What do you think of the halal way of slaughtering?
I always find it interesting that people asking about this topic always bring up halal, and never kosher or other religious slaughter. So I’m going to talk about both.
I’ve been to exactly two slaughterhouses through my education. One was for pigs only, so certainly not halal or kosher in any way. The other did sheep and cattle, and was both halal and kosher, and I have to say I greatly preferred the second.
So let me tell you about the halal/kosher place.The sheep would come up single file into the ‘box’, which has doors that close behind them so the others couldn’t see. They were rendered unconscious with a reversible captive bolt pistol to the skull, then their throat is slit before they’re hung up.
So what makes this both halal and kosher instead of non-religious slaughter?
The captive bolt is reversible. Once a year, for certification, one animal is allowed to recover from it to prove it’s not lethal.
There’s a little room beside the ‘box’ where a Muslim prays over each animal to make it halal, and a Jew prays over each animal to make it kosher. So they are both halal and kosher at the same time, because capitalism.
That’s it. It’s otherwise exactly the same as a non-religious slaughter plant. Non-religious slaughter just doesn’t care whether their captive bolt is reversible or not.
There’s a lot of… venom… about religious slaughter, fueled by islamophobia and anti-semitism, and at least within Australia there is absolutely no reason for it. I can make no comments about other nations with laxer animal welfare laws, but that’s how it’s done at the large commercial plants here.
And if you look at the rules and consider it in an early history context, then throat slitting isn’t a bad way to go in the absence of captive bolt guns and firearms. Having a very religious person doing all the slaughter is probably a decent way to make sure you don’t have a psychopath doing all that killing.
Which is also why I wonder about pigs being forbidden. It’s harder to kill a pig humanely with less stress by throat slitting than a goat, sheep or cow is. They’re good protein and efficient to raise, is it possible that someone way back when said “If we can’t kill it well, don’t kill them to eat?”
I think it’s plausible that these rules came about out of a desire to do right by the animals to be eaten, before our modern understanding. Not a religious scholar though, so probably not the best person to ask.
So I don’t have any objections to halal and kosher slaughter over non-religious slaughter.
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