Let them eat hake

“Muslims wishing to eat halal would go to a restaurant and it was fish or nothing. Now we have a choice,” boasts a Muslim in France in a Guardian article that seems to celebrate the fact that middle-class Muslims have ensured that many hundreds of thousands more animals are slaughtered inhumanely to satisfy superstition.

Supermarkets are now heaving with halal food, says the article, and much of it is meat.

Nowhere does the article even hint at the methods of slaughter. I don’t know what French conventional slaughter methods are, but we all know what ritual slaughter means: slitting the throat of an animal hauled up by its hind legs while the animal sees its own blood painfully drip away.

And religion is driving this. And this will happen in the UK, where conventional slaughter regulations do require prestunning, but, as a sop to the superstitious and for the sake of appeasing Jews and Muslims, the law allows special dispensations to the religious to kill their animals in a barbaric manner.

In spite of recommendations by the Farm Animal Welfare Council, the British government continues to permit this barbarism, and there’s no indication that any other party with a chance of winning the next general election would do otherwise.

If we had strict laws, Muslims would be forced to eat fish or nothing. Or they could get on with sensible life and, if they have to eat meat at all, eat extensively reared organic meat that’s prestunned before the fatal cut is administered.

As a French princess is supposed to have said (in a saying widely attributed to Marie Antoinette), “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” (let them eat cake). Let’s rephrase it, then, to “Qu’ils mangent du poisson.” Or, you could say, “Let them eat hake.”

And, if you thought I led this entire post to that conclusion just to get a good headline, you’re dead right!