Stop this ritual slaughter

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The slaughter of farm animals was a subject to which my mind was closed until 1975. With relish I had eaten veal in Italy and wondered at the mysteries of bollito misto, the great stew. In Belgium nothing had been more sumptuous than half a calf 's head in a Brussels brasserie, tête de veau complete with ear, eye and half muzzle, the cheek, the tongue and brain fine fare for the unthinking glutton. With less pleasure, but scarce a second thought, I had bolted steaks of horse in France.

Roaming the Balkans, not once had I paused to consider the lives, deaths and identities of the animals reduced there to the ubiquitous meatball. But when I went to Turkey where, by chance, I witnessed the slaughter of a cow in a one-man abattoir, the road led to Damascus.

I have since then, in almost every country that rings the Mediterranean, Christian and Muslim, seen slaughter in rather larger abattoirs, surprised at the ease with which it has been possible to enter - but then it is a spectator sport of sorts, and the slaughtermen are by no means selfish with their pleasures. Slaughtermen? The term suggests some element of skill, but to kill sentient creatures day in, day out, must kill compassion, too, numb care and conscience.

The owner of a small Yorkshire abattoir once told me that he always employed as many married men as possible, "young boys do not have the necessary moral responsibility or respect ..."

In a Muslim abattoir in Lebanon or Tunisia all that is required is the brutal ability to drag an animal by nose and tail into the slaughter area, beat it with iron bars, kick its legs from under it, jump on its back - anything to make it fall on the slippery floor so that its head can be held back and its throat cut, more or less.

If more, then a minute or so of struggling to get to its feet will see consciousness slip away; if less, then the loss of blood is slow and, after two or three minutes of futile struggle, a big animal, gurgling horribly, will drown in its own blood.

This leads me to the perilous subject of ritual slaughter in this country, the halal of Muslims and the shechita of Jews, methods that involve the bleeding to death of the fully conscious animal.

All slaughtered food animals bleed to death, but in this country's licensed abattoirs they are stunned and deeply unconscious before their throats are cut; here it is not by any means a flawless procedure and is not a method even the Americans would tolerate for dispatching criminals, but it is significantly less cruel and less prolonged.

Ashcochet, a Jewish slaughterman, it is said, undergoes rigorous training and is unlikely to be careless or deliberately cruel; even so, non-Jewish scientists examining shechita, while recording loss of evoked response in calves as swift as 20 seconds, also recorded intervals of as long as 385 seconds - that is more than six minutes - before the calf ceased the struggle to get to its feet.

The average period for calves observed by one scientist between the cut and the end of the struggle was 171 seconds - almost three minutes. This hardly confirms the Jewish claim that death is pretty well immediate and the animals scarcely feel a thing.

The figures for the halal slaughter of calves are much the same - the average 215 seconds between the cut and unconsciousness, the best figure 132 seconds (more than two minutes), the worst 297.

With halal, however, we have the complication of private slaughter, totally unskilled, usually of sheep, notoriously for Eid-el-Kebir, an annual Islamic feast, but also to bring a blessing, for example, on a new house.

I raise these matters because, in the long kerfuffle over the euro last week, another report on religious slaughter from the Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC), an independent advisory body established by government in 1979, is likely to pass unnoticed.

Its first report in 1985 concluded that halal and shechita should come to an end within three years. Nothing was done and they did not.

In 1992 a spokesman for the then Conservative administration wrote to me that the issue was "a fundamental matter of religious belief " and that ministers "must allow people the freedom to practise this aspect of their religion". It is, however, not a belief, but a mere practice that is contrary to the spirit and teachings of both the Bible and the Koran; this assertion will no doubt encourage readers to bandy quotations till Kingdom come, but I am adamant that neither canonical text encourages or condones cruelty to animals.

This is a perilous subject, not for the correspondence that it will engender, but for the accusations of racial and religious prejudice that are inevitable when anyone is rash enough to criticise religious slaughter.

I admit to a prejudice against cruelty to animals and if in this I cross swords with other races and religions, so be it, for in my plea for compassion I occupy a higher moral ground than those who elevate ancient laws of hygiene into articles of faith.

I hold no brief for our native practices. To eat a lamb chop a lamb must be killed, but I would rather that it had not been forced, terrified, onto a transporter and carried hundreds of miles to its death. I want my chicken to have something resembling a natural life and would rather wring its neck than have it die suspended by its feet from a conveyor belt.

We have, nevertheless, in this country, a long history of caring for the welfare of all animals. We no longer bait the bull and bear. The first Cattle Cruelty Act was passed in 1822.

Slaughterhouse conditions have been, admittedly irregularly, under review for almost two centuries, and shechita was permitted out of kindness and respect when the Jewish population was a tiny minority of 50,000 or so and no one thought it would increase.

Halal slaughter was accepted on the back of shechita and the demand for it must now satisfy a minority of millions.

We are a multicultural society. This must mean mutual respect, not merely the surrender of the majority to the customs of the incoming minorities, and those already here must show some understanding of what we see as our developing responsibilities.

Would white Anglo-Saxons of vaguely Christian background be expected to accept without demur the sharia laws of Islam when we shed their Western equivalents centuries ago?

Why, then, must we tolerate halal slaughter and its Trojan Horse, shechita? FAWC again demands that we should not; FAWC is right; and the Government could do a great good by courageously obeying it.

 

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