Things that upset me:

June 1, 2011

The Freethinker picking on halal slaughter.

Halal (and Kosher) slaughter is almost certainly more humane than other types of factory slaughter of animals, focused on providing the animal a quick and painless-as-possible death. Halal slaughter also calls for gentleness and respect for the animals involved, especially immediately before and after the killing.

A downside of it is that it is done by a person, with a quite large and extremely sharp knife, and it’s extremely bloody-looking in comparison to factory slaughter. Having seen many videos of halal slaughter actually happening, as far as I can tell the knife is honed constantly and the initial cut performed damn near decapitates the animal, rendering it almost immediately unconscious of any pain.

I can’t, of course, speak to the conditions animals are raised in prior to slaughter, but I can’t imagine they would (or could) be any worse than what animals commonly experience in factory farms and feedlots. This also doesn’t address general issues of ethics regarding whether or not we should kill animals to eat in the first place.

What infuriates me about the piece at The Freethinker is that this is being presented as a perfectly reasonable criticism of a “cruel” religious practice—not as an indictment of animal slaughter in general. News flash, assholes: Animal slaughter kills animals. It’s bloody. Because animals are full of blood and meat. And how much less cruel can killing be than an almost immediate death?

It’s just another piece of blatant and hateful Islamophobia in which an obvious double standard is being applied due to the religious nature of the practice and regardless of the actual relative merits of the practice when set alongside other types of animal slaughter.

I’m not sure I recommend reading the comments, as they quickly devolve into complaints about such a “barbaric” form of killing and complaints about being accused of racism and Islamophobia for, you know, being racist and Islamophobic.

I wonder where exactly people think the meat they eat comes from and how exactly animals are killed and butchered. If people want to argue that killing animals is wrong or cruel, they ought to. But don’t single out arguably the most humane sort of slaughter there is as being especially cruel just because Muslims are a popular punching bag these days.

This sort of thing is no more acceptable than all the sexist/racist/Islamophobic cartoons about Muslim women that are floating around the atheist blogosphere.

This is what we get when the atheist community is dominated primarily by white, Western men.

3:28am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZOglYy5fZ6Zy
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(Notes: 8)