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Friday 26 June 2009

Animal rites

“This regulation protects the fundamental rights of Europe’s religious minorities.”

Hang on, hang on, hang on! We’re talking here of the rights of religious lunatics to kill animals in a barbaric manner. Those rights?

Yes, it would seem so.

The quote we open with comes from Dr Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, quoted in a story on the politics.co.uk website.

Animal-rights campaigners are rightly miffed at the fact that, because of these primitive God botherers, meat slaughtered cruelly will now have to be sold throughout the European Union.

This is because – as we reported recently – MEPs ruled that Muslims and Jews should be allowed, without prior stunning, to slit the conscious animals’ throats so that the creatures can witness their own lives dripping out of their necks while, we are told, in pain and anguish.

The story says:

The new EU rules require all slaughter techniques to make sure animals do not suffer “any avoidable distress or pain”, but they make an explicit exception for “cultural traditions and religious rites” [. . .]

Conference of European Rabbis executive director Aba Dunner added: “The regulation specifically makes provision for the killing of animals for food by religious communities to be exempted from the requirement for pre-stunning, and it contains no discriminatory labelling requirements for meat slaughtered using the shechita [the Jewish kosher] method nor for post-cut stunning to be enforced.

Does this mean that you and I could buy meat anywhere – a local butcher, a supermarket – and have no right whatever to know how it’s been slaughtered? In the name of your damned religion, you primitive barbaric bastard?

Then we get another idiot:

Fhuja Shafi, chair of the food standards committee at the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) said: “This is a human rights issue in terms of our ability to practise our religion. It’s a very humane method of slaughter. The incision with a very sharp knife produces a fast death and we see no problem with it.”

No, you wouldn’t see the problem with it, you thick moron, because you are not the animal (even if you have the brain of one).

Again, where is the “right”? Oh, yes, you have a right in law, it seems, but that doesn’t make it a moral right.

Stephen Evans of Britain’s National Secular Society (NSS) is quoted as saying, “This is further evidence of the grip that religion increasingly holds over our decision makers.

“Here we have a non-negotiable religious opt-out for a piece of legislation aimed at avoiding unnecessary suffering. The ruling is basically saying that it’s okay to cause animals to suffer, as long as you’re religiously motivated.”

The NSS tried to get a meeting with Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, but he wouldn’t meet them. However, having had some kind of irony bypass, his department said it would be continuing to monitor slaughterhouses and – get this! – the efficiency of stunning techniques would be regularly monitored.

Think about that for a moment. The efficiency of stunning techniques? What about the lack of stunning techniques? Those stunning techniques are pretty damned inefficient, in that, for halal and kosher slaughter, they don’t damned well exist.

Oh, but you don’t consider the lack of stunning as a deficiency in stunning. No, of course not. How silly of me even to consider that, for once, our politicians might put decency before primitive superstition.
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Related links:
In favour of animal suffering
It’s still OK to be barbaric to animals

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