Vegans shouldn’t be afraid of condemning Halal slaughter

An animal rights activist has exposed extreme cruelty at a slaughterhouse in Arley, Warwickshire. Joey Carbstrong’s secretly recorded footage shows staff slamming sheep hard onto concrete floors, dismembering sheep while they are still alive and playing recordings of wolves to the terrified animals as they were dying.

The shock here is not just the cruelty itself: repeated investigations have found hideous savagery in UK abattoirs. When the animal welfare group Animal Aid secretly filmed inside eleven randomly chosen UK slaughterhouses several years ago, their undercover researchers found clear evidence of cruelty and law-breaking in ten of them. 

Then last year, the broadcaster Chris Packham quit as president of the RSPCA after cruelty was exposed at some of the charity’s approved list of abattoirs. I’ve written about these issues for the past decade and I can give it to you straight: forget any fantasy of animals being gently put to sleep – what goes on in slaughterhouses is frequently much, much worse than you could ever imagine.