To refuse eating or buying anything halal?

[ClaryIsTheBest]

Is somebody unreasonable to refuse to buy or eat anything halal?

I'm not sure. I mean, everybody gets to choose what they want to eat (or not eat). But still...

As for organic - UK organic standards do specify high welfare standards for animals to be raised in. However over the last 30 years the general farming standards have risen to be practically the same, eg space to live in, so nowadays while organic is often slower-growing tastier breeds, there's precious little difference - and slaughter is the same too.

FWIW mainstream fruit and veg now use way less and better targeted pesticides than when organic first started, so now organic has mostly met its aim of all food being of similar quality, so they've rather lost their USP!

Pretty much all non-stun UK halal meat is sold at a premium in specialist shops and supply chains, so the 80+% stunned halal is what you might get in a supermarket or restaurant. If you're concerned about animal welfare, consider lobbying to eliminate dodgy dog breeding or boycott Danish bacon or something.

Jessy I didn't see that prayer from the House of Lords. But I object to that prayer for exactly the same reason I object to halal not being labelled. I think it's pretty awful when we have a multi faith HoL to have prayers describing everyone there as servants of a Christian God who bestows all power.

Personally I object to both that prayer and not labelling because I think both of them interfere with the right of individuals to practice a faith or none and exercise their own conscience.

Is somebody unreasonable to buy or eat anything halal?

I wish I said this earlier but this is a shocking post. So a whole religion are BU? And no one says anything

Shameful

Andnotcitrys - yes - well said

I don't really disagree on either of those points, Bill. The lack of willingness to label accurately because it might affect the bottom line/put people off meat is really annoying. There are ways around it but you have to be pretty informed to start with to navigate the assurance schemes and what they mean.

Bill,
The whole point in relegion is to take away peoples free will and conscience then impose sctrictures over how to behave. Hence issuing instructions about what is halal or harram and kosher etc.

For that reason I would also avoid halal if it was possible to identify what is "permitted". But as you quite correctly observe, meat is not adequately labeled because the retailers understand that many people would not buy it.

easy, if only that was true! If all religion was totally prescriptive and people didn't put their own interpretations on it as their conscience dictated the human race would have spent a hell of a lot less time blowing each other up, nailing each other to crosses, burning each other and general being bastards because they thought that their interpretation and conscience was right and everybody else's was wrong. Even people who are the same basic religion can't agree - Catholics and Protestants; Shia and Sunni; Hindu and Sikh.

Trying to establish exactly what the various halal authentication bodies require to confirm something as halal is entertaining, because they are competing for custom too. So they won't publish whether they require non-stun or stunning, because taking a public stance either way will put some Muslims and other buyers off. Whereas if the meat is advertised as certified halal, 95% of Muslims will buy it without asking further questions.

MHC meat is all stunned (the largest UK halal body) , so unless you are objecting to part of the background noise at slaughter, there's no reason to reject it compared to other meat.

The obsession with wanting to know about stunning is rather wierd given no-one wants to know about the hoists used, the noise insulation preventing animals hearing what happens at slaughter, the number of rest breaks they get on their journey to slaughter, etc. So being only 'concerned' about the one moment of the process that happens to be of interest to Muslims... looks like unconscious racism to me.

^^ This

Haha that shut them all up!!

It's probably because when people are told that they are racist, it often just closes the conversation down.

I don't think it's unreasonable to not want to eat ritually slaughtered meat. Either because, you are not of that religion (or no religion) or you are not comfortable with an unstunned animal having its throat slit and bled - or both.
I don't think it means that most people don't care about animal transportation to abbotoirs etc. Information on this isn't available in restaurants and supermarkets, so they would have to do a huge amount of research before each purchase, it would be a full time occupation really.
People will react on the information they have, there and then. The unstunned slaughter is something that some people don't agree with.

I don't eat meat, and would be delighted if everyone followed suit - but that's not going to happen.

Any conversation on this (on mumsnet) results in people being told they are racist, have another agenda etc. The threads always end on this tone, people will be told by strangers on the internet that they are racist. If the topic carried on, it would just me "no I'm not" and then "yes you are".

