to not know if this offensive?

[Catnary]

Colleague in canteen queue today, I comment that the food looks tasty. She makes a face, points to the label and says “Yeah but look, I’m not eating that!”

Label says “Halal beef casserole”.

I say “but it’s just a different way of slaughtering the cow”

”Yeah I know, that’s what I mean, it’s SO cruel. I can’t have that on my conscience.”

This was all very loud and other people overheard. Neither colleague nor I are Muslim but many other colleagues are. I felt very uncomfortable, didn’t engage, and ordered the beef.

Is this just no different to a vegetarian declaring loudly that they couldn’t possibly be so cruel as to eat meat, or is it a slur on Muslims? It felt inappropriate, especially at work.

It certainly made me rethink halal meat too! There are loads of different websites that talk about it. Here's one example: wehalal.co/blog/halal-meat/

It's a US source, and worth knowing that in the UK & EU growth hormones are outright banned and antibiotics are only allowed if the animal is actually ill, not just as a daily prophylactic.

I strongly suspect that definitions around a "pure and natural" life has been stretched thin over time; I can't remember ever seeing halal meat labelled as "free range" (why wouldn't you give it that premium label if it conformed to those standards? I'm sure there are specialist suppliers doing it but certainly the halal butchers in my local Asda aren't advertising it, and nor are the local independent halal butcher) and it's often sold at prices so low that they are only achievable by intensive farming.

Cows and sheep are naturally herbivores, but chickens and other poultry are omnivores - they will eat insects and even occasionally catch and kill small mammals up to the size of mice. Any chicken living a free-range lifestyle will inevitably have an omnivorous diet.

@DogsDryWineAndCheese the aim of slaughtering animals is to make profit within the guidelines and laws they have to follow. Let's not pretend that humane treatment is the top priority.

The kind of halal meat provided by mass caterers is going to be from animals that were pre-stunned. If that's what you care about in terms of the "humane" treatment of animals then it makes no sense to object to the halal beef in this canteen meal.

I assume halal meat isn't labelled as "free range" because that's the whole point of it. It's a prerequisite of halal meat. For Muslims it's taken for granted that animals will have been raised this way.
I live in an area of Leeds which is home to a large number of Muslims. I have many Muslim colleagues, neighbours etc. Looking back I do now remember conversations about the animals being raised humanely with space to roam etc.

Like all private businesses, they're out to make as much money as possible. Free range designation would widen the appeal to welfare minded non Muslim meat eaters (if stunned)

However, the price is a really big hint. All prices taken from the Asda website

• Shazaan Halal chicken breast £8.56 per kg
• Asda own brand chicken breast £8.98 per kg (no specific welfare claims made, so it'll be low welfare)
• Asda free range chicken breast £15 per kg
• Asda organic free range chicken breast £18.80 per kg

The halal chicken breast is the cheapest of the lot; on a purely economic scalebhow on earth would they be producing free range halal chicken at those prices when regular free range chicken is so much more? The sums just don't add up.

YABVU. How is her view on the meat any less valid than that of the Muslim who insists upon eating it? One thinks it’s cruel, the other thinks it’s necessary. You can’t allow all of the freedom of expression to only be exercised by the religious!

I get my meat from here, their website answers a couple of questions on this thread:

www.willowbrookfarm.co.uk/halal-standard

I don't think her objection to halal slaughter is offensive in itself, but I do think it's offensive if halal slaughter is the ONLY animal welfare issue she cares about. If someone boycotts halal meat but doesn't boycott, for example, battery chickens, then there's definitely an agenda there that isn't really connected to animal welfare at all.

That's an interesting link, and confirms my prior understanding that the farm welfare standards of halal meat is no higher than that of non halal meat (which is piss poor, especially for poultry) unlike what @SallyWD was saying.

"Halal monitoring bodies do not look at the animal's life, which means an animal can be raised in appalling factory conditions but still get halal certification. Furthermore even in the slaughter, both the HMC and the HFA, do not stipulate requirements to mitigate the litany of welfare abuses during the transportation and mass slaughter of the animals and they approve large scale abattoir slaughter processes. As a result we do not seek their certification."

If I were in the market for chicken breast (as a vegetarian, I'm.not) then I'd be just as happy to eat the Willowbrook halal free range chicken as any other free range chicken.

Out of interest how do you justify eating meat if you care about animal welfare? Have you seen how animals are killed or just oblivious.

Thank you so much for that Gerund, I will look them up straight away!

How so? What does it involve?

