The problem of ritual slaughter
28 October 2025
Anna Sergeant and Julia Hartley
This is an extract from an article published in the latest edition of The Critic, 17th October 2025. We post it here by kind permission of its authors and editors of The Critic.
In 2024, approximately 220 million animals were ritually slaughtered in England and Wales. Of these, roughly 30 million had their throats slit whilst fully conscious, and 190 million were stunned unconscious before being killed.
The Welfare at the Time of Killing (England) Regulations 2015 (“WATOK”) require that animals be effectively stunned before slaughter, in order to spare them “avoidable pain, distress or suffering” when they are killed. In its next breath, however, WATOK authorises the very practice it condemns (non-stun slaughter) where it is “in accordance with religious rites”.
Non-stun slaughter entails atrocious violence which all major animal welfare bodies, including the British Veterinary Association and RSPCA, agree should be prohibited. The failure of Parliament to make a decision about the normative value of animal welfare has left a gaping statutory hole that defers the fate of animals’ final moments to the whim of religious authority.
Public concern over ritual slaughter rarely ever sets its sights beyond non-stun slaughter. But ritual stun-slaughter brings with it its own catalogue of problems. Currently, the market treats ritually stun-slaughtered meat as indistinguishable from standard meat, with the result that millions of people buy it and become unwitting participants in religious rituals alien to them. By failing to take this issue in hand, the state allows religious freedom to be eroded.
Parliament should remove the exemption and ban non-stun slaughter, in order to restore ethical and legal coherence to animal welfare law. In parallel, the state should introduce mandatory labelling of both the manner of slaughter and the ritual status of meat.
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One such limit arises when balancing the appetite for non-stunned meat against the suffering that the slaughter will cause. In response to the petition prompting the 2025 debate on ritual, the government wrote, “We would prefer all animals to be stunned before slaughter. However, we respect the rights of Jews and Muslims to eat meat prepared in accordance with their religious beliefs.” But Jews and Muslims do not have such a right; there is no right to meat in English law, religiously prepared or otherwise. Neither Islam nor Judaism requires adherents to eat animals at all; indeed, many Muslims and Jews are vegetarians. The liberty at stake is therefore a question not of religious necessity but of personal preference. That distinction bears on proportionality: mere preference cannot legitimately override a matter of public morality.
There is legal precedent for this. In 1995, a German court recognised that Muslims and Jews do not need to eat meat, and this was the primary justification for the banning of non-stun ritual slaughter in Germany. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) went on to uphold a Belgian ban on non-stun slaughter in 2024, finding that such a ban is compatible with Article 9, the right to freedom of religion. [See Rosalind English’s post on this decision here]. Seven European states, including Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland have since gone on to implement bans on non-stun slaughter. The ECtHR recognises that banning non-stun slaughter is a legitimate aim justifying a curbing of religious activities; on this occasion, the European Convention on Human Rights need not obstruct British domestic policy.
There is a bewildering fact about ritual slaughter in Britain, which is the enormous disparity between the proportion of the population who eat ritually slaughtered meat and the proportion of animals that are ritually slaughtered. Muslims comprise roughly 6.5 per cent of the population, and Jews 0.5 per cent. Yet in 2024, 214.6 million animals were slaughtered under halal conditions alone — not 6.5 per cent of all slaughter in England and Wales as one might expect, but actually 20.7 per cent.
The rest of this article, along with the authors’ recommendations for labelling and law reform, can be read here. A legal campaign is currently under way to enforce proper inspection and regulation of slaughterhouses to reduce the numbers of animals slaughtered without stunning.
