SELINA SCOTT: Nowhere in Labour’s new 12,500-word animal welfare paper is there a single mention of barbaric halal slaughter

With Britain still in the grip of winter, it’s hard to imagine that newborn lambs will soon be jumping for joy in the meadows around my farmhouse in North Yorkshire.

The infectious joy of survival won’t last long.

Within a few months, the farmer who raised these gentle creatures will load them onto the back of a lorry and ship them to Northallerton market, where many will be sold for religious slaughter; This is a barbarity of death unimaginable to those who wrongly believe that this country leads the world in animal welfare.

These lambs will be chained by their hind legs, pulled onto a conveyor belt, and their throats will be slit while they continue to bleat. They will bleed to death, fully conscious in fear and pain, for up to a minute.

UK law requires animals to be stunned before slaughter, but an exemption is reserved for both ‘schechita’ (Jewish) and some ‘halal’ (Muslim) methods.

And the latter is by far the larger market for this product, serving the UK Muslim population of four million, which has almost doubled from a decade ago; This trend is mainly due to the increase in legal and illegal immigration. By comparison, the Jewish population is over 277,000.

Although the RSPCA says only 12 per cent of halal meat is not pre-stunned (and no scheme animals are pre-stunned), this equates to what the Food Standards Agency estimates are around 30 million chickens, sheep, goats and cattle killed while fully conscious in 2024.

Other social welfare organizations put the figure higher, possibly as high as 100 million.

According to the National Secular Society, it is equally worrying that an increasing number of these animals are being fed in our hospitals, supermarkets, prisons, kebab shops and other outlets in the food chain without any of us knowing.

The unadulterated products are being served without the knowledge of parents or children by 17 local councils in schools, the majority of which are not Islamic faith schools. From where? Because it’s cheaper, and in an industry worth £2bn a year, overproduction is a commercial necessity for large abattoirs looking to keep costs down and conveyor belts running.

The bill aims to ban the scalding of lobsters in boiling water, stating that this is ‘not an acceptable method of killing’.

The bill does not aim to end Muslim halal slaughter, a method in which farm animals’ throats are slit while they are conscious.

For an animal welfare advocate like me, this industrial-scale cruelty is a scandal made worse by the lack of political will to combat it. Last month Labor announced its animal welfare strategy, which made headlines when it banned live boiling and tracking of lobsters.

However, in the entire 12,500-word article, there is not a single mention of ritual massacre. He promises to introduce legislation on the ‘humane slaughter of farmed fish’ and phase out CO2 gassing of pigs (a painful and harrowing experience), but makes no comment on the brutal way millions of livestock are being killed.

It is also not recommended that retailers be forced to label the method of measurement on their packaging so that consumers can see what they are buying.

The worker is fully aware of how emotional this issue is. A public petition calling for all animals to be stunned before slaughter gained 100,000 signatures and was debated in Parliament last summer, but the issue failed to gain momentum following opposition from vested interests.

Two more petitions are gaining strength; Both require a clearly labeled method of death for all meat sold.

It is instructive that neither the RSPCA nor Compassion in World Farming have contributed any significant impact to these causes. Both charities say they instead prioritize high welfare standards on farms.

There is a strong suspicion that they are frightened and fearful that public support for a more humane way of killing animals will anger and anger religious minorities.

I do not disrespect religions, but the authorities often kneel before these Levantine traditions in our slaughterhouses, afraid of being called racist and – for politicians – losing votes. But the food industry is also complicit in this, reluctant to provide customers with clarity about how their meat is killed.

I contacted Jake Pickering, senior agriculture manager at Waitrose, which boasts of being ‘first in animal welfare’, and he told me that its own brand of meat is humanely killed.

He added that shoppers should check the website for ingredient information. I did this and after reviewing a 68 page document I finally found the promise. So why not make this a selling point brag to show off your credentials?

With England still in the grip of winter, it’s hard to imagine newborn lambs will soon be jumping for joy in the meadows around my farmhouse in North Yorkshire, writes SELINA SCOTT

It is, of course, a great irony that Muslims and Jews insist on knowing the method of death through their own food chains of specialist butchers and grocers.

Anyone who doubts the horror of stun methods should listen to farmer and former farmers’ minister Jim Paice, who describes how, while visiting a religious slaughterhouse, he had to watch ‘for six terrible minutes how an ox bled to death, shrieking in pain’.

Another former agriculture minister, George Eustice, echoed his dismay in a debate in the House of Commons in 2019: ‘The biggest concern is always the impact on cattle because their physiology is complicated by the fact that they have a third artery that goes to the back of the head and continues to supply blood even after the cut has occurred.’

He went on to explain in more gruesome detail why the cattle ‘took between a minute and 20 seconds to two minutes to lose consciousness’ without being knocked unconscious.

Those who have spoken out against ritual killings include parliamentarians and former MPs Craig MacKinlay, Steve Double and Roger Gale.

It is certain that there are those who have spent their lives working with animals. Farmer and Great Yarmouth MP Rupert Lowe told Parliament last year: ‘Freedom of belief does not mean freedom to cause cruel and brutal suffering…

‘We talk a lot about being a nation of animal lovers here. It’s time to prove it.’

Frontline vets tasked with monitoring brutality in slaughterhouses have expressed their disgust. John Blackwell, former president of the British Veterinary Association, called on Jews and Muslims to allow all animals to be rendered unconscious before their throats are slit. He described the ‘shechita’ cut as ‘five or six seconds of pain for the animal, although the duration of suffering can be quite long’.

It is embarrassingly significant that British leaders remain silent on the issue, while on the other side of the channel the European Court of Human Rights has recently banned taser massacres in parts of Belgium; This paved the way for a continental ban covering Norway, Sweden, Slovenia, Iceland, Switzerland and Denmark.

Australia and New Zealand have also banned non-stuns. If they can do it, why can’t we?

As philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham wrote about animal welfare in 1789: ‘Is not the question whether they can reason? Or can’t they talk? But can they suffer?’

This was over 200 years ago. It is a moral failure that, in today’s so-called enlightened age, we continue to ignore this question while millions of sentient beings are forced to die fully conscious.

Selina Scott is an animal welfare campaigner and former TV presenter.