do you care if your meat is stunned before slaughter?

[salsmum]

Increasingly these days hospitals,schools, restuarants/takeaways and care homes are using Halal meat. I would like to know if the meat that I eat has been stunned before slaughter and find the Halal slaughter method particularly cruel (animals throat is cut while it is still concious) I just wanted to ask if any MNs would like to be given the choice whether they eat Halal meat and whether they would choose not to if the meat was labelled on the supermarket shelf? i.e. stating if the animal has been stunned prior to slaughter..some Halal meat the animals are pre-stunned beforehand IYSWIM? This isnt a post about religious beliefs so please don't flame me but mearly I'm interested to see if anyone else would rather have the choice to know

All the slaughtermen I worked with had the utmost respect for the animals, and they often reiterated the fact that until the animal is dead it is a living creature and should be treated as such.
As for some of the previous posts saying that the animals are terrified prior to death and they can smell the blood, well, I imagine this could well be true in the more intensive systems where the animals are basically on a conveyor belt and very little attention is paid to individual animals to speed up the process. However, in my experience of a smaller, more traditional slaughterhouse, this was not the case at all, the animals were not in distress, not making any noise or trying to run away, they were calm and content right up to the point of stunning. Also, each animal is processed individually so they don't see each other die! I do agree that any form of slaughter is not nice or pretty, but I think the way I saw it being done was the best possible way.
I think usually a humane death and a good life for the animals go hand in hand, if a farmer cares enough to give the animals a good life, they are probably more likely to offer them a more humane death too (although I appreciate this is not always the case).
I think if an animal was killed quickly and painlessly but had spend its whole life stuck in a small cage unable to move, the kind death would sort of be irrelevent, as the animal has still suffered.
I think if you are conscious about animal welfare, you will find it difficult to find the sort of information from supermarkets - they don't really want to tell you how the animals live or die, but many butchers and farmers will be happy to tell you, as they are proud of the meat the produce.
To be honest, I think Halal meat is being more widely used so that Muslims will have the choice to eat meat, I work in catering and found that where I work a lot of people come in and ask whether the meat is Halal, and if we didn't offer it, they would either have the veggie option or not eat there. Offering it gives people choice, but at least they are honest about which is Halal and which isn't, so you can decide for yourself .
(Sorry about another long post!)

extremepie - how can you find out where your meat was slaughtered? I know there is good practice out there but I have only found one butcher that can tell you not only where the animal was raised but where and how it was killed.

If you eat meat then you have to accept that the animal probably suffered at some point - trying to justify your choice by believing that it might have had a nice life and got its ears tickled by the farmer before having its throat cut is daft.

eating meat (which I do) means death.

nancy - but that attitude justifies any barbarity doesn't it? Death yes, but it should be acheived without excessive suffering.

I will leapfrog this thread to the obvious and inevitable conclusion: the only people possibly entitled to take a moral highground on this are people like Peter Tatchell, vegans who refuse to wear leather, and maybe not even wool, and probably wouldn't keep a pet either. The rest of us collude every day in the industrial scale use of animals for our own needs and desires. Arguably their lives are still far better, in spite of all our ineptitude of care, than they ever would be as wild animals, anyway. There is no way to kill them without some suffering -- and there are some decent arguments here about why Halal death is no worse than any other means of dispatch.

I do think humane slaughter is important,but the treatment before slaughter,is even more important.

I wish it was possible for all animals to be slaughtered on the farm where they live,or within two or three miles distance of that.

I'm perfectly comfortable with eating meat,certainly from local farms with high welfare standards. I'm not deluded enough though to think that's what I always eat,if dining out but it's what I usually eat.

I'm perfectly comfortable with eating meat,and not deluded about the reality of all it involves,as some seem to think all meat eaters are.

I hunt with hawks and falcons,as does my dp, who also goes shooting and I've killed rabbits,ducks,pheasants etc while practicing falconry,humanely I might add,so I'm comfortable with all processes involved.

I'm even more comfortable with game than I am with local,well raised,farmed meat,and at the moment the majority of meat I'm eating comes from that source.

I've no idea why I typed 'I'm perfectly comfortable with eating meat' twice.

It's stupid to say that if an animal has lived a good life, then how it dies doesn't matter so much. Of course it does. As people, we want to live happy lives and die painlessly. Why would anyone think it is okay for animals to get less than that?

If some methods of slaughter result in less suffering than others, then that those are the methods which ought to be followed. Animal welfare should take priority over other considerations.

Don't know where the extra 'that' in my post came from. Must read before posting

With game I think you have less possibility that it has been mistreated as the majority of it is wild :)
As for finding out about your meat Ormirian, I think it depends on the area you live in how easily you can find out about your meat, probably just asking lots of questions will point you in the right direction, organic standards tend to be better (but not always) so that is a good place to start.
Maybe try and do some research on the net, you might be able to buy direct from farmers, some may even deliver to you. Actually, this is what I do, I order about once a month from Pipers farm (based in Devon), and they deliver to my door next day - it all comes frozen so you can just use what you need and keep the rest. They have probably the best tasting meat I've ever had, and I feel confident buying from them because I've seen the conditions for myself .

Personally, I think anyone who makes the effort to try and buy meat from more natural, sustainable and humane sources, is helping to move the farming industry away from the intensive, industrial system, which can only be a good thing!

In that case Riven I support the Halal way of treating the animals, however I disagree with slaughter without stunning.

If all you care about is the taste then you should care very much how it is killed. Stress and pain pass to the end product. Same with milk - anyone see the Krishna cows in this week's Guardian?

Yes i do care if the meat has been 'humanely'killed,
That's why i pay more for the meat i buy.

I'm with moraldefective. I avoid halal meat as I avoid battery farming. I also think it's pretty terrible that animals suffer unnecessarily as a result of religious beliefs; if you ban hunting because it is cruel to foxes yet is a HUGE part of some rural communities, why allow the bleeding of a conscious animal to death because the practice forms part of the belief system of a religious group.

letthereberock because you love the meat

Well yes, i DO like meat.
I like bacon,lamb,beef and pork.
But i try to be reasonable and buy what i can afford..
Today we had'free range chicken'.

I could have got a bigger chicken but i got a smaller,more expensive one instead.

What should people do if they can only afford the cheaper chicken?

No I will not eat it

RCT....what will you not eat?

'No I will not eat it'

Would you eat them
in a box?
Would you eat them
with a fox?

To be honest, I would prefer to put my energy into sourcing organic, local meats than sourcing meats that have "halal" stamped on them.

LetThereBeRock' deserves a round of applause for that...!

Sorry in a bit of a rush, I choose not to eat halal meat as I do think it is a cruel way to kill an animal, we eat mostly free range meat, I have stopped using one of my local take aways because it now only serves halal meat

There is always so much misinformation on these threads. I don't care greatly either way about the OPs question, but i would really like the standards for welfare for animals at slaughter at rise, and meat from abroad to only be sold here if the welfare standards are comparable.

The vast majority of halal meat is pre stunned in the UK. As a muslim if you specifically wanted 'unstunned' halal meat there would about two butchers offering it out of ten (and charging more due to the rarity of it)

Halal meat being 'secretly' used is far from an islamification of the UK. Muslims won't be eating the meat because they wont know if it is halal anymore than the non muslims, so it isnt pandering to them at all.

I work in a food shop and we get ask if the meat is Halal (it is not) but the boss tell us to say it is when the Muslin taxi drivers come in and ask if it is