair that everyone could agree was “humane”. So stunning an animal with electricity must still be somewhat of an inexact science too.
I believe the ‘captive bolt’ method of stunning is the most humane in practice.
Because it is mechanized, with most of the work done by the equipment. It does not depend on the skill, training, or energy of the operator. For a worker doing this all day for hours at a time, in the Kosher method they can easily become tired, or not get the artery accurately, or the knife become dull – all of those will cause increased pain for the animal.
This quoted section describes the findings from a survey of European slaughter plants forty years ago. It describes an alternate method of stunning called electrocoma, and recommends not using it because the lower amperages might not render the pig unconscious quickly enough; they then recommend a minimum amperage to use for this method to make it less prone to failure. This isn’t however the method used now.
Again the 13-26 second numbers are from a decades-old survey and are examples of how not to do it. 1-3 seconds is the current standard time. Also consider how it feels when you get electrocuted… you don’t retain your normal ability to think and feel while it’s happening; you wouldn’t have the same kind of awareness you’d have like when sitting in a chair and slowly stabbing your thigh with a kitchen knife… As far as your brain can tell as soon as the current is applied the effect is instantaneous, and the 1-3 seconds is the time it takes to produce a grand-mal seizure and the lights go completely out. I’m not sure how much faster one can expect death to occur. Perhaps if you set of some high explosives you could kill an animal in only fractions of a second but this is of course not practical.
I can see that your argument is that stunning is very painful, but I don’t see any evidence for that assertion.