Halal Meat Scandal: What’s the big fuss?

This article was written for Within magazine – The Birthday edition 🙂

Halal Hysteria has swept across the UK and suddenly we’re having a huge moral panic over how our meat is slaughtered. This has been fuelled by ‘certain’ sections of the media; having realised the threat of imminent terrorism is wearing a little thin, they’re now telling us there’s some kind of sinister plot – inflicting halal meat on innocent, animal loving Brits. Unsurprisingly, both the BNP and EDL have jumped on the anti-halal bandwagon, using the debate as a proxy for the real concern, the presence of a growing Muslim population.

More fuel for the halal hysteria fire…

Do you really think the papers are concerned with animal rights? If so, why is the debate not about all forms of slaughter? – The fact it’s only the halal method that’s being discussed is no coincidence.

Why the sudden interest now – if everyone is so worried about how the meat they eat was killed, why have they never asked before?

If The Sun says it’s true it must be…

That’s because it wasn’t really a problem, was it? Well, not until The Sun said it was anyway…

So what does halal actually mean? Put simply it’s like this – The animal must be healthy and uninjured. A relevant prayer is recited whilst the animal is slaughtered – using a single cut to the throat with a sharp knife. All blood is then drained from the body.

There’s no nice way to kill an animal in order to eat it, but personally I find this method slightly more palatable than the other ‘non-halal’ methods – the thought of an animal shot with a bolt through the head, or a chicken hung upside down, dipped in electrified water then having its head mechanically removed makes me lose my appetite.

We should have all our meat labeled, with a detailed explanation of how the animal was killed, and then let the consumer decide – in fact, maybe a live feed from the abattoir, relayed on a huge screen directly above the meat fridges is the way forward…