to be very suprised at the school letter about Halal meat?

[fromparistoberlin]

opended DS bag and read a letter with a voting slip basically saying

alot of parents have asked for Halal meat (fair enough)
The school dinner providers can only do Halal OR non-Halal (erm we are in London, slightly surpised)

so we either vote for ALL Halal, or non Halal

so basically an ethical dilemna!

Vote A, feel like a bigot

Vote B, feel slightly uncomfortable that something I dont really fully understand is being imposed

I am going to write and say this is a really unfair way to handle it and they should fucking change suppliers, we are in London FFS

nice little ethical mind fuck THANKS school!

I'm sure many abattoirs could be improved and we should work on that until it is as fast and painless as possible. But if we accept that everyone must eat halal then we can never improve it. Not now and not ever. In a thousand years we must still do it the same way.

I have yet to see anyone complain about Halal and Kosher slaughter, when they are the same bloody thing.

Gruffalo, I'm Jewish. I'm not very religious, I certainly don't keep kosher. But I have heard this complaint.

Occasionally people, hearing my religion/background, find it necessary to tell me how they abhor kosher meat.

It comes out of nowhere and it's uncomfortable.

Killing is killing no matter how you dress it up.

crescentmoon I'm not a vet. I'm pretty sure that any animal can be killed really fast by say a bolt gun. Perhaps we will find a better method still. The point is that any method that takes longer is therefore unnecessary cruelty. Why would anyone want to kill an animal slower?

What are your thoughts?

btw many Muslims will object to animals being stunned at all on the grounds that it isn't proper halal. If we're saying it has to be acceptable to all Muslims then we must not do anything to them before we start to cut.

Wow.....I'm so glad that things like that are not an issue where I live.

The Australian Prime Minister got it right in her speech ! This country has gone to the bloody dogs and its way too late to do anything about it.

mrsjay and sal you would be wrong, in my dds school majority would be Muslim.

I to agree with what you have said crescent. At the end of the day killing animals is just that.....killing animals. No matter how you dress it up or make yourself feel better about it. No matter what religion you are or what blessing you give it.....its still an animal being killed. People happily drink milk knowing that it is actually meant for a baby calf not a human and calves are removed from their mother at birth so that humans can have their milk. We don't need milk. But I digress....that is another story. But all this talk about halal or kosher or whatever. Its still the same meat without the fancy name. What has this country come to.

seems to me likes there's 2 issues.
The religious aspect. Some people object to someone muttering some religious words over an animal before its killed. How do you know someone hasnt blessed a field of sheep? Druids driving about dedicating them to the moon or something?
The Humane aspect. Is there a truly humane way to kill a large animal? I'd say not. Killing is killing. You want meat, it has to die and there will be some suffering. You want lots of meat and you get appalling suffering. Even the RSPCA doesnt think stunning is cruelty free.

When Halal cattle are slaughtered it is said that they have to hear a certain passage from the Koran whilst 'bleeding out' they can only do this whilst conscious. I personally would not eat halal or Kosher meat. My late hubbs was a butcher and as part of his training had to attend an abattoir
to see how different animals are slaughtered.... he had a very strong stomach but after seeing animals slaughtered by having their throats cut for kosher/halal meat, cows being turned upside down in a restraining cage before being 'bled out' he said it was the most cruel and sickening sight he's EVER seen...I would not touch halal/kosher meat....maybe if the children concerned are old enough they should know the facts themselves and then THEY can choose what the eat.

cresentmoon, my husband did not slaughter animals, he worked for a large,well known supermarket as a meat manager but as part of his training it was compulsory that he went to a slaughterhouse to witness different types of slaughter.

Crescent

You are correct that is the standard way of killing none halal meat.

I don't see how we can dismiss the Muslims who object to stunning just because they are a minority. The Muslims who want halal are also a minority in the country. Should we dismiss them too?

If religion trumps everything else then everyone's religion must. We must make a list of all beliefs and ensure that everything we do fits in with all of them. This is going to be tricky because some contradict each other. Like the meat eating Sikhs who can't eat halal.

crescentmoon just saw your comment to me. I don't know a better way, but we should be using the best one we have available and keep looking for better ways as time goes by.

I don't think stunning is always the ethical way, and if people were more aware of how farm animals were produced or how they were transported the last minutes of an animal's life would be the least of their concerns.

I have seen horses killed (for the purposes of euthanasia) by both bolt gun and lethal injection, both of these seemed relatively peaceful ways to go, given the circumstances, and the animals were not stunned beforehand. However, both these meathods can cause suffering if they go wrong, so I wouldn't necessarily say they were more humane.

Even organic meat may have to travel a long way to slaughter, usually in poor conditions. A lecturer I know who studies this sort of thing found the average distance travelled by sheep to slaughter was 700 miles, which is a lot more suffering- heat related, fighting due to confined space, injuries due to difficulties balancing, poor ventialation and so on, than having their throat slit. Animals regularly die in transit due to such problems.

If you're going to eat meat- espescially the cheap meat in school dinners, you can't claim to care about animal welfare when it comes to the slaughter house. I think if most people on this thread saw how non-halal meat was slaughtered or even produced, they would think again about eating meat at all- I know I did.

For the record though, I do think the school should provide a choice if some people are uncomfortable with eating halal meat for religious reasons.

Ita an outrage that we have to eat halal meat.

But you don't have to eat it.

We do if we want to eat meat because we aren't being told if it's halal or not, so unless we turn veggie we are being made to eat it by stealth and lies. I can't understand how people think this is ok. I now can't buy a takeaway meal for my family because I've been told it's probably halal, so that's our options limited in favour of someone's else's supposedly more important beliefs. A poster suggested that it was ok for non-muslim kids to eat Halal because they won't know! Would it be ok to tell the muslim kids that the meat is halal even if it's not? After all they won't know either will they. But apparently that's not the same .

There's so much false outrage on this thread - islamophobia dressed up as concern about animal welfare.

I have seen how halal meat is killed, and it turned my stomach. Awful. However, it was seeing how normal meat is produced that made me decide not to eat it any more. Very, very distressing. :(

I accept entirely that some people do have valid and genuine concerns, and that's absolutely fair enough if they are very careful only to eat meat that is ethically sourced. But some of the comments on here are ludicrous. I simply don't believe that anyone who would buy meat from a bloody takeaway is that bothered about the rights of the animals in their burgers.

If you genuinely care about the welfare of the animals that you're eating, then you will take care to source your meat from a reliable ethical supplier, and then there won't be any danger of you eating halal meat against your wishes. If, however, you buy your meat without researching its source, then you clearly aren't that bothered about animal welfare after all, and I can only presume that you might have another agenda going on with regard to the halal issue.

pixel with the take aways, that is a business decision, nothing to do with religion, KFC, Nando's etc provide halal meat as Business decision.