It wasn't because Op's friend was against unstun meat though, as he would eat kosher which is all unstun, it was solely that he didn't want to support a Muslim business by buying halal.
If it is true then I'm surprised that he is comfortable sitting at the table with your other Muslim friend if he is so against halal for the reasons that you stated.

Information on this isn't available in restaurants and supermarkets, so they would have to do a huge amount of research before each purchase, it would be a full time occupation really.

Not a bit. It takes only a small amount of time to inform oneself about assurance schemes that cover those issues. And that information is then available at point of purchase, including in many restaurants, meaning you can seek meat that has been produced to the standards that matter to you.

And then the question of 'halal or not' rightly becomes one of religion, not welfare. Because all assurance schemes I've seen that cover welfare require stunning before slaughter.

Is it possible to buy non-halal meat? I thought all supermarket meat apart from pork was halal, and I would like the choice. Does anyone know?

I am in London so have no accredited farm to butcher source.

Why do you want non-halal specifically, user?

It is very easy to buy meat which is guaranteed to have been stunned before slaughter - the RSPCA standards will guarantee that. However the RSPCA areb

Oops

The RSPCA aren't fussed about which tapes are playing in the background in the abattoir though, so they're not going to cover that in their standards.

Ditto the Soil Association standards. I think they are also silent on the welfare impacts or Arabic being spoken nearby.

*of

I would imagine (if I ate meat) a trip to Tesco for a big shop would be a bit of a minefield. They sell that many meat products from various suppliers, I imagine it would be quite a job checking how it all got there.
I'm sure Tesco would say that everything is approved to whatever standard - but those approved standards will variable at different levels.

Yes, Pickled. That's why independent assurance schemes exist.

It's true that Tescos are not keen to make meat production facts completely transparent, and that for example "Willowmead Farm" produce is packaged in such a way to obscure the fact that it comes from an industrial estate just outside Krakow.

However if it says "RSPCA Assured" then it should have been produced in accordance with a given set of standards which the RSPCA are happy with - including pre-slaughter stunning.

Just checking back in on this one because the fact we are going to have a free trade agreement with the USA should mean people are happy. Sounds like the USA will be banning all Muslims soon and so halal should disappear too.

Of course we will be getting flooded with antibiotic stuffed, factory farmed, low welfare cheap meat, and a lot will still not be stunned as its Kosher but so long as it's not been near any Arabic all will be well.

I would like non-halal meat and also non-antibiotic Trump meat. I just want humanely slaughtered natural meat without skyfairy praying and without unnatural additives. This appears to be too much to ask - why?

For all those saying the meat industry in the UK is inhumane, I had a very interesting experience a year or so ago when I had to go and inspect intensively farmed chickens.

It's not normally part of my job, and I was fully expecting to come back horrified and probably vegetarian, but actually I was extremely impressed by what I saw. These were hens for non-free range meat for mainstream supermarkets. They were in large barns, with plenty of space, plenty of straw on the floor so they aren't standing in their own poo, natural light and fluorescent lighting. The straw is regularly topped up so that it is clean and fresh. When they are young the barns would have CDs hung from the ceiling and cardboard tubes and things that crinkled put in them so the hens had something to play with. They clearly weren't stressed or fighting.

I've kept hens myself, and when I've kept them penned in they've seemed very upset, but when I first got them and they didn't understand what the outside world was, they really didn't like it at all (the outside that is). When they don't know what they're missing, they really don't find being inside distressing.

Once the hens have grown to about 6 weeks old, they are then packed up into crates for transport. I've packed other birds, and while this is stressful at the time, they very quickly calm down once in a confined space. They were then transported to the slaughter-house which was generally about 15 minutes drive away. Some of these would then be slaughtered as halal meat, where the procedure was identical to non-halal, but within a slaughterhouse that had been appropriately inspected, with a blade that fitted requirements and with the appropriate prayers being said.

As such, overall I concluded that the quality of life for these animals was a) far better than I would ever have expected or hoped and b) that there was no difference in the humaneness between the halal slaughter and non halal in terms of animal welfare.