All eyes on EU court for decision on religious slaughter

22 October 2020

Stunning animals before slaughter and avoiding unnecessary suffering is surely the least we owe these fellow sentient beings.

The practice of pre-stunning is mandatory throughout the EU.

Although the EU Animal Slaughter Regulation allows for a ‘religious exception’, it also expressly enables member states to adopt “national rules aimed at ensuring more extensive protection of animals at the time of killing”.

That’s how Denmark, Sweden and Slovenia were able to ban slaughter without stunning.

However, today a compromise between a religious exception, allowing slaughter without stunning, and an outright ban of the practice is close to reach.

Read more at source

EU Observer

Source:  https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-eu-court-religion-slaughter/eu-court-adviser-backs-ritual-animal-slaughter-without-stunning-idUKKBN2611M9

EU court adviser backs ritual animal slaughter without stunning

By Reuters Staff

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – EU judges should strike down a Belgian law requiring all animals be stunned prior to their death, which has effectively outlawed slaughter according to Jewish and Muslim rites, an EU court adviser said on Thursday.

Gerard Hogan, an advocate general of the Court of Justice of the European Union, said an EU law of 2009 set out that animals should normally be stunned before they are slaughtered, but made a clear exception for slaughter prescribed by religious rites.

EU judges typically follow the opinions of advocate generals although are not bound to do so. They would normally deliver their ruling in two to four months.

The case came to the EU court in Luxembourg after a 2017 decree in the Belgian region of Flanders to amend its law on protection and welfare of animals by requiring all animals be first stunned.

Jewish and Muslim association challenged the decree and Belgium’s Constitutional Court referred the case to the EU Court of Justice.

Hogan said the religious exception reflected the European Union’s desire to respect freedom of religion and the right to manifest religious belief in practice and observance despite avoidable suffering caused to animals.

Jewish and Muslim methods of slaughter involves the animals’ throats being cut with a sharp knife, which advocates says results in death almost immediately. Traditionally, prior stunning is not permitted.

Belgian campaign group Global Action in the Interest of Animals (GAIA), whose representatives were present at the court on Thursday, said it was disappointed and perplexed by the opinion, but noted the judges might rule differently.

“How will the court deal with (EU) members that have for years had general bans on slaughter without stunning: Denmark, parts of Finland, Slovenia and Sweden?” said GAIA lawyer Anthony Godfroid.

All eyes on EU court for decision on religious slaughter

https://euobserver.com/opinion/149811

The popular image of a ritual killing is that of a butcher restraining an animal to expose its throat, covering its eyes with its ears while muttering prayers to calm it.

Sadly, this is far from the experience of animals being killed without pre-stunning for halal or kosher meat, where they are strung up and knifed in a relentless industrial process.

• By now technological development makes it possible for animals to be butchered humanely, while still preserving religious freedom (Photo: Lukas Budimaier)

Even when their throat is cleanly cut, the massive injury triggers a barrage of sensory information to the brain, meaning their last, long minutes of consciousness as they bleed out are filled with pain and terror.

Stunning animals before slaughter and avoiding unnecessary suffering is surely the least we owe these fellow sentient beings.

That’s why the practice of pre-stunning is mandatory throughout the EU.

Although the EU Animal Slaughter Regulation allows for a ‘religious exception’, it also expressly enables member states to adopt “national rules aimed at ensuring more extensive protection of animals at the time of killing”.

That’s how Denmark, Sweden and Slovenia were able to ban slaughter without stunning.

However, today a compromise between a religious exception, allowing slaughter without stunning, and an outright ban of the practice is close to reach.

This is the method known as reversible stunning, which renders the animal unconscious for the time it takes to cut its throat while respecting the religious requirement of it remaining alive so the blood is pumped out by its still-beating heart.

According to well-established scientific evidence, this method is not only less traumatising for the animal and makes its handling easier for the butcher, but it is also accepted by a growing number of representatives of these religious communities.

However, reversible stunning now faces a major legal challenge across Europe.

After the Flemish region introduced reversible stunning in 2017, various Jewish and Muslim associations contested this decree before national courts and sought its total or partial annulment.

The case reached the Belgian Constitutional Court, which referred the matter to the European Court of Justice for a final decision.

What’s at stake in the present case is not a ban on religious slaughter, but whether a member state may adopt measures to improve the welfare of animals being slaughtered in the context of a religious rite – the aim of the Flemish legislation in requiring the animal to be reversibly stunned.

