When my father arrived in the UK in the late 1950s to work in the east London docks, part of the early wave of Bangladeshi men who came after the Second World War, there was no halal meat available, so he went without for years. Halal meat refers to meat prepared according to Islamic law, which requires a swift cut to the throat while invoking the name of God as part of religious observance.
He first settled in Tower Hamlets – a borough of crumbling terraces and gruelling, low-paid labour – where he and other men from Sylhet would occasionally buy chickens to slaughter themselves, following halal principles. In those small, overcrowded flats, they cooked and ate together – not just for sustenance, but to preserve their dignity, faith, and a fragile sense of home in an unfamiliar land.
On Monday, parliament will debate a public petition to ban non-stun slaughter. Framed as a matter of animal welfare, the petition raises a deeper issue around the cultural othering of Muslim and Jewish communities in Britain. Jewish dietary law, or kashrut, includes shechita – a method of slaughter that also prohibits stunning. The petition’s use of words such as “barbaric” and appeals made to “modern British values” suggest that certain minorities are incompatible with national identity – effectively challenging both halal and kosher practices.
In Islam, we are taught to treat animals with compassion and care. Islamic law sets out clear guidelines to ensure that animals are not subjected to unnecessary suffering, even at the point of slaughter.
For centuries, across cultures and faiths, animals have provided food, clothing, transportation, protection, and emotional companionship. This shared history carries a shared responsibility.
Yet in February 2024, the European Court of Human Rights upheld a ban on non-stun ritual slaughter in Belgium, concluding it did not violate Article 9 of the Convention. The Court argued that “public morals” include concern for the living environment of individuals – and by extension, animals.
But whose morals are being upheld? And at what cost to religious freedom?
That decision reflected not moral neutrality, but a hierarchy of values, one in which cultural majorities define what counts as acceptable, and minorities are expected to adjust.
This narrative of exclusion overlooks how British norms around food, tradition and necessity have also been shaped by history and circumstance.
In the 1980s, when my siblings and I asked if we could get a pet rabbit, my father laughed. Are we going to eat it too? he said – half joke, half memory. For him, rabbits meant necessity, not sentiment.
During and after the Second World War, rabbit meat was a staple of the British diet. In places like east London, backyard hutches weren’t for pets, but for the pot. It was ordinary, practical – unquestionably British. Such practices weren’t demonised; they were seen as sensible.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA), the UK’s regulator for food safety and hygiene, monitors compliance across all slaughterhouses, halal and non-halal alike. In its 2023–24 report, the FSA recorded 362 breaches of animal welfare regulations but does not specify whether these violations occurred in halal-certified or mainstream facilities. Given that approximately 88 per cent of animals slaughtered for halal consumption in the UK are now stunned first – up from 80 per cent in 2015 – and that only a small number of non-stun halal and kosher slaughterhouses remain in operation, it is statistically likely that the majority of these breaches occurred in mainstream slaughterhouses using stunning.
Yet halal practices continue to face disproportionate scrutiny, even though the government-backed Demonstration of Life protocol has shown that non-stun halal slaughter can meet established welfare standards. Established in 2021 with support from the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Animal Welfare, the DoL protocol is an industry-led and government-backed scheme that assures Muslim consumers, both in the UK and abroad, that electrical head-only stunning of sheep and goats is consistent with halal slaughter principles.
The ban on non-stun slaughter that is being debated through this petition reflects a broader trend of scrutiny targeting Muslim life in Britain. Muslim practices have long been treated with suspicion under the guise of liberal concern, whether in discussions of halal meat, the burka or sharia law. A recent example came on Wednesday, when Reform UK MP Sarah Pochin challenged Sir Keir Starmer to say whether he would support banning the face and body coverings worn by some Muslim women – a policy already enacted in countries such as France, Denmark and Belgium.
It raises an urgent question: whose values are being protected, and why must minorities have to constantly justify theirs?
Ultimately, the question is not whether to ban non-stun slaughter, but how we can uphold both animal welfare and religious freedom – without scapegoating minority communities.
