To be confused by the Halal meat thing.

[LEMmingaround]

I don't understand why this is a problem. 90% of the animals are stunned before they are killed anyway - so what is the problem?

I do think it should be labelled as there are some religeons (sihks i think) for who this would be a problem but people getting upset over halal meat served in subway/pizza express? REALLY? To me it just sounds like an excuse for prejudice. Those people quite happy to eat the meat from there tht is not halal and probably don't give a flying fuck what happened to the animals during their lives or at their slaughter. If you were tht worried about that sort of thing you would a) be vegetarian/vegan or b) only ever eat meat that you knew where it came from and that was treated properly. Am i being niave that thinking that having to respect and pray for an animal at slaughter (even if the slaughter is not pleasant) that they may well have good welfare standards? Most of the meat you get from TEsco comes from the EU and the standards don't meat the UK standards for living conditions.

HercShipwright
It it totally relevant how the animal is slaughtered
You'd have to be pretty fucked up to be as happy to eat an animal that was killed by being skinned alive or torn limb from limb as you would to eat one that was killed quickly and humanely without much comprehension as to what was happening.

80% of halal slaughtered in this country is stunned. I think 20% not is still a big number.

It is not legal to import meat that has been slaughtered without stunning.

The vast majority of halaal meat salughtered in the UK is stunned. - In Tooting, the very rare shop that sells unstunned makes a point of advertising it as such.

I think it is fair and perfectly reasonable to discuss this whole issue, and there are interesting aspects - one of which is that the BNP have quite deliberately campaigned / stirred this up - they boast of it on their website.

LEM - yes, all meat in 'Indian' (i.e they are mostly Bangladeshi) restaurants is 99.99% certain to be halal.

Actually part of being halaal is that the animal is supposed to have been kept in clean and healthy conditions and not to be injured before death, so welfare is theoretically important. But most halaal meat seems to come from the same mass poduction market as everything else and only becomes halaal at the point of slaughter.

S'OK bottlenecker, I was just trying to help out with my own take on it. Didn't read it as anything other than 'how things re and why we shouldn't really be taken in now cos it is mostly media rubbish '

The actual figures the BVA use are at the bottom of the link I posted, it differed between different kinds of animals.

I have no idea though of how much meat is imported. The EU are strict(ish) about it. Other countries will differ.

If people care about animal welfare, they should care about how the animals live, not how they die. Most animals raised for meat live in hideous conditions; if they are slaughtered without stunning, they are only in extreme pain for 7 seconds before they are unconscious, which is nothing compared to the rest of their lives.

I am vegetarian (close to vegan), and I feel that people making a fuss about this is just hypocracy. If people really cared about animal welfare they would either stop eating animals or only eat animals they are 100% sure have lived happy lives (animals they have reared and shot in their own backyard without traumatically transporting them to slaughterhouses? or maybe road kill?).

I didn't know that about imports blu.

Well I couldn't think of a better term for it OiYou The point I was trying to get cross was that just because atheists don't have a religion it doesn't mean our beliefs, or lack there of shouldn't be ignored entirely for people who do buy into one god or another. So if I'm feeling particularly anti religion one day why should I not be able to go and buy a piece of meat that hasn't been prayed over? Most days I really don't care, but some days actually I'm really bloody annoyed at religious people and their assumption that shoving their belief in my face and expecting me to jump on their bandwagon is okay. On those days, I really might not want to eat something that has had anything to do with religion. (even if it meant giving up wine because they Pope had prayed all over it - bastard )

Because having made a conscious decision not to follow any religion why should I have to have any religion forced on me?

But how is it being forced on you? There is in practice no difference in slaughtering methods for the vast majority of meat, and surely the fact that someone has stuck on a recorded prayer in the abattoir doesn't mean that religion is being forced on you. There are so many other ways in which religion can impact on atheists' daily lives - e.g. the existence of state schools, the fact that Bishops have the right by virtue of being Bishops to sit in Parliament, etc - that in the scheme of things this seems utterly trivial.

Oi It's not irrelevant. I don't want to be killed and eaten at all, thanks.

I'm a vegan. Meat eaters who whiter on about cruelty etc are just kidding themselves. It's all cruel.

Kewcumber - two things - firstly - your point about the religeons all worshipping the same god just a different name - I have often wondered that myself. Don't know anything about it though.

Secondly, i absolutely respect your belief - my point is, that i am making badly - if you don't believe in god, any god, how could it offend you if someone prayed to a god you don't believe exists? Not that your opinion isn't valid - i can't understand why an atheist woudl have a problem with it as it would be irrelevant. This is aside from the welfare issues of course - which actually are the biggest issues for me, although i feel satisfied now that there is not a significant issue 90% of the time.

I was told that meat is only Halal if an animal is conscious at the moment of the prayers. Stunning that renders them insensible to this would render the meat unfit for consumption by believers.

So surely stunned Halal meat is an oxymoron anyway?

claraschu - nicely put. That really should be the focus of anyone who eats meat and professes to ever think about its life as they chew.

