A Review of Legal Regulation of Religious Slaughter in Australia: Failure to Regulate or a Regulatory Fail?

Abstract

While religious slaughter is not a new practice in Australia, it has recently attracted public concern regarding questions of animal welfare following unfavourable media coverage. However, the details of religious slaughter practices, including related animal welfare provisions, appear to be poorly understood by the Australian public, and no existing literature concisely synthesises current regulations, practices, and issues. This paper addresses this gap by examining the processes associated with various types of religious slaughter and associated animal welfare issues, by reviewing the relevant legislation and examining public views, while highlighting areas for further research, particularly in Australia. The paper finds shortcomings in relation to transparency and understanding of current practices and regulation and suggests a need for more clear and consistent legislative provisions, as well as increased independence from industry in the setting of the standards, enforcement and administration of religious slaughter. A starting point for legal reform would be the relocation of important provisions pertaining to religious slaughter from delegated codes to the responsible act or regulation, ensuring proper parliamentary oversight. In addition, more active public engagement must occur, particularly with regard to what constitutes legal practices and animal welfare standards in the Australian context to overcome ongoing conflict between those who oppose religious slaughter and the Muslim and Jewish communities.

Volume 12, No. 3, 2023

“…To minimize the presence of physical hazards in meat, regulation should only allow for the use of specific ammunition types that will provide a quick kill and shots aimed at specific parts of the body. This then calls for progressive review of generally accepted game meat animal killing methods and consideration of developing trends in the meat supply chain (McTee et al 2017;Loyer et al 2020). Regarding ammunition, high velocity bullets can be used to kill meat animals without leaving fragments in the body of the animal as the bullets tend to exit the carcass (Martin et al 2017).…”

Values of Australian Meat Consumers Related to Sheep and Beef Cattle Welfare: What Makes a Good Life and a Good Death?

“…Firstly, in Australia, all animals must be stunned prior to slaughter, unless permission is granted for ritual slaughter (Australia and New Zealand Food Regulation Ministerial Council 2007 , 7.12[1]). These exceptions compose a very small portion of the overall number of slaughtered animals, and primarily are provided for Kosher production; most importantly, Islamic religious leaders in Australia have accepted pre-slaughter stunning practices as halal (Bergauld-Blackler 2016 ; Armanios and Ergene 2018 ; Loyer et al 2020 ). 5 Despite the ubiquity of pre-stunning slaughter in Australia, including in halal slaughter, participants described halal practices as not including pre-slaughter stunning and hence causing a ‘bad’ death.…”

“…On the surface, these concerns echo previous research indicating that Europeans (Vanhonacker et al 2010 ) and Canadians (Spooner et al 2014 ) also consider pre-slaughter stunning to be important for animal welfare. They also are based in part on lack of awareness about slaughter processes in general, which relate to participants’ preferences to not consider these processes in any detail and the lack of regulatory transparency in this domain (see Loyer et al 2020 for a review). In addition, concerns about halal slaughter are clearly associated with concerns about the live export trade (see Buddle et al 2018b for more detail on Australians’ perceptions of livestock transport including in conjunction with live export), which was an issue that received considerable media attention in the few years prior to this research (Buddle and Bray 2019 ).…”

Pain at the Slaughterhouse in Ruminants with a Focus on the Neurobiology of Sensitisation

“…In most jurisdictions, regulatory and guidance documents require that steps are put in place to mitigate the experience of pain associated with sticking. This is usually done by requiring pre-stick stunning [ 55 , 56 , 57 ].…”