So, there's this article in the Independent going around that slams halal and kosher slaughter because the slaughter method is inhumane. The usual suspects are talking about it: people who really, really hate prejudice, bigotry, and racism but who think everyone who is religious is nuts.*
By some people's standards, I'm a religious Jew. By religious Jews' standards, I'm an apostate goy, so I'll let you decide. But, I'm also a vegetarian. So these debates always seem ridiculous to me. Here's the argument
Of course, they claim that this practice isn't cruel at all. Henry Grunwald, chairman of the main body overseeing the certification of kosher meat, Shechita UK, says that when you slash an animal's throat "there is an instant drop in blood pressure in the brain. The animal is dead." Similarly, Raghib Ali, of the Oxford Islam and Muslim Awareness Project, says: "It's not cruel, it is better for the animal."
This has been proven by science to be false.
I don't know if I believe it either. I'm of the belief that schechting an animal is less cruel than at least some methods practiced in the world, but asking me to make that decision is sort of like asking me if I approve of the death penalty just because they use injections instead of the electric chair.
To me, killing is killing.
The rest of the question is of degree, not kind. Murder by orgasm is still murder. Murder by woodchipper is murder, but is more cruel. The most humanely slaughtered animal was still a living thing with a soul that was blotted out for a society that is in no deficit of aggregate calories.
But this article uses the admittedly antique religious practices of minority groups to engage in a "I'm so much better" round of chest puffery among those who eat the meat that is stunned first.
Maybe in England they don't have problems with live cows ending up on the meat hooks "humane slaughter" or not. Maybe that's because in England they don't have factory slaughterhouses that employ undocumented wage slaves. Maybe they don't get shit in the meat in England.
I don't know. But we do have these problems in the United States. And, like it or not, a significant portion of kosher meat now at least comes with the requirement that the animal be treated humanely during its life, even if it's schechted in the end. (Check out KOL Foods, for example.)
That's more than you can say for some British beef, which, one thing I do know, used to be fed.... beef. (Mad Cow disease... remember that?)
So, don't tell me there's "humane" slaughter. There isn't. And don't tell me that if we just got rid of religion there wouldn't be any inhumane slaughter. There will. Don't use anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish bigotry to make yourself feel better about your own complicity in animal murder.
On the contrary, in the US at least, religious food organizations like Magen Tzedek and Hazon are doing more for animal welfare than the totally secular factory farmers are, that's for damn sure.
*Hitchens argument regarding the morality of religious folks works both ways. If atheists can be moral, then religion isn't a sufficient condition of morality. In reverse, I would argue, if religious people can be moral, then neither is atheism.