Slaughter of animals is regulated by law and because of the growing concern for consideration of animal suffering, the process of stunning has become obligatory in the European Union since 1979 in order to avoid unnecessary suffering. However, most of the member states have made exceptions regarding religious slaughter in order to satisfy the Islamic and Jewish communities and their traditions. In the United-Kingdom, the stunning of animals before slaughter is required to avoid unnecessary pain and is regulated by both European and national law. Stunning is the process of making the animal unconscious before killing in order to avoid unnecessary suffering. The main body responsible for this process is the DEFRA (Development environment food and rural affairs). It is the Slaughter of Animals Act 1933 which first introduced this requirement in England and Wales. Currently, the relevant legislation governing the religious slaughter of animals in national law is the Welfare of Animals (Slaughter or Killing) Regulations 1995 with its Schedule 12. Later, the Welfare of Animals at the time of killing (England) Regulations 2013 was brought into force and extended to activities which were not covered by the WASK 1995. The European Regulations 1099/2009 on the protection of animals at the time of killing is now in force and replaced in 2013 the directive 93/119. All these insure the prohibition of avoidable excitement, pain or suffering by imposing specific methods of killing and licenses to people conducted slaughter who must be trained.
However, the law allows exceptions for religious slaughter . Indeed, it states that the Jewish method of killing called Schechita and the Muslim one called Dhabihah are permitted as long as they avoid un...
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... towards them as we can in this process, we must also be respectful of religious freedom. “Slaughter cannot be humane by any method, for slaughter is cruel. And yet, the slaughter of animals being a necessity it must be performed as humanely as possible” .
Bibliography: https://www.gov.uk/farm-animal-welfare-at-slaughter Religious SlaughterStandard Note: SN/SC/1314, Last updated: 11 June 2012, Author: Christopher Barclay, Science and Environment Section library house of commons
Masri, Al-Hafiz Basheer Ahmad (1993). Animal Welfare in Islam
Foltz, Richard C. (2006). Animals in Islamic Tradition and Muslim Cultures
Religious Slaughter: evaluation of current practices in selected countries, Velarde, A; Rodriguez, P; Dalmau, A…
Government Regulations of Schechita (Jewish Religious Slaughter) in the twenty-first century: are they ethical? Zivotofsky
Jewry law was, like German medieval law in general, of a disintegrated nature (Kisch 1935: 69). It also frequently overlapped and contradicted itself, thanks to the wide range of sources from which it derived (Cohen 1994:31). Medieval Jewry law has been described as a ‘law of privilege made up of occasional favours and restrictions of various kinds without re...
As I have progressed through this class, my already strong interest in animal ethics has grown substantially. The animal narratives that we have read for this course and their discussion have prompted me to think more deeply about mankind’s treatment of our fellow animals, including how my actions impact Earth’s countless other creatures. It is all too easy to separate one’s ethical perspective and personal philosophy from one’s actions, and so after coming to the conclusion that meat was not something that was worth killing for to me, I became a vegetarian. The trigger for this change (one that I had attempted before, I might add) was in the many stories of animal narratives and their inseparable discussion of the morality in how we treat animals. I will discuss the messages and lessons that the readings have presented on animal ethics, particularly in The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Dead Body and the Living Brain, Rachel in Love, My Friend the Pig, and It Was a Different Day When They Killed the Pig. These stories are particularly relevant to the topic of animal ethics and what constitutes moral treatment of animals, each carrying important lessons on different facets the vast subject of animal ethics.
...ey are murdering people they had grown up with, the tradition dominates their life and is one of the only things that they know therefore it is necessary to uphold.
Christopher McCandless, a young American who was found dead in summer of 1992 in wild land in Alaska, wrote in his diary about his moral struggle regarding killing a moose for survival. According to Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, Chris had to abandon most of the meat since he lacked the knowledge of how to dismantle and preserve it (166-168). Not only did he have a moral dilemma to kill a moose, but also had a deep regret that a life he had taken was wasted because of his own fault. He then started recognizing what he ate as a precious gift from the nature and called it “Holy Food” (Krakauer 168). Exploring relationships between human beings and other animals arouses many difficult questions: Which animals are humans allowed to eat and which ones are not? To which extent can humans govern other animals? For what purposes and on which principles can we kill other animals? Above all, what does it mean for humans to eat other animals? The answer may lie in its context. Since meat-eating has been included and remained in almost every food culture in the world throughout history and is more likely to increase in the future due to the mass production of meat, there is a very small chance for vegetarianism to become a mainstream food choice and it will remain that way.
We brutally inflict pain upon the animals, not exclusively in the final moments as they are being slaughtered, but for the most part, during their entire life. Many animals know nothing other than a life in a dark, crowded barn or factory treated as meat before they are even killed. These terrible conditions blatantly show that we do not care about these animals and we simply rear and kill them in order to satisfy our trivial interests. The cruelty imposed upon these helpless animals is shocking and it is not rare for people to turn a blind eye to the brutality. Another commonplace would be for a meat consumer to say that humans are “ends in themselves, while everything other than a person can only have value for a person” (C. Vlastos). People believe that animals are on this earth simply for human consumption, which can be easily
Primarily, the restrictions placed on the consumption of certain types of meat, a limitation that continues in rules for maintaining a Jewish kosher home, relates directly to what is viewed as the rules for the holy people of God. The people of God, then, are expected to recognize that “God is to be obeyed, concluding that circumcision and the prescriptions of Mosaic law are still obligatory” (1).