You can be an animal lover and eat meat

P.S. Hitler was not religious, but he was a vegetarian.

Hitler did lots of terrible, inhumane things, including gassing millions of children to death and torturing millions of others to death.

Communism has nothing to do with religion. It’s a political ideology. It caused A LOT of suffering and pain. Under Stalin, hundreds of thousands were killed in cold blood because he was merely suspicious that they may oppose him. Stalin was anything but religious.

Slavery was something that went on for hundreds of years, it involved many cruel inhumane practices. The people and countries that enslaved Africans did it for money, not religion.

I can go on, but you get the picture, I hope. Anything — political ideology, philosophy, religion, etc. — can twisted by someone and used to do terrible things. Religion is no exception.

Second, there’s a holier-than-thou attitude among certain individuals in society who like to point the finger at others and yet fail to see their own flaws. I have never hung myself, allowed myself to be stunned to death, or known anyone to have bled to death and come back to say how it feels. I don’t know of any scientists who’ve done reliable studies that can show whether passing out due to blood loss is worse or whether being stunned hurts more. A scientist worth his/or her salt will NOT tell you they know the answer because the scientific method is based on something called falsification, and testing for wether “stunning will hurt more than bleeding to death” will involve doing it and then asking the person how painful it was — something that’s not going to happen if the person is dead!

Third, I’ve looked at supermarket shelves and seen the explosion of new “vegan” products. They are all super processed. I wonder how much oil, gas & CO2 was wasted to deliver that nice vegan sausage on someone’s plate. Just because someone’s vegetarian it does t mean they’re a nice or good person (again, the Hitler example).

So the point of my rant is that it’s very fashionable these days for people to go “Halal meat is cruel” or “vegetarians are saving the planet”. The truth is, these people are both hypocrites and ignorant. They’re probably not the brightest nor the kindest of people.

@Catnary YANUB — this girl is a bit dim and mean. Sorry if she’s a friend.

It's more ignorance than hate. Animals do not suffer when slaughtered in the Jewish/Muslim manner. At least not any more than in the mainstream way.

Agree with this. There is so much ignorance about halal meat and most people just jump on the bandwagon of what our tabloids feed us regarding it, often a load of nonsense but great at getting people to squabble amongst themselves.
I bet the woman moaning about halal meat happily eats eggs from caged hens. It is bigoted it.

It’s arguable that they do if they are not pre-stunned. Which 100% of kosher meat is not pre-stunned. Tbh though the choice of slaughter is small fry when you look at how some (most) of these animals are kept. Shouldn’t we care more about the whole meat industry rather than just one religions practices for death?

This link has been incredibly helpful as I have been looking for raw milk for a little while and there is a small holding relatively close to me. Thanks @GerundTheBehemoth

Very well said @QuinkWashable, thank you for wording it much better than I could!

You say “It’s arguable that they do if they are not pre-stunned”

How do you know this? And how do you know that stunning doesn’t hurt them more?

Putting aside how animals feel when killed, how do you know that one method of slaughter isn’t healthier than the other?

People love throwing around a lot of second-hand unsubstantiated statements they read on FB & Twitter about how sunning animals is kinder than bleeding to death (personally, I’d rather bleed to death as I heard it’s just like passing out. I’d rather not be stunned, but that’s just a personal choice). But I’m left scratching my head how these people could possibly be so certain that stunning hurts less, or being vegan is healthier, etc.

So only people doing the offending have any rights? What a ridiculous idea.

For the record I find ‘Halal’ a horrific method and will avoid it as much as possible. Although I don’t eat much meat anyway.

The woman in question could have used basic tact. A simple ‘I don’t want to eat Halal’ quietly to respond to the op’s question would have been fine although even that was not necessary unless the op pushed. I also don’t agree with it being the standard option in schools etc. Stuff like this causes division needlessly.

Also terms like ‘woke brigade’ are used as a weapon to by the right wing media to shut down people who have thoughts and ideas that don’t align with their own ideology. I can’t take anyone seriously who used them like original thoughts.

The agenda could simply be that she is offended by things she doesn’t like that have been brought to her attention. The sort of person who is incensed at news stories of unwanted kittens being drowned but doesn’t think about kittens being put down at an animal shelter, or of them starving to death if left in the wild, etc.

It’s not an informed position, but that doesn’t mean her motivation is Islamophobia.

What twaddle. There are Indian Muslims and Bangladeshi Hindus.

Honestly, the confidence of some people spouting stuff on a subject they know pityingly little about...