Not only does this method meet religious community requirements to have animals alive at the time of the throat cut, but it is also proportionate to its declared goal to protect animal welfare while guaranteeing the religious liberty and freedom contained in the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Reversal on reverse stunning?

However, in a recent opinion, though seemingly favourable to the adoption of other technical conditions to minimise the suffering of animals at the time of the killing, a member of the Court of Justice of the EU – Advocate General (AG) Hogan – proposed that the court should find that member states were not permitted to implement reversible stunning.

The opinion argues that the ‘religious exception’ was intended to “grant more specific protection to the freedom of religion” in this context and that when establishing stricter national rules, member states must “operate within [its] confines”.

Yet this appears to overlook the fact that the EU legislation submits the adoption of stricter national rules to only one condition, that the importing country – in this case, Belgium – does not prevent the circulation of animal products from another member state with a laxer regime, i.e. meat from animals that were not stunned before slaughter.

There would be no need for this provision to exist if countries were entirely bound by the ‘religious exception’.

We disagree with the contention that the “preservation of the religious rites of animal slaughter often sits uneasily with modern conceptions of animal welfare” and that as a result, the court should not allow member states to “hollow out” the ‘religious exception’. Technology and best practices are there to guarantee that both interests can be reconciled and respected.

Far from being motivated by Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, the Flemish decree prescribing reversible stunning is the outcome of long-standing consultations with the relevant religious communities in an effort to strike a new balance between the exercise of religious freedom and animal welfare.

The acceptance of reversible stunning appears all the more important when analysing the broader context: in Europe, there are many more animals slaughtered without stunning than those needed, but no labelling is required for such meat.

This situation severely affects EU consumers’ right to know if they’re buying and consuming meat that might be derived from animals that have not been stunned before killing.

When these religious traditions were established, there were well-founded sanitary reasons for encouraging people to shun the flesh of animals they could not identify as being recently alive. But advances in food safety have long made such practices redundant.

By now technological development makes it possible for animals to be butchered humanely, while still preserving religious freedom.

It is time for European law to recognise it is no longer acceptable to deny them a kinder end to their lives.

Regards Mark

Reproduced from Plant Based News without any amendments.

Link:  https://plantbasednews.org/lifestyle/meat-and-dairy-carry-infectious-disease-pathogen-linked-to-diabetes/

 

Meat And Dairy Carry Infectious Disease Pathogen Linked To Diabetes And Crohn’s

In the world of diabetes, more than 92 percent of all patients have either prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, with the remaining eight percent having either type 1 or type 1.5 diabetes.

Both type 1 and type 1.5 diabetes are autoimmune conditions that have a genetic basis, but often require an environmental ‘trigger’ to begin.

Given that type 1 diabetes has increased by 100 percent in prevalence over the past 25 years, scientists are constantly on the lookout for environmental triggers that might help explain why the rate of type 1 diabetes diagnosis is higher today than it has been at any point in human history, and why the prevalence of type 1 diabetes is increasing by about three percent per year.

MAP in Dairy Products Increase The Risk Of Type 1 Diabetes

Even though many people think of autoimmune conditions as being caused by poor genetics, a collection of fascinating research is suggesting that drinking milk and eating meat can both increase your risk for type 1 diabetes and type 1.5 diabetes—in addition to Crohn’s disease—via a specific pathogen known as mycobacterium avium paratuberculosis (MAP).

MAP is a distant relative of the bacteria Mycobacterium bovis, which is the culprit for tuberculosis (TB) and leprae (leprosy) in humans and TB in animals. MAP does not cause TB or leprosy in humans.

MAP is a mycobacterium, or a bacteria that grows like a fungus, and has been shown to influence susceptibility to autoimmune type 1 diabetes.

Studies show the connection between MAP and type 1 diabetes apparent that a recent review of current scientific literature showed that 100 percent of human studies analyzed detected the presence of MAP bacteria in those living with type 1 diabetes.

So how does MAP enter the food supply? Well, it’s a little… unsavory. MAP infects the gastrointestinal tract of industrialized cows (cows being raised for food or milk) causing an often fatal condition known as Johne’s disease. 

While the MAP bacteria lives in the intestines of cows, it is also present in the fecal matter of infected cows, which means that the MAP bacteria can easily be passed between animals exposed to one another’s fecal material. Unfortunately, this is all too common when hundreds or thousands of cows are living together in close quarters, as is common in large industrialized farms.

