Animal Welfare: Methods of Slaughter

Lord Trees Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Trees]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the ethical, legal and religious factors that influence the way in which some animals are slaughtered in the United Kingdom.

[Lord Trees (CB)]

My Lords, in my 45 years as a veterinary surgeon I have witnessed the abattoir slaughter of many animals with and without stunning, but when I first witnessed slaughter without stunning it was profoundly disturbing. The animal staggered from its killing crate, blood gushing from the neck wound, and it did not collapse into unconsciousness for some considerable time. It is that experience and others since that have caused me to bring this debate.

It might be useful initially to cover the legal framework surrounding the slaughter of animals—and I am going to concentrate on cattle and sheep. The legal framework is straightforward. In abattoirs, the death of animals is due to exsanguination following severance of the major blood vessels in the neck. It is illegal in the UK and throughout the EU to do that without first rendering animals insensible by stunning—except that that requirement for pre-stunning is exempted for those of Muslim and Jewish faiths to produce either respectively halal meat or kosher meat by shechita. I intend to talk about stunning and non-stunning in the rest of my speech.

Noble Lords have heard my reactions. Let me quote the reactions of a female, Jewish vet, who recently sent me an e-mail. She said:

“Without a doubt, during my almost twenty years as a vet, I have never witnessed anything as horrific as Shechita slaughter. That horror lives fresh in my mind today and having been raised and now living in a Kosher home I do not and never have eaten a piece of Kosher meat since the day I witnessed this barbaric practice. Indeed I have seen much suffering and many severe injuries in the animals I have treated over the years, but nothing comes close to the unnecessary and brutal suffering that these animals experience at the very end of their lives”.

Note that that is from a qualified, official veterinary surgeon who has done a lot of meat hygiene work and has witnessed the slaughter of many animals involving both stunning and non-stunning.

Let me emphasise that I recognise that both the great faiths in question have serious concerns for animal welfare. I also make it quite clear that I defend and respect the freedom of expression of all groups, religious or non-religious, within reasonable limits acceptable to our society. Nevertheless, it is my contention that unnecessary suffering is being caused to a very substantial number of animals by slaughter without stunning. I want to address this under three headings: inconsistency, injury and insult.

In terms of inconsistency, we rightly pride ourselves here in Britain on our animal welfare regulations and our humaneness. Recently, it has been made an offence to dock a puppy dog’s tail. That is something that involved a snip with a pair of scissors which, on a week-old pup, evoked at most a slight yelp. We have made that illegal—and I am happy with that law—yet we allow adult animals to have their throats cut without rendering them unconscious first. Is that a consistent approach to humaneness?

I turn to biological tissue injury. The Farm Animal Welfare Council, in its report of 2003, considered the whole issue of slaughter without stunning in great detail. Considering the injury to the neck involved in throat-cutting, the council noted that this involved the incision of skin, muscle, trachea, oesophagus, both jugular veins, both carotid arteries, major nerve trunks and several other nerves. It concluded that,

“such a massive injury would result in very significant pain and distress in the period before insensibility supervenes”.

The FAWC report went on to refer to evidence of the time taken to lose brain responsiveness in different species following the neck cut. It noted that in sheep it was five to 10 seconds; in adult cattle, with excellent technique, it was a minimum of 22 to 40 seconds; and in calves it was 10 to 120 seconds. Twenty seconds is a long time if you are suffering pain. The FAWC report—and remember that this is the Government’s independent advisory committee—recommended in its 2003 report that,

“the Government should repeal the current exemption”

from pre-stunning.

I turn to insult. By this I mean tissue damage and particularly the induction of pain—I mean a biological insult. Determining the perception of pain can be very difficult, I acknowledge, but some recent research has been done on calves in New Zealand which I would argue provides strong evidence that pain is perceived by a neck cut and that stunning abrogates that. In this work, electrophysiological measurements were taken of brain signals, for which there was supportive evidence of their being associated with pain. A neck cut without pre-stunning caused pain signals lasting for up to two minutes. Such signals did not occur when stunning was used before the neck cut. Finally, if the neck cut was made and then animals were stunned, the pain signals occurring after the cut were immediately abolished. Every attempt was made in this work to mimic slaughter without stunning but true shechita could not be performed because, ironically, the animals had to be gently anaesthetised to conform to experimental animal laws and thus could not pass for human consumption, as shechita demands. So I would argue that it is likely that severe pain is caused by slaughter without stunning, albeit for a relatively short period, but perhaps for as much as two minutes in cattle.

How many animals are involved in slaughter without stunning? The latest available survey by the Food Standards Agency, in 2011, indicates that approximately 70,000 cattle are slaughtered in the UK each year without stunning, mainly by shechita, and that about 1.5 million sheep are despatched without stunning, mainly for halal consumption. I should point out that the majority of sheep that are killed for halal purposes in the UK are pre-stunned, but that still leaves the significant minority of 1.5 million that I have referred to. Thus I contend that, given the nature of the biological insult and the numbers involved, slaughter without stunning is a major, if not the major animal welfare issue in the United Kingdom today. A further important fact is that much of the meat from non-stunned slaughter goes into the food chain for mainstream consumers. I suggest that consumers can justifiably expect to be informed if the normal legally required form of humane slaughter has not been used.

All the independent welfare bodies advocate stunning before slaughter—FAWC, the British Veterinary Association, the Federation of Veterinarians of Europe, the RSPCA and the Humane Slaughter Association—and furthermore, the food-quality assurance schemes such as red tractor and the Soil Association do not permit non-stun slaughter. In Europe, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland and Iceland have disallowed non-stun slaughter, and New Zealand does not permit the non-stun abattoir slaughter of mammals. Significantly, New Zealand exports large amounts of sheep meat that has been reversibly stunned and certified as halal to Muslim communities in Asia and the Middle East.

The EU is currently conducting a study on providing consumers with the relevant information on the stunning of animals by labelling of meat products. In the UK, the beef and lamb trade organisation EBLEX is working on the issue of clear labelling with halal producers. Will the Government support measures to label meat appropriately to enable consumers to make informed choices?

I make it clear that I am not asking in this debate for non-stun slaughter to be banned. I am not a believer in bans; I would rather that society collectively arrived at decisions about what is acceptable and what is not. However, I sincerely ask the Muslim and Jewish communities and their leaders to reflect and consider whether ancient practices, for which there were good reasons many hundreds of years ago, are necessary today. There are non-lethal, non-invasive methods of stunning, and even if there is disagreement on the extent or duration of pain perception, is it not time to adopt stunning to preclude the possibility of unnecessary suffering—as some Muslim food authorities have allowed?