Counting Sheep

by Philip Walling

  Now I think I understand it better. It was partly the waste that shocked and upset them; they were sickened by the profligacy of the destruction. They reared their animals to feed people, not to have them incinerated on huge pyres. Many had bred and nurtured their livestock over generations, they were their whole life, and when they were destroyed in a day they suffered a wrenching bereavement.

  The slaughter came at a dark time for farming, when prices were so depressed that farmers were selling their sheep, wool and cattle at less than the cost of production. There is no doubt that the compensation saved many struggling livestock farmers and transformed the businesses of many more, injecting a good deal of capital into the countryside. But there was also a barely expressed, because it is hard to express, but deeply felt, unease about the whole business. Coming, as it did, so early in the new century, there was feeling that the epidemic and the slaughter held a sacrificial, even apocalyptic, significance and, in some vaguely understood sense, was a blood sacrifice. But for what?

  I do not know whether there was any deeper element of sacrifice about the slaughter, but I do know that many of the animals lost their lives unnecessarily. A pedigree sheep breeder told me that none of his sheep had the disease until he found a pair of slaughterman’s white hooded overalls that had been thrown over the hedge into one of his fields. Then less than twelve hours later he had a phone call from DEFRA to inform him they understood his farm might be infected and they were coming to test. Others, miles from any infection, found cow tongues that had been thrown into their fields amongst grazing animals, and they received the same quick response from DEFRA that resulted in their animals being slaughtered.

  We might think that sacrifice, particularly blood sacrifice, belonged to a primitive, pre-rational world that has been abolished by modern enlightenment. At the heart of sacrifice is the offering to a divinity, in propitiation or praise, of something of great value to the offerer. Although there are bloodless sacrifices, of artefacts, food or drink (libations), the most powerful and enduring have always involved the spilling of blood, preferably innocent blood, and very often, in the Abrahamic tradition, the blood of sheep, preferably lambs.

  The mythical and mystical references to sacrificial sheep in our history and culture go back into prehistory. The lamb, especially a white lamb, is the symbol of renewal, tenderness, sacrifice and innocence. In Jewish, Christian and Muslim symbolism the lamb is the perfect sacrificial victim. The Jewish sacrifice of the Passover lamb, the Islamic sacrifice of a lamb at Ramadan, and the sacrifice of Christ, the Good Shepherd, who died on the Cross as the ultimate sacrifice to redeem the world. Christianity fulfilled the Old Testament prophecy that a suffering messiah would be like a lamb led to the slaughter.

  But blood sacrifice as part of a religious rite has been practised by nearly all cultures across the world from very earliest times. This impulse for blood sacrifice would appear to be something deep within humanity which requires expression and which if denied in one form will find another. And the one perennial victim of blood sacrifice in Europe and Asia has been the poor sheep.

  Although the God of the Old Testament required animal sacrifice, it was only as a temporary covering for sin until he should send his Son to shed his blood as the ultimate, perfect sacrifice to end all sacrifice, for as St Paul said, ‘without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness’ (Hebrews 9:22). Animal sacrifices were commanded by God so that the individual could experience forgiveness of sin. The animal served as a substitute – that is, the animal died in place of the sinner, who was thereby forgiven, but only temporarily; that is why the sacrifice needed to be offered over and over again. But for Christians animal sacrifice ceased with the coming of Christ as the ultimate sacrificial substitute for all eternity (Hebrews 7:27).

  At the heart of her great account of travelling in the Balkans in 1937, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West describes the sacrifice of two black lambs on a rock in the Sheep’s Field on the Plain of Kosovo, the sacred place of the Serbs. The ancient rock, where sacrifice was made, had candles stuck in every crevice and was stained red-brown with the blood of a thousand years of sacrifice and gleamed with the drying blood of the cockerels and lambs that had been killed there during the previous night.