Problem is many people don't give it a second thought until they are invited to consider, sheeplike, a perspective that is generated to sell newspaper (or gain the BNP an expounding post).

I am lucky in that the butchers round here all have access to locally reared meat and a very local abattoir. Much of the meat sold is reared by the family of the butcher and they all grew up with the family that runs the abattoir. They generally take great pride in displaying the farm of origin, the farmer and his contact details on the wall. I live in a very, very rural area and this is a great point of pride (even when the lamb is Welsh .

But many don't have access to 'meat with a face' as DH puts it. Most people only have access to anonymous meat in a supermarket. Which is why the focus should really be on the life of the animal.

Secular meat - sorry but, thats the funniest thing ive read all week!

Thanks Blu - i always thought the same (about the welfare standards of Halal) then read a few threads on here (becuase i get all my info on mnet, its betterer than wiki!) and i was unsure. So actually feel better about it now.

Migninette, that is why about 20% of Halal meat is not stunned prior to slaughter. SOME Muslims believe that, not all! There is no one Muslim religion and different social groupings have different beliefs, based upon their Imam's interpretation of the Q'uran and its precepts.

Which is another reason to dislike the media, they do not even try to educate us, just scare us!

For me it's about the deception really, not the fact that it's halal. I eat meat but I can be quite fussy about it and want to know where it comes from. I want choice, not to be told what to eat. Same thing as the horse meat scandal . The public have a right to know and not have all this ridiculous cover up. (it's not even the ethical reasons that bother me, I just like to know for health reasons).

Honestly though I rarely have Pizza Express or Subway anyway.

There's something else to consider.

If we care about cruelty, we have to consider four possible categories of slaughter, not two. In order from least to most painful, these are:

1. Successful stunned slaughter
2. Successful unstunned slaughter
3. Failed unstunned slaughter
4. Failed stunned slaughter

Failed stunning happens a lot. And it means that there is not only the pain of the knife, but the pain of the stunning apparatus as well.

Oh My GOOD GOD. I can't believe the ignorance on this thread.

Just a couple of points:

Javotte That post is NOT educational its about as far from it as possible. ALL MEAT IN THE UK is killed by slitting the animals throat ALL OF IT. So bollocks about it being unclean and about France and ecoli is EDL bullshit at its best.

The System is

STUN

HANG

SLIT THROAT

BLEED OUT

STRIP CARCASS

in 90% of cases.

To make this Halal they say a prayer at the same time, thats the only difference.

In very very very few specialist abattoirs the system is exactly the same but they don't stun first. IMHO that needs to be banned, thats where the cruelty comes in and that os for HALAL AND KOSHER but no one ever mentions Kosher do they, I wonder why that is?

MOST Halal meat comes from mainstream abattoirs and THERE IS NO TAX PAID TO MOSQUES. That again is EDL bullshit.

Oh and on another small point bottle the use of hormones is banned in the UK for cattle, so thats a myth too.

And Breathe.

These is media claptrap. The BVA are petitioning to stop all non-stun slaughter. As usual, the media have dumbed it down and decided to call it 'halal' slaughter, disregarding Kosher and the fact that most Halal slaughter is done with pre-stunning.

Nomama

Thanks for that. I was told that by a Muslim doctor and wondered, that's all.

Mignonette as Muslims live by the Koran and at the time of writing stunning didn't exist actually there is no consensus on it at all, no guidance.

The book says that an animals heart must be beating so that it can hear the prayer and the blood drains. Tests have proven that animals are alive after stunning (they are pulled off line and revived nice) therefore a hgue amount of Imams (religous leaders) believe stunning is fine and halal.

Some believe that as it isn't mentioned in the book and you can't be 100% sure that the animal wasn't accidentely killed then its not ok to stun first.

Like many religions they just row about it a lot while the average muslim on the street doesn't really think about it and just buys meat marked as halal obliviously and most of it is stunned.

It would be easier if we just stopped discussing it, said all meat has to be stunned (Halal and Kosher) the end. Those who are absolutely against will go veggie as they did when the law was changed in New Zealand and Austria and a few others.

x post

Preparing myself for a flaming here but genuinly don't care if i've been eating halal meat for years. I don't profess to know anything about the ritual of how it is slaughtered but I'm not worried about it either,agree with the pp who said worry about how it lives,not dies (and to answer another point while yes a nice peaceful death in my sleep is preferable if I die in a flaming ball of agony I'm not going to remember it either)

Channel 4 released their stats for complaints today. Their most complained about show last year? The call to prayer during ramadan which if I remember correctly was on at about 4am! The daily wail etc is on one of their b 'Islam is scary' things just now,this story was out years ago and it was completly ignored

And when I first mentioned this a few years ago, i also pointed out that Kosher meat has similar laws governing it. The answer is to be scrupulous about the way your meat is produced. Care about the animals life as well as its death.

Because death is a blessed release for many battery and intensively reared animals

Thanks softly for that explanation too.

Apologies for my typos, on my phone and typing one handed