Industry faces animal-welfare dilemma

Rules governing halal meat production say the animal should be killed by a single cut to the throat and nothing else.

It must be alive and healthy before the slaughter, according to the Muslim Koran.

Some animal welfare activists have argued that the Muslim method is cruel, and others have insisted livestock should all be stunned before slaughter.

Britain's Farm Animal Welfare Council has claimed halal slaughtering practices cause severe suffering to animals, with cows taking up to two minutes to bleed to death.

Agriculture Minister Jim Sutton's National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee is framing a mandatory code of practice for commercial slaughter of livestock. It said last week that it was waiting to sight research into the amount of pain felt by animals that were slaughtered without first being stunned.

An outright ban on throat-cutting without prior stunning would be difficult for the Government, because it could shut New Zealand out of many markets.

One possibility might be to stun the animal immediately after the cut, rendering it unconscious.

Some animal welfare advocates have said such a practice would benefit cattle, which they claim can remain conscious for up to 90 seconds after the throat is cut.

But meat industry veterans have said that when the throat is cut, there is an instant drop in blood pressure in the brain, and the animal is effectively dead.

And they have also noted that stunning the animal once its throat was cut would not necessarily satisfy religious requirements, because the Koran required that the animal's blood flows from its body by "natural convulsion".

Post-cut stunning could also affect the way the blood drains, depending on what happened to the convulsions.

British researchers have been trying to design new machinery that could carry out "controlled stunning" to the satisfaction of Muslims. New Zealand does not kill any significant numbers of animals for an export trade in kosher meat for Jewish consumers because of difficulties in showing the technique is humane.

At present, a small number of animals are slaughtered in New Zealand each year to meet the needs of the local Jewish community.

In the production of kosher meat, animals must be slaughtered on their backs, cannot be stunned before death, and cannot die from loss of blood.

- NZPA