Animal Welfare or Veiled Racism?

[leo9]

Is there a difference between stunning before slaughter or not?
Who cares? As I understand it, the ritual killing involves severing the carotid and jugular veins. It is supposed to be very quick and relatively painless.

When I first started raising livestock, I believed people who told me that cutting a conscious animal's throat was quick and painless. After the first try I knew that anyone who said so must be totally hardened. It is horribly obvious to anyone with a grain of empathy that the animal spends its last ten or twenty seconds in pain and terror as its life drains away. I'm speaking here of a sheep: I'm told it can take two minutes for a steer, and I can all too vividly believe it.

Since then I have killed a good many meat animals with a clear conscience, because I made sure that they never knew what hit them and were unconscious when their arteries were opened.

I am not a vegetarian, because I accept that we're made to live on meat as well as plants. But I rarely eat meat I haven't raised myself, because it's one thing to be party to the death of an animal that had a comforable life, and quite another to be party to the abuse and torture of animals, which factory farming and mass slaughter so often are.

One of the many irritating things about this debate is that, like so many things that people claim are a religious necessity, kosher and hallal slaughter actually have no basis in scripture. The only thing the scripture says is that one shouldn't eat a sick animal, which (like many of the dietary laws) is obvious good sense. But at some time in the unrecorded past some theological hair-splitter decided that was far too simple a reading to be holy, and it had to mean something difficult and different from what any other people did: so they declared that "sick" included an animal that was unconscious through having just been knocked on the head. Hence the rule.

But, like the burqa and female genital mutilation, it's now considered a religious requirement simply because they've done it that way for so long.

Is the call for banning animal welfare or a racist agenda?
I doubt that it's intended to be racist. I do think there are some people who are genuinely concerned over animal welfare.

It's not like you to be naive. Animal welfare groups have been complaining about ritual slaughter for some fifty years, but suddenly governments act on it? Just when being nasty to Muslims is fashionable? And you seriously think racism has nothing to do with it?

The only surprise here is that they're causing trouble for Jews as well, and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the authors of this law were so ignorant that they didn't realise kosher slaughter is the same as hallal. It would be in keeping with that kind of dumb prejudice.

Should we be eating domestic animals or not?
Absolutely! I know, technically I'm supposed to be an omnivore, but give me meat! Lots of meat! Vegetables are what food eats.

I've no problem with eating animals. I do have a problem with abusing animals, and most factory farming is grossly cruel; I've been a farm relief worker (an agency hand,) and seen places that you don't want to hear about. So at the moment, when I'm not in a position to raise my own meat, I try to stick to what I can be sure has been raised humanely. This is not only rare but expensive, so in practice I'm semi-vegetarian.