  A father circled the rock three times, then kissed it, and handed up his little daughter to a man standing on the rock, climbed up himself and watched as another man took a little black lamb to the edge of the rock and drew a knife across its throat. A jet of blood spurted out ‘and fell red and shining on the browner blood that had been shed before’. The father had caught some of the blood on his fingers and with it he made a circle on the child’s forehead. The sacrifice was then repeated.

  A bearded Moslem standing by the rock explained that the father was doing it because his wife had got his daughter by coming to the rock and sacrificing a lamb and ‘all children that are got from the rock must be brought back and marked with the sign of the rock’. West was revolted by what she saw as an abominable practice ‘of shedding innocent blood to secure innocent advantages’. Of inflicting pain on ‘something weaker than themselves’.

  She shuddered at the primitive belief that ‘if one squares death by offering him a sacrifice, one will be allowed some share in life for which one has hungered. Thus those who had a lech for violence could gratify it and at the same time gain authority over those who loved peace and life.’ She was disgusted that the slaughterer of the lamb was very well pleased with the importance his cruel act had given him and she thanked God that Christianity denounced this cruelty, ‘the prime human fault which the military mind of Mohammed had not even identified’.

  England has long prided itself on its concern for animals. Even though an animal was to be slaughtered, English law required that it be treated as humanely as possible and spared any unnecessary distress and suffering. This usually meant animals were stunned before slaughter, either electrically, or with a captive bolt fired from a pistol that entered the brain and retracted, killing them before their throats were cut. But for many years an exemption was allowed for ritual religious slaughter, which was intended to satisfy Jewish demand for kosher, or shechita meat. This exemption allowed the killing, by cutting their throats without stunning, of about 1 per cent of the sheep then slaughtered in Britain. Many were uneasy about cutting an animal’s throat without stunning it, but as long as it was a minor exception to the rules, it was tolerated.

  The Jewish tradition was adopted, almost without modification, by Islam. In Arabic an animal sacrifice is called dhabihah or qurban, and in Islamic law is the prescribed method of ritual slaughter of all animals. It consists of a swift deep incision with a sharp knife across the throat which is intended to cut the jugular veins and carotid arteries, but leave the spinal cord intact. The animal has to be fully sensate when its throat is cut and while it is being bled to death, otherwise its meat is haram (forbidden) as carrion.

  When the first Muslims came into Britain they took advantage of the kosher exemption to provide themselves with halal meat. However, over the years, as the Muslim population of England and Wales has increased (now 5 per cent) so has halal slaughter, so that half of all the sheep now killed in Britain are slaughtered in accordance with the prescriptions of Islam.

  Abattoir owners say that about 90 per cent of these are stunned first by passing an electrical current through their heads, which renders them temporarily insensate, but does not kill them. But this is a suspiciously round figure, and Rizvan Khalid, a director of Euro Quality Lambs, a Muslim abattoir, was honest enough to admit that even though he says most of the lambs killed in his abattoir are stunned, he would prefer non-stunning. This does not give much confidence that stunning will always be done if the inspectors are not looking. For most Muslims pre-stunning satisfies the Islamic requirement that the animal should be alive when it is bled. Most of the other 50 per cent of the sheep that are killed in accordance with the animal welfare regulations are also back-stunned, which invol
ves passing a second electrical current through their body which stops the heart, or shot with a captive bolt. Muslims will not accept this because they consider that it kills the animal and makes it haram.

  On 1 January 2014 the EU Regulation 1099/2009 Welfare of Animals at the Time of Killing (‘WATOK’) superseded the old 1995 Welfare of Animals (Slaughter or Killing) Regulations (‘WASK’).

  Article 3 of WATOK requires that ‘animals shall be spared any avoidable pain, distress or suffering during their killing and related operation’.

  Article 4 (1) says ‘Animals shall only be killed after stunning in accordance with the methods and specific requirements … set out in Annex 1.’ The methods of killing referred to in Annex 1, which do not result in instantaneous death (simple stunning) have to be followed as quickly as possible by a procedure ensuring death, such as bleeding etc.

  However, where animals are slaughtered by ‘methods prescribed by religious rites’ the requirements of paragraph 1 do not apply provided that the slaughter takes place in a slaughterhouse.

