I came across this Tweet after I started this post but it confirms my belief. This Tweet is clear there are people who would ban Jews and Muslims from observing good meat production practice. My post was going top start here.
Please be in no doubt the Danish ban on non-stun slaughter has nothing to do with humane slaughter.
A central and core element of good kosher/halal practice that may not be obvious is transparency of the supply chain. I came across this when reading around the horse meat scandal that broke in 2014. Long opaque international supply chains for processed meat products allowed horse meat to be mixed with beef and to be sold as beef.
Kosher/halal codes start high welfare animal husbandry. In the UK there is a growing Secular demand for locally produced high welfare meat. We are seeing a demand for farmers’ markets. In theory it ought to be possible for consumers to see and observe any stage in the supply chain. In practice an element of trust occurs – that’s trust in the people you know. It is the same with halal meat.
Although I did not save the reference, at the time of the horse meat scandal I read about halal meat not leaving the sight of a Muslim. The the idea immediately made sense. In brief you should not eat meat whose provenance you did not know and supplied by people you do not know or should not trust.
In Secular Britain we have a range of quality marks that are supposed to assure that products are made to agreed standards.
The RSCPA has recently renamed its “Freedom Foods” mark as “RSPCA Assured“. Then there is the “Red Tractor” quality mark.
What do these quality marks tell us? The Soil Association’s website includes this statement:
It seems we have to trust what people say. The longer the supply chain the more opaque it must be and the more trust we have to place in more and more people that we can never know.
In February 2015 Animal Aid released covert filming from a non-stun abattoir in the North of England. The images placed in the public domain are distressing to say the least. In a statement that was released with the images was this:
… Yorkshire Lamb is the tenth slaughterhouse in which we have filmed undercover since January 2009. As with the others, we didn’t know what we would find when our cameras were planted, including that it was a halal establishment – the first we have investigated. All the other nine were practising so-called ‘humane slaughter’. Two were Soil Association-approved, and another was accredited by the RSPCA’s Freedom Foods scheme. In eight out of the nine, we found serious welfare breaches, including animals being kicked, punched in the face, given electric shocks, burnt with cigarettes and thrown about prior to having their throats cut …
Animal Aid cameras are in place for very short periods (a matter of a few days) so if the distressing incidents that have been captured are rare then Animal Aid would have had to be very lucky to have been around when they occur.
The Animal Aid images from the non-stun slaughter facility show that even “halal” certified meat may not be produced to a guaranteed standard implied by the label.
Go onto the Internet and you will find reports of breaches of welfare standards even from facilities selling into the Jewish Kosher market – even in Israel itself.
Countries that are banning non-stun are not doing so for humane reasons. Animal Aid filmed mostly in “humane” slaughterhouses. The truth is that even here in the UK we cannot be assured that the meat we consume has come from animals that did not suffer in the last moments of their lives in Secular slaughterhouses. Here in the UK with its high standards we do not know if meat has been humanely processed – that’s within country.
The Danish government will have been aware of these issues when it banned non-stun practice within Denmark. It will have known that it is forcing Jews and Muslims, who very reasonably believe that meat should be locally produced and distributed through short transparent supply chains, to eat from meat from unknown sources. Denmark has in effect knowingly introduced discriminatory legislation.
Why would it do so? To protect its Secular meat trade from criticism?
Have you noticed that when Secularists want to show that their rituals are “humane” they never show you the graphic bleeding out? There is an assumption that stunning is a foolproof procedure – when little is known about the rate of mis-stunning which may be more that 1 in 20 animals. Insiders tell me that production lines slow down when Defra’s official inspectors are snooping around the slaughter halls. Others tell me that increasingly veterinary surgeons are avoiding eating meat – now that would make for an interesting study and would be very informative.
I introduced this post under the guise of the recent Danish ban on non-stun slaughter. The ban requires Jews and Muslims to buy meat from ever increasingly opaque supply chains. I have shown evidence that Secular slaughterhouses have issues and that Secular supply chains are not transparent.
Halal and Kosher dietary laws are derived from knowing where the meat one eats has come from and how it died. Good Secular practices promote the same principles and there may be growing interest in supporting local meat producers and distributors – by using family butchers, farmers’ markets and farm shops. Good Secular practice seems to be in harmony with good halal and kosher practice. This leads to one conclusion – banning non-stun slaughter must be rooted in anti-Semitism.
I have been provocative but as we know proper halal/kosher slaughter practice, applied by people with proper training and in the proper places is a non-inferior practice. In America and here in the UK non-stun facilities catering for the halal or the kosher markets have been found wanting – and so have Secular facilities operating under quality marks that are meant to assure humane stun slaughter.
I guess the bottom line is that if we want cheap meat in quantity we have to reduce our welfare expectations – or give increasing consideration to reducing our meat consumption.
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