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.
Parliament should remove the exemption and ban non-stun slaughter
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.
Iterations of WATOK, along with the ritual slaughter exemption, have existed since 1933. Schedule 3 of WATOK permits forms of Jewish and Islamic ritual slaughter that forbid the stunning of the animal before the ritual cut — a deep knife cut to the throat, slicing the carotid artery and jugular veins. This has long been contested by animal welfare groups. Physiological studies consistently record acute stress responses in non-stunned animals and prolonged periods of consciousness after neck incision — up to 2.5 minutes in birds even when performed correctly, and much longer where blades are blunt or the cut shallow – during which behavioural and neurological signs indicate severe pain and panic. Dreadful recordings abound of animals shrieking and stumbling with heads lolling from half-severed necks. MPs in a debate on 9 June 2025 insisted, and concluded, that this is necessary in order to respect faith and uphold religious freedom.
This is cowardice in the garb of tolerance.
In Judaism, kosher slaughter (“shechita”) requires that the animal be in good health, so the halakhic authorities reject pre-stunning, despite some Jewish groups pushing for pre-slaughter stunning on animal welfare grounds. In Islam, by contrast, there is disagreement as to whether pre-slaughter stunning is permitted. Some clerics insist that the animal must be conscious, and thus forbid stun-slaughter. But an increasingly large number accept stunning, provided that the animal is alive at the moment of incision, that blood flow is unobstructed, and, crucially, that the stunning is “reversible”. Stunning is reversible if it is possible for the animal to regain consciousness. A blow to the head or a metal rod fired into an animal’s brain is irreversible; an electric shock can be reversible, depending on the voltage. Reversible stunning runs the risk of the animal regaining consciousness before or after the ritual cut, but, if performed successfully, is less cruel than simply cutting the throat of a conscious animal.
A closer look at Schedule 3 reveals deep constitutional flaws. By carving out an exception for halal and kosher slaughter “in accordance with religious rites,” Parliament has not merely accommodated belief but has surrendered legal authority to theology. The applicability of the general prohibition on non-stun slaughter turns on whether, according to a given religion, a rite requires the non-stun method — a question of faith, not of law. This means that the boundary of a statutory prohibition is defined not by Parliament or the court, but by religious authority dictated by bodies that have been neither publicly elected nor even, in the case of Islam, specified by WATOK. Further, where theology is unsettled, as it is on the question of stunning, the law becomes unknowable: it cannot say to whom, or to what, authority has been delegated. Such uncertainty offends the basic requirement of the rule of law, in Dicey’s classical formulation, that legal obligations be clear and predictable in order to prevent discretionary or arbitrary rule.
The result of the state’s apathy on this matter is illustrated by the divergence of private halal certification bodies. Of the seven halal certification bodies listed by the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) (a government body), only one – the Halal Monitoring Committee (HMC) — categorically rejects stunning. The others — such as Halal Certification Organisation and Halal Food Authority – permit stunning, subject to certain conditions including reversibility. The most fascinating argument of the HMC’s rationale is that, because “there is no pressure from the side of the government of the United Kingdom forcing Muslims to adopt [pre-slaughter stunning], […] the Halal Monitoring Committee has set a blanket ruling disallowing stunning in any form”. This is not religious freedom but a statutory vacuum. The state allows non-stun because some authorities demand it, whilst in turn those authorities demand it because the state allows it – a perfect circle that exposes the constitutional absurdity of allowing private belief to determine the applicability of law.
In refusing to afford all farmed animals the basic protection of pre-slaughter stunning, the state seeks to pass off inaction and equivocation as enlightened pluralism. One MP protested in the June debate that “labelling [halal and kosher] meat […] as inherently cruel not only is inaccurate, but will feed the fires of prejudice.” This is the managerial class in microcosm: its callow nihilism makes it contemptuous of the very notion of freestanding ethical principles, while the polestar of its day-to-day governance is a paralysing terror at the thought that its increasingly cramped and fractious subject peoples might turn on one another. Even its pretensions to pluralism are misconceived. Pluralism is not neutral, and is not the default state of human polities. It is a uniquely fortunate condition which blossoms or withers with the character and prudence of its custodians. Principled limits are not the enemy of pluralism but the condition for it.
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. 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.
82 per cent of sheep in Britain are now ritually slaughtered, and, astonishingly, 29 per cent are killed by halal non-stun slaughter
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. Non-stun slaughter accounted for 2.6 per cent of the total. If halal slaughter in Britain once served solely to satisfy the perceived religious needs of its Muslim population, this can no longer be said to be true. Instead, millions of non-Muslims in Britain now eat stun-slaughtered halal meat without realising that they are doing so — and, depending on the restaurants and kebab shops they go to, they might be unwittingly consuming non-stunned meat as well. How this state of affairs arose is an almost impenetrable question. Whether it would have come to pass if the public had been enabled, by a system of labelling, to make informed choices about ritually slaughtered and non-stunned meat, is a more interesting one.