  The regulations are in force across the EU, but national governments are free to make their own rules that add to the protection of animals and do not reduce the effect of the regulations. Poland, Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, Sweden and New Zealand have banned slaughter without stunning and Finland, Denmark and Austria require the animal to be stunned immediately (almost simultaneously) after its throat has been cut if it has not been stunned before.

  In Britain, the Farm Animal Welfare Council, which exists to advise ministers how to promote humane treatment of animals, recommended that slaughter without stunning should be banned, as did many other bodies, including the British Veterinary Association and the European Federation of Veterinarians. They all condemned as cruel the killing of an animal by cutting its throat, because it caused ‘avoidable pain, distress and suffering’. The process of bleeding out takes time: the animal has to held immobile for at least twenty seconds for sheep, and two minutes for cattle, while it bleeds to death, and the regulations dictate that it is not supposed to be moved during this period. This need to give each animal a period of individual attention makes it difficult to automate the process.

  Research by Compassion in World Farming also highlighted a phenomenon slaughtermen call ‘ballooning’. After the throat is cut, large clots of blood can quickly form at the ends of the carotid arteries, slowing the rate of blood loss and delaying the drop in blood pressure that causes the merciful loss of consciousness. As many as 62.5 per cent of calves suffered from ballooning. John Webster, professor of animal husbandry at the University of Bristol, emphasised that in religious slaughter fear afflicts an animal just as much as pain. ‘What is totally unacceptable is the distressing fact, for the cow, that she is conscious of choking to death in her own blood.’ Nonetheless, the exemption for religious slaughter remains.

  For those sheep that are only head-stunned there is no practical difference between slaughter that is halal or haram. But there is a spiritual difference which is important to Muslims. In order to be halal sheep have to be killed by either a Muslim or ‘a person of the Book’ (a Christian or a Jew) and, whoever does it, he must dedicate the animal’s life to Allah by reciting over it as it is dying, ‘In the name of Allah, Allah is great.’ Some insist that during the process the animal is also turned east, to face Mecca. Others insist that the animal must not be killed within sight of another animal, or see the knife that is about to cut its throat.

  It is not as if the adherents of the two religions which seek to take advantage of the exemption can agree amongst themselves on how to kill animals. Orthodox Jews insist on shechita meat, Reform Jews do not and the Board of Deputies of British Jews is quoted by Nick Cohen in an article in 2004 for the New Statesman, saying that the overall attitude of Judaism is best summed up in the twelfth chapter of the Book of Proverbs: ‘A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast.’

  Islam is even more confused. A recent report on halal slaughter by EBLEX, the body that promotes the beef and sheep industries in Britain, highlighted the widely different understanding of halal slaughter by everyone involved. Of the forty-one abattoirs doing halal slaughter, only fourteen were willing to participate in the survey, raising the suspicion that there were more abattoirs that did not stun than would admit to the practice. There was no generally accepted definition of halal slaughter. It certainly did not seem to turn on whether the animals were stunned, because many abattoir owners stunned their animals because they admitted that it was better for their welfare. It is certainly not prohibited by Islam to stun them, so long as they are not considered to be dead when they are bled. Many consumers were prepared to accept the word of a Muslim butcher that the meat was halal. It seems that the essential factor was that the slaughterman be a Muslim and say the correct prayer over the dying animal.

  There is no Koranic prohibition on stunning. For example, all lamb slaughtered in New Zealand has to be stunned first, yet it sells huge quantities of sheep meat to the Muslim world. In Britain the Muslim market for halal sheep meat is about 20 per cent of the whole but the relatively small share of the market that is non-stunned meat seems to be increasing. Many people I spoke to were unwilling to talk about it, even though they thought it was cruel. Some farmers were anxious not to spoil the Islamic market for their old ewes, which they feared would collapse if they caused too much fuss about not stunning. But as stunning is acceptable to all but a small hard-line element in Judaism and Islam, its prohibition could hardly be interpreted as oppressive to minorities, or racist. Rather, it would be perfectly consonant with European concern for the welfare of animals, some of which appears to be shared by most of those who insist on halal slaughter.

