An animal rights activist has exposed extreme cruelty at a slaughterhouse in Arley, Warwickshire. Joey Carbstrong’s secretly recorded footage shows staff slamming sheep hard onto concrete floors, dismembering sheep while they are still alive and playing recordings of wolves to the terrified animals as they were dying.
The shock here is not just the cruelty itself: repeated investigations have found hideous savagery in UK abattoirs. When the animal welfare group Animal Aid secretly filmed inside eleven randomly chosen UK slaughterhouses several years ago, their undercover researchers found clear evidence of cruelty and law-breaking in ten of them.
We shouldn’t be silent on the most inhumane of the slaughter methods in this country
Then last year, the broadcaster Chris Packham quit as president of the RSPCA after cruelty was exposed at some of the charity’s approved list of abattoirs. I’ve written about these issues for the past decade and I can give it to you straight: forget any fantasy of animals being gently put to sleep – what goes on in slaughterhouses is frequently much, much worse than you could ever imagine.
What is particularly shocking about Carbstrong’s expose is that the slaughterhouse he exposed is a Halal establishment. You’ve probably noticed that vegan activists have become much more direct and confrontational over the past ten years, but most have been reluctant to criticise the non-stun slaughter methods of Halal and kosher slaughterhouses, which require the animal’s throat to be slit quickly with a sharp knife while it is still conscious.
One reason for vegans’ selective silence on non-stun slaughter has been because vegans see all animal killing as fundamentally wrong. We might not want to rank which forms of abuse are worse than others because that could be seen as indirectly endorsing some forms of the bloodshed. Also, even in conventional abattoirs that use stunning, millions of animals are improperly stunned in the UK every year and have their throats cut as they’re conscious and terrified.
But I think there’s another big reason for these pulled punches: people are scared of being accused of being Islamophobic or anti-Semitic. Lots of vegans also have progressive, compassionate views on human rights issues, so few are keen to be accused of racism.
While some animal rights figures tiptoe around non-slaughter methods, certain other people slide straight in wearing size 10 boots. Far-right activists single out Halal slaughter for obsessive criticism, recoiling with horror when they see Halal meat in a supermarket or restaurant and calling for it to be banned outright.
But is this because they care about animals? Sometimes the anger seems less about animals suffering and more about Muslims getting their way.
Surely there’s some middle ground here? Yes, it feels suspicious when far-right people single out Halal and kosher slaughter for criticism but it’s also wrong to be scared of questioning those methods at all. If you truly care about animals you shouldn’t turn away from some animal suffering because you’re scared of how it might look if you criticise it.
And is it accurate to accuse anyone of ‘singling out’ non-stun slaughterers when they’ve quite literally singled themselves out by using this method. They insist their way is better, so they should expect their methods to be discussed in that context.
More than 92 billion land animals are killed for their meat each year and, like all vegans, I’d very much prefer that number to be a zero. For anyone pushing or nudging the world in that direction, controversy is probably inevitable – but we shouldn’t be silent on the most inhumane of the slaughter methods that are commonplace in this country. That would be a strange state of affairs.
By exposing the slaughterhouse in Warwickshire, Carbstrong has re-opened the debate on the ethics of eating meat. He deserves enormous praise for that and he should also be cheered for having the moral clarity to target animal cruelty – whoever is inflicting it.
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