Halal - Slaughter Regulation

The hypocrisy in this is obvious and there is no need to elaborate. What dazzled me is Nesrine Malik's audacity to write this piece. I wish there were more like her. There is no need for the quintessential euphemistic warning before reading this piece since the truth and evidence is safely stored in our "innocent" looking refrigerators. I have seen this as a kid and my life was never the same. Since we don't get to see this anymore is the reason for the hypocrisy.

"I remember vividly the first time I saw an animal slaughtered at our home in Sudan. The hapless sheep was brought to the house and tethered in the garden days before the Eid festival. My sisters and I fed it, watered it and giggled at its silly bleats outside our bedroom windows at night.

I was vaguely aware that this sheep was to provide food for us, but as a five-year-old had not fully grasped the concept until I walked out on Eid morning just in time to see the butcher slit its throat.

Having spent my first few years in a non-Muslim country, I had grown familiar with anthropomorphised animals on TV, in children's books and bedtime stories. We bought our meat from halal butchers, but never saw it killed.

So, arriving back in Sudan, I was somewhat more sensitive about the slaughter process than other children in my family and neighbourhood.

That fateful day, our neighbour's two boys dropped by to witness the killing. Once the sheep was dead, the butcher sliced an aperture in its body and blew air between its skin and its flesh – a practice that makes skinning easier. As the carcass inflated, the two boys punched it gleefully.

Sorry to be graphic. I could go on. It was pretty gruesome. The poor animal certainly did not die immediately, since the religious stipulation on halal slaughter is that it must bleed to death. The logic behind this is that remaining blood in the body may become polluted and harmful to humans. By the time I eventually moved to the UK, my original cuddly approach towards animals had been eroded by years of mini-abattoirs in the back garden. If anything, the whole process had begun to take on pleasant associations as sheep were only ever slaughtered at our home in celebration of a happy event.

Brian Sewell, the art critic, had his own reverse epiphany, having previously consumed "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" like an "unthinking glutton", he found his unflinching carnivorousness did not translate to indifference towards the way his meat was killed. When he witnessed halal and shechita slaughter, he saw animals kicked, bludgeoned and felled so that the butcher could get at their necks.

Isn't there some hypocrisy in heartily consuming meat but being precious about how animals are butchered? Apart from lethal injection in a Swiss clinic somewhere, I cannot imagine that any method of execution is particularly pleasant. If you're squeamish about the killing, surely vegetarianism is the only tenable position."