Almost all humans want to have possession and control over their own life, they want the ability to live independently without being considered someone’s property. Many people argue that animals should live in the same way as humans because animals don’t have possession of their lives as they are considered the property of humans. An article that argues for animal rights is “The case against pets” (2016) by Francione and Charlton. Gary L Francione and Anna E Charlton are married and wrote a book together, “Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach (2015). Francione is a law professor at Rutgers University and an honorary professor at University of East Anglia. Charlton is also a law professor at Rutgers University and she is the co-founder of the Rutgers Animal Rights Law Clinic. In this article Francione and Charlton mainly focus on persuading people to believe in animal rights but only focus on one right, the right of animals not to be property. The article is written in a well-supported manner with a lot of details and examples backing it up, but a few counter-arguments can be made against some of their arguments.
There is a significant difference between government and religious morals even though both are ethical authorities. These two moral authorities conflict with one another while both are to help people make sou...
Regan, Tom. "A Reply to Griffiths." Animals and Christianity. Ed. A. Linzey et al. New York: Crossroad, 1990.
In his essay “Religion and Animal Rights," the writer Tom Regan maintains the place that animals are "subjects-of-a-life”, like humans. If we value all beings regardless of the degree of human rationality that are able to act, we must also attribute to animals or as it is called non-human animals as well. All practices involving abuse of animals should be abolished. The animals have an intrinsic value as humans, and stresses that Christian theology has brought unbridled land on the brink of an ecological catastrophe.
In the monotheistic religious traditions of Christianity and Islam, one role of God (or Allah) is to limit or control aggressions among humankind. In these religious traditions, God establishes an ideal or standard for the righteous use of force by followers of the faith. These standards, or just war traditions, address details of when to use force to solve disputes, to what extent the force should be employed, and whose blessing is required to insure that the use of force is appropriate in the eyes of God. If a situation satisfies the just war tradition in that culture and the aggression is carried out for religious reasons, the action can be further classified as holy war. Many Americans connect the concept of holy war only with Islam. In fact the Christian crusades during the middle ages were just such a holy war being waged by Christians against Muslims. Whether a particular situation qualifies as a holy war or not, the focus of the just war tradition is to ask God for approval. “Appeals to ‘holy war’ or ‘religious crusade’ in one or another tradition are one type of appeal to divine authority regarding the use of force.” In recent history numerous conflicts, border skirmishes, battles and wars have arisen in which governments have decided to apply military force to varying degrees. Inevitably, politicians, policy-makers, religious and military leaders seek divine authority on which to base the struggle of their population and the loss of life. Have religious ethical values or theological aspects of the just war tradition influenced the nature of these military actions? Have the prevailing religious values kept military actions any more humane than they might otherwise have been? This paper will examine the theological roots of the just war tradition in the Christian and Islamic cultures. In addition, it will try to ascertain how religious ethics, and the just war tradition in particular, has been used between the “war” on terror and the United States. Finally, this paper will dem...
Should animals have to go through pain and suffering? Should they have to go without food and/or water? The answer is no. Animal abuse happens everyday and it happens because people are barbarous or because they don’t know how to take the best care of an animal that they have. Whatever the reason it’s still not right and will never be okay. This paper will cover a brief history of animal abuse, the statistics, the signs of animal abuse, and what can be done to stop animal abuse. Animal abuse needs to end for the animals that can’t speak for themselves.
"The Case For Animal Rights" written by Tom Regan, promotes the equal treatment of humans and non-humans. I agree with Regan's view, as he suggests that humans and animals alike, share the experience of life, and thus share equal, inherent value.
In the early modern era in Europe, public executions were the primary punishment given to members of society who were involved in criminal behavior. This form of punishment served to showcase the absolute power of the state, King and church to take away the life of any citizen who disrupts peace. It was a way to make the criminal justice system visible and effective in an era when the criminal justice system was in its beginning stages of demonstrating orderliness (Spierenburg). More specifically, it was a relatively straightforward and psychological way to evoke deterrence. The potential of gruesome violence, public persecution and religious betrayal were tools thought to be strong enough to make public executions a successful form of deterrence because within the community, social bonds and religion were the foundation of everyday life.... ...
Every year, the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) takes in close to 50,000 reports of animal mistreatment in Australia and about 150,000 in England and in Wales (RSPCA, 2013). However, these figures do not include the cases when mistreatment is not reported which, according to the RSPCA, happens almost as often as the ones recorded (RSPCA, 2013). Maltreatment occurs when an animal is tormented or harmed, imprisoned or transported from one place to another in a manner that risks their well-being and health. Killing them in a non-humane way, not providing them with the correct food, not taking care of them or the illness and injuries they may have, and not providing them with proper shelter or adequate living circumstances are also forms of cruelty. In 2013 the RSPCA investigated 4,000 more cases in Australia than in the previous year; statistics also show that in the United Kingdom, on average, every thirty seconds someone dials the Organization’s 24-hour cruelty line seeking for help (RSPCA, 2013). This indicates that animal mistreatment is a growing issue that has effects not only on the victims, but also on the perpetrator, the people involved in rescuing and saving the animals’ life, and every other individual that gets touched by their stories. Thus, considering that abusing animals is against our moral and ethical obligation of protecting our planet and the forms of life in it, including animal life, it is an issue that is happening considerably often. However, thankfully for the animals, there are also organizations and laws opposing and fighting against animal cruelty to save the victims and to put an end to it. Global organizations such as the RSPCA, ALDF, PETA, WSPA, among other...