The ban on religious slaughter in Holland and possibly eventually throughout the EU as a result, has nothing to do with animal welfare or providing information to the consumers, but is a political agenda by Islamophobic politicians using the animal welfare community.
Dr Joe M. Regenstein, a professor in the Department of Food Science at Cornell University in New York State in an interview with Halal Media said, the earlier proposed EU labelling law amendment and the current Dutch ban on religious slaughter are politically motivated and part of a process that is singling out unstunned slaughter.
Dr Regenstein, who is of the Jewish faith, explains that apart from unstunned slaughter, there are three types of stunned slaughter, and each are distinctively different – mechanical stunning, electrical stunning and gas stunning.
If this was about labelling to provide consumer information, he said, why not include information about all slaughter methods because consumers should have the right to choose.
“If we want to label, let’s label fairly. Of course I’m being facetious – it’s a Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal but let’s have labels that say something like this animal had its skull cracked; this animal was electrocuted; this animal was sent to the gas chamber, and this animal was hand-slaughtered with respect and kindness.”
“And what about telling people that this animal was missed on the first stun? It freaked out, and then it was stunned a second time? If you want to give information, let’s talk about giving all those relevant pieces of information. But if it’s only about singling out unstunned slaughter, you have to question the motives of the people doing this,” he said.
He said the meat industry, however, would never allow this type of labelling, and so the next best option for those who believe in animal welfare and/or are Islamophobic or anti-Semitic is to use the animal welfare movements and implement a total ban on religious slaughter altogether, which is currently happening in the Netherlands. However, even the entire premise of stunning for animal welfare is flawed, he says.
“The idea from a Muslim perspective is that it is extremely critical that the animal be alive at the time of slaughter, and that the actual cutting of the animal for bleeding be the source of death.
“The problem with stunning is: “are you actually sure the animal is alive at the time of killing? In fact, probably the world’s greatest animal welfare person, Dr Temple Grandin from the United States, is also very positive about religious slaughter done right.”
Personally, he believes that when correctly and optimally executed, unstunned slaughter is actually better from the animal’s point of view. He argues that this goes back to the fact that one does not actually feel any pain when a cut is made using an extremely sharp knife. At the same time, this type of cut would lead to an endorphin rush, which is sometimes referred to as a runner’s “high” and is actually quite euphoric, he said. Although this is still a hypothesis and has not been proven, it is a natural feeling in mammals and many of us have experienced this effect before.
“If you look at an animal expiring that is properly killed without stunning, it just quietly expires, and it shows none of the signs of aversive behaviours to suggest that it feels anything negative. I think that is the critical piece – it isn’t how long it takes to kill, which is one of things that Western scientists are emphasising.
“It also is about the respect of having a religious person saying a prayer and killing an animal with kindness and compassion, as oppose to banging its head or electrocuting it by a worker who is just counting how many animals he has to kill till he can go on his break.”
Dr Regenstein agrees that there is a clear disconnect between the reality and the so-called scientific reports, and the ban represents a total disrespect for the minority religions, for Muslims and Jews. “It’s clearly not about animal welfare; it’s not about the quality of slaughter, but a political agenda.”
“As an industry, the meat industry needs to get to the point where they would be happy to slaughter in a glass slaughterhouse, and where people can come and see what they’re doing, and begin to understand that their meat comes from animals that are slaughtered, which is actually much less of a problem in Muslim countries than in Western countries,” he said.
Dr Regenstein heads Cornell’s Kosher and Halal Food Initiative, and is on the technical committee of the Islamic Food and Nutrition Council of America (IFANCA), the largest halal certification agency in North America.
He recently delivered a paper on Halal Meat: Stunning vs Non Stunning at the World Halal Research Summit in Kuala Lumpur, organised by the Halal Industry Development Corporation (HDC).
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