Under ideal conditions, MAP present in the intestines and fecal matter of livestock would pose no threat to human health, assuming that their intestines were removed after slaughter and their fecal matter remained separated from the slaughterhouse.

However, when animals are slaughtered, fecal residue from the soil ends up clinging to the boots, clothes, and gloves of slaughterhouse workers, which then cross-contaminates the carcasses of the animals, contaminating both the milk and the meat products en route to the grocery store.

No matter how stringent the conditions are at industrial slaughterhouses, MAP migrates into dairy and meat products; avoiding this fecal contamination when animals are slaughtered is virtually impossible at large scale.

This means that MAP is present in milk and dairy products that you purchase at the grocery store, including raw milk, bulk milk, pasteurized milk, infant food formula, cheese, ice cream, and flavored milk drinks. A study published in 2007 revealed that more than 68 percent of all U.S dairy operations housed cows infected with MAP, and that more than 95 percent of farms containing more than 500 cows housed animals infected with MAP.

Even though milk must be pasteurized (treated at high heat to kill off disease-causing bacteria) before being sold at grocery stores, a small fraction of live MAP bacteria can survive pasteurization.

Approximately three out of every 100 milk products purchased in the U.S contain living MAP bacteria, meaning that milk and milk products are a vehicle that transports infectious bacteria directly from cows to humans, increasing risk for developing various autoimmune diseases, including type 1 diabetes.

MAP is Also Present in Meat Products

MAP is also present in the meat you buy at the grocery store or butcher, including beef, pork, chicken, and organ tissues. Studies have shown that between 15-20 percent of commonly eaten meat products test positive for MAP DNA, and that ground beef presents the greatest risk for transporting MAP into the human food chain.

A recent investigation in 298 children in Sardinia, Italy, found that those who ate more meat before the age of two years old developed significantly more cases of type 1 diabetes and that ‘high meat consumption tends to be an important early life cofactor for type 1 diabetes development’.

This same research team also showed that both milk consumption and meat intake are significantly correlated with the incidence of type 1 diabetes in children younger than 15 years old in forty countries around the world.

What Causes Autoimmunity?

But how exactly does autoimmunity happen in the first place? The process is known as molecular mimicry, a sneaky tactic used by various bacteria and viruses in which pathogenic proteins attempt to evade detection by the human immune system by ‘disguising’ themselves as mammalian proteins.

In both young children and adults, microscopic holes in the lining of your gut wall allow pathogenic proteins to pass directly from your digestive system into your blood before they have been sufficiently cut by digestive enzymes.

Once these pathogenic proteins are present in your blood, your immune system recognizes them as foreign proteins and mounts an immune response that targets them for destruction. But because these pathogenic proteins contain specific regions that mimic proteins found in your body, your immune system can mistakenly target proteins on human cells in tissues all over your body for destruction, setting the stage for an autoimmune reaction.

Think of autoimmunity as a form of biological ‘friendly fire’ in which your immune system is hijacked by a pathogenic protein that tricks your immune system into destroying critical human cells containing proteins with a similar structure.

When infected with MAP, your immune system manufactures antibodies that mistakenly attack the ZnT8 protein on the surface of beta cells, targeting them for destruction.

To target these proteins for destruction, your immune system activates cells known as macrophages to engulf and destroy entire beta cells, leading to a near or complete loss of insulin production.

Final Remarks

As is true in almost all biological scenarios, the connection between dairy and meat consumption and type 1 diabetes is indefinite. Therefore, not everyone who drinks dairy and eats cattle, sheep, goats is at risk for type 1 diabetes.

But what this evidence does indicate is that even pasteurized dairy products at the grocery store may harbor living MAP bacteria, which can influence your risk for the development of type 1 diabetes. Despite needing more novel studies to demonstrate MAP’s causation for Crohn’s disease and multiple sclerosis, it is not worth the detrimental risk on your health.

Given that the insulin producing beta cells in your pancreas are the only cells in your body capable of manufacturing insulin, it’s important to ensure that the food you eat protects these critical cells at all ages.

While reducing your intake of dairy products can minimize your risk for type 1 diabetes, eliminating dairy products altogether is the safest way to truly minimize your risk.

Link:  https://plantbasednews.org/lifestyle/meat-and-dairy-carry-infectious-disease-pathogen-linked-to-diabetes/