New Zealand and Australia both have halal slaughter systems. I'm not sure about Australia, but New Zealand law requires all animals to be stunned before killing, whether for halal purposes or not. As long as the animal is alive when it's killed, it meets the halal standard.

The big issue in my opinion is live sheep exports. The animals suffer incredibly on long sea voyages through the tropics, and there 's no guarantee that they'll be slaughtered humanely in the Middle East. New Zealand has already banned the practice, and I hope Australia will too.

The only considerations for animal slaughter should be humaneness, safety, and hygiene.

What about us bow hunters. What we do could be considered ritual.

rmfr

@CyberLN original post

To me the question is: can we say: "ban any ritualistic butchering" of animals, but not include normal food consumption of animals in that ban?

For instance, 9 billion chickens are slaughtered every year in just the US alone. Can we, in the face of such large scale slaughter then turn around and say: "no, you cannot kill a chicken for your ritual?"

Food waste is also a huge issue, especially in the US, it is said more than 50% of all food grown/raised for consumption never gets eaten and instead heads for the landfill, or best case scenario, gets composted. While I imagine meat products is a lower percentage, even if just 11% of chickens does not get consumed, that is still 1 billion chickens a year that are raised, fed, and killed, (with a great environmental cost) then sent to trash (without even being eaten,) every year in the US alone.

Perhaps if food waste was not such an issue, we could maybe say: well eating a chicken at least someone gets fed, but again, another issue rises up, a vast majority of all people can live on a vegetarian or even vegan diet, we do not need meat and dairy to live long healthy lives, in fact large quantity consumption of especially red meat has been shown to be detrimental to good health outcomes.

Huge amounts of food we grow, (that also uses huge amounts of clean water,) is in turn, used to feed livestock. If we all became vegans and stopped food waste, the US "bread basket" could feed the entire world, no one going hungry anywhere, simple, (but large!) kCal calculations bear this math out. (Transportation and distribution issues notwithstanding.)
 
 

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