82 per cent of sheep in Britain are now ritually slaughtered, and, astonishingly, 29 per cent are killed by halal non-stun slaughter. In 2018, the government celebrated the lifting of a ban on lamb exports to Saudi Arabia — a trade dominated by halal-slaughtered meat, much of it non-stunned. In 2022, 11,629 tonnes of halal sheep meat was exported — representing about a third of the meat of non-stunned sheep in the UK. This is a market being actively encouraged by the AHDB, which writes proudly of its “showcasing of British beef and lamb at key local and international halal food events [and] expos”. It becomes clear from this that the British state does not actually see non-stun slaughter as a regrettable evil (as it occasionally intimates), but as an exploitable opportunity.
Domestically, the non-stun exemption bleeds into public procurement and mainstream consumption. WATOK only permits non-stun slaughter where the animal is killed for “the food of Muslims” or “the food of Jews”. Yet over half of all cows slaughtered by shechita in 2022 were rejected for not meeting religious requirements but then deemed “fit for wider consumption.” In other words, animals killed in botched non-stun ritual slaughter are being sold to gentiles. Meanwhile, a 2018 survey of local authorities found at least seventeen serving non-stun halal meat in more than 140 schools, most of them not Islamic schools. 37 per cent of the meat provided to schools by The City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council is the product of non-stun slaughter. The commercialisation of the exemption has expanded it beyond recognition.
Retailers are central to stun-slaughtered halal meat’s permeation through the British meat market, although this issue is often misunderstood by campaigners who fail to distinguish stun- from non-stun slaughter. Major UK supermarkets (Asda, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Morrisons, Waitrose, M&S, Lidl, Aldi, and Iceland) require that all their own-brand meat be stunned prior to slaughter. What they typically do not specify is the type of stunning. As a result, suppliers can meet both the supermarket policy and many halal certifications by using reversible-stun ritual slaughter. This practice is widespread domestically and common in imported lamb. The vast majority of Australia and New Zealand’s lamb exports are halal, and such imports constitute 24.3 per cent of the UK sheep meat market. In the UK, according to the FSA, 54 per cent of sheep and 19 per cent of chickens are slaughtered using halal stun. Thus the immediate retail risk is not that supermarkets are flooding own-brand ranges with non-stun meat. The risk is subtler: the quiet ritualisation of supply chains. The increasing ubiquitousness of stun-slaughtered halal meat is not down to supermarkets alone. According to an NSS survey, many local councils buy halal-certified stunned meat for general menus, often without informing families or patients.
Because reversibly stunned halal-compliant meat opens export channels and appears to satisfy mixed markets, private and public contracts will continue to trend towards halal out of financial expedience, unless the arithmetic of incentives changes.
Ritual stun slaughter is not an animal welfare issue (since the animals were stunned) but a normative one: the state is procuring products of religious rites for citizens who may reasonably object, while providing no disclosure. The invocation — “In the name of Allah, Allah is the greatest” — is not a mere garnish. It consecrates the act of killing as a sacred rite. Sikhism explicitly proscribes ritually slaughtered meat, and St Paul recommends against it, but one needn’t be religious in order to object to involuntary incorporation into another’s ritual. Yet because labelling is not mandatory, consumers have no way of knowing whether the meat they buy was stun-slaughtered, nor whether it was ritually consecrated. The ramifications of this opacity are not just ethical but legal: it prevents individuals from exercising freedom of religion in the marketplace. When the product of ritual slaughter is sold without a label to secular consumers, the boundary between the sacred and the civic collapses. The state, claiming neutrality, becomes the distributor of a religious practice. A status quo maintained by Parliament ostensibly for reasons of tolerance, is in fact a system of quiet compulsion through the withholding of information.
Here is what we should do.
Firstly, mandatory labelling for all ritually slaughtered meat should be introduced. This alone will not solve the problem of the creeping normalisation of halal-stun meat, but will go some way to alter the balance of the skewed incentives which give rise to the present pattern.
More significantly, for the sake of animal welfare, Parliament should abolish the WATOK Schedule 3 exemption and require effective pre-slaughter stunning in all cases. This would not be revolutionary; it would merely bring Britain into line with other states that have banned non-stun slaughter and whose measures have been upheld by the European Court of Human Rights as compatible with Article 9. Where we should go further, however, is in banning imports of non-stun-slaughtered meat. We already know from grim experience that our politicians operate by the maxim, “Out of sight, out of mind”, but to permit the importing of non-stun meat would be to outsource cruelty while pretending to condemn it. A nation that presumes to moral seriousness cannot prohibit suffering at home whilst purchasing it abroad.
The burden on religious practice would be minimal; the benefits — to animal welfare, commercial transparency, and legal coherence — immense.
Britain can ban non-stun slaughter. The measure is legally available, administratively straightforward, and normatively overdue. It would reaffirm that our principles of animal welfare are not theatre and that pluralism does not mean the abdication of moral responsibility.