  It is hard to find out whether or not the meat we buy is halal slaughtered, and even more difficult to know whether it comes from an animal that has been stunned before having its throat cut. Many in the meat trade, including many Muslims, feel that it ought to be made mandatory to label meat as halal, stunned or non-stunned, so that consumers can make an informed choice. After all the fuss about the alleged cruelty to the small number of foxes that were killed by dogs during fox hunting, it is disappointing, to say the least, that few are prepared to raise the same outraged opposition to the tens of millions of farm animals that have their throats cut without stunning in ritual slaughter every year. A disagreeable smell of double standards comes from the animal rights movement, which is against the shooting of pheasants, most of which are dead before they hit the ground, and their relative silence over religious slaughter. It is beyond argument that cutting an animal’s throat without stunning causes ‘pain, distress or suffering’ that could be avoided if it was stunned first.

  Non-Islamic consumers have little idea where their meat comes from and many British people seem not to care too much. In any case, as they can’t quite reconcile the meat on their plate with the death of an animal, they would rather put the subject out of their minds. The disturbing thing about it is that many people involved simply will not talk about halal slaughter; they seem inhibited to say aloud what they think, for fear of upsetting religious sensibilities, or being accused of being ‘racist’.

  The government and other authorities that could ban slaughter without stunning are no better at discussing it. Many Christians and, interestingly, Sikhs are firmly against throat cutting before stunning for sincerely held religious reasons. And many secular liberals passionately oppose it because they feel it to be needlessly cruel. The National Secular Society has been particularly vocal in its opposition to the suffering of the animals involved. In the end, it comes down to the question of which sensibilities, religious or otherwise, are to take precedence, because they can’t all be given equal weight. In the meanwhile, much suffering that could be avoided goes on.

  14

  THE MODERN AND THE FUTURE

  The more alfalfa [Major Major’s] father did not grow the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new
land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce.

  Joseph Heller, Catch 22

  FARMING FACES FORMIDABLE CHALLENGES. THOUSANDS of farmers, as small primary producers, are economically weak in the face of a few powerful buyers and traders. Farmers have little control over the prices they receive and to survive they have to use considerable ingenuity in keeping down their costs and fi nding new ways to use their land. This is nothing that they have not faced and conquered in the past, and they are astute at finding ways of dealing with it.

  Over the last half-century the national flock has become younger and more prolifi c as breeders have responded to the growing demand for lamb meat. They would once have kept geld ewes for their wool, and wethers for their wool and mutton, but these have largely disappeared from our pastures. This demand for ever younger, leaner and smaller lamb carcases seems a profligate waste of sheep’s lives, requiring ewes to have the largest possible litters of lambs, which are then killed at what our forebears would have considered absurdly young ages. Many never reach six months, and few make it to a year old. Consumers are missing out on the delights of eating grassfed mutton, which is a superior meat to the often bland lamb that supermarkets offer, especially the kind of lamb that has been fattened on cereals.

  But farmers can only produce what people will buy. So as tastes change breeders have responded by producing ever leaner and more muscled types; pushing the boundaries into the development of breeds that would have impressed and amazed Bakewell. This skill of pedigree breeders, and their readiness to innovate, makes British sheep still the best in the world and is nowhere seen to better effect than in the new meat breeds of which the Texel and the Beltex are supreme examples.

  Texels originally come from the island of that name, off the coast of Holland. The breed may have a Roman origin, and, like the other Dutch breeds that conquered the world in the second half of the twentieth century, the Friesian and Holstein dairy cow and the Landrace pig, they are practical manifestations of domestic livestock that make no concessions to beauty. I am willing to concede that there is beauty in their functionality, although I’m not sure I can appreciate it, but they display such a depressing worldliness of purpose that the joy I could get from rearing a cussed old Herdwick, or a stately Lincoln Longwool, would elude me if I found myself shepherding a flock of Texels.