So it’s been announced that KFC are trialing an all-halal menu. If successful (!) the menu will be rolled out nationally.
I’ve got just one observation on this.
How can slaughtering animals by cutting their throats and allowing them to bleed to death be compatible with animal welfare legislation?
I don’t ask this question as a vegetarian, I ask as someone who has a firm interest in stamping out animal cruelty.
An old article, but: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2977086.stm
I’m with you.
To be honest I’ve not eaten KFC in a very long time because it’s vile but going all halal wouldn’t induce me to go back, in fact quite the opposite. I don’t like to think too much about how my food has been killed as I tuck into my roast chicken but having once been into a slaughterhouse I am reasonably content that the dispatch is as humane as can be managed. I find the idea of lunch having been hung upside down to have it’s throat slit and to be left to bleed to death, in pain and scared, exceedingly off-putting. This is not Saudi Arabia, it’s Britain and so food sold here and killed here should adhere to British welfare standards. If any religion at all doesn’t agree with that then I would recommend they think about becoming vegetarian.
I don’t get this whole ‘animal cruelty is unacceptable and people who commit it will be sent to prison’ (as happened earlier this week with the case of a guy who kicked a dog to death), but ‘stringing a roomful of animals up by their hind feet and cutting their throats so that they bleed to death is not cruel’ contradiction.
It is as if we have somehow suspended our value judgements on what constitutes animal cruelty simply because two religions are involved. How can that be acceptable? Or moral?
This whole halal and kosher process of slaughtering livestock has to be publicly scrutinised and objectively reviewed by scientific examination, surely?
And if the finding is that these 2,000-year-old religious practices are cruel, then these practices should be stopped immediately. I know that the Old Testament says it’s acceptable to sell one’s daughter in to slavery and also that people should be stoned to death for working on the Sabbath, but we’ve moved on.
The whole kosher/halal thing is like the elephant in the room that no-one dares to talk about. Are we scared of the religious folk? Or are we scared of labelling these two religions as barbaric and the reaction that this will provoke from the religious zealots?