Posted by:
Tevai
(
)
Date: January 23, 2018 02:44PM
Visitors Welcome Wrote:
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> Halal meat is meat made according to the rules of
> islam, which prohibits sedating animals before
> slaughtering them.
> Halal meat means that the animal was killed by
> putting a knife in its neck.
> Halal meat is not made according to the humane
> standards we westerners have come to take for
> granted.
> If you consider yourself a liberal, and the
> wellness of animals means something to you, avoid
> halal meat as much as you can.
> Seriously.
I agree with this...but (for similar reasons) I stopped eating ALL meat about thirty years ago.
An amusing story (at least it was amusing to me when it happened):
When I was in Israel, I was with a tour group of (mostly practicing Orthodox) Jewish Hebrew-school teachers, and all of the food we ate (no matter where in Israel we were) was kosher. The first day of our group tour, because I refused the chicken (etc.) at our introductory dinner, everyone in our group learned that I was vegetarian, so most of the people in our, fairly small, group watched out for me (telling me when something unfamiliar to me actually had meat, or meat fat, in it).
There was one woman, though, who looked at me like I was an alien life form from Mars or something, but since I was also the only convert-to-Judaism in the group, I assumed it was because she came from a fairly restricted Jewish background (she lived and worked in one of the heavily-Orthodox Jewish areas in the New York City area) and had probably never before personally known a convert to Judaism. (I doubt that her group had many, if ANY, converts in it.)
This might well have been true, but as I learned a few days later (when she lectured me) her reaction to me was mostly, at least in HER mind, because I am vegetarian. According to her, I was basically "gaming the [Jewish] system": exempting myself from the many rules and restrictions of observant kashrut living by simply never eating meat.
She really DID think I was something of an insincere convert because, instead of FOLLOWING the rules of kashrut, on a practical basis, I did an end run around most of them by being a vegetarian. She thought that me being vegetarian was unfair to observant Jews who DO, with great sincerity and diligence, "keep kosher."
So far as halal meat goes: We have a fairly significant number of Muslims where I live (which means: we also have a number of halal-certified stores which we pass regularly when we are going about daily life). Every time I pass one of those stores, I wince for the animals whose meat is sold there. It really does bother me (and the same is true for me when I pass kosher meat stores as well---as I understand the butchering process, kosher requirements are at least a LITTLE bit more humane than halal requirements, but maybe not by all that much).
I know that kosher requirements are often cited as one of the (by comparison) "more humane," "good things" about Judaism and Jewish life, but from what I was taught and have read about, I don't see that kosher slaughter requirements are any great improvement (or, perhaps, ANY improvement) over what happens in normal American butchering operations...
...to the point where, had I not been a vegetarian when I became a Jew (in actual fact, I WAS a vegetarian when I became a Jew), I think I would have very strongly entertained the possibility of becoming a vegetarian, strictly on the grounds of humane treatment for meat-producing animals.
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 01/23/2018 03:33PM by Tevai.