🐑 The Shepherd's Betrayal

There’s a particular kind of blindspot that reveals what a movement truly worships - not what it claims to value, but what it will never criticise, no matter how flagrant the contradiction.

Animal welfare campaigners in Britain will hound a farmer for tail-docking a piglet without anaesthetic. They’ll march outside a laboratory that uses mice in medical research. They’ll lobby Parliament over the conditions of battery hens. But mention halal slaughter - the practice of cutting an animal’s throat while it is fully conscious, allowing it to thrash and bleed out over minutes - and suddenly the same campaigners discover nuance. Suddenly they’re very interested in “dialogue” and “community engagement” and “respecting religious practice.”

This isn’t nuance. It’s cowardice dressed in progressive language. And at the heart of it lies a betrayal so deep it’s almost spiritual.

What Actually Happens

Let’s be precise about what halal slaughter involves. The animal’s carotid arteries and jugular veins are severed with a single cut while the creature is fully conscious and unrestrained. The butcher is required to recite “Bismillah, Allahu Akbar” - “In the name of Allah, Allah is greatest” - over each individual animal as the blade goes in. The animal then loses consciousness over a period ranging from seconds to several minutes depending on species. For sheep and cattle, this process can be prolonged.

This is not a fringe assessment. The Farm Animal Welfare Council concluded that non-stun slaughter “causes severe suffering.” The British Veterinary Association has called for it to be banned. The RSPCA itself stated: “The RSPCA is opposed to the slaughter of any animal without prior stunning.” The science is not contested. And yet - the religious exemption remains. The volume of non-stun slaughter is growing. And the organisations that issued these statements have quietly dropped the political fight.

The animals cannot lobby. They cannot vote. They cannot accuse their advocates of abandoning them. So their advocates did.

The Pastoral as Theology

There is a reason Constable painted the Stour Valley, and Turner painted the English countryside, and not a factory floor. The shepherd with his flock is not merely a picturesque feature of British life - it is theological. It is the closest thing our culture has to a sacred image.

Psalm 23 does not say “The Lᴏʀᴅ is my manager.” It says shepherd. And for millennia, in Britain as in Israel, the shepherd was the lens through which we understood God’s relationship to humanity - patient, protective, present, never exploitative. Jesus takes the same image and deepens it: “I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11, NKJV). This is not sentimentality. It is the foundation of a whole ethic.

Genesis 1:28 gives humanity dominion over the animals - but the Hebrew radah is not the dominion of the conqueror. It is the dominion of the king who rules by protecting. Centuries of British animal husbandry developed within that framework, even after the theology faded from public view: you do not cause unnecessary suffering to an animal in your care. You honour the hierarchy of stewardship by exercising it well. You give it a clean death.

To allow animals to have their throats slit while fully conscious - while lines from an alien theology are recited over them invoking a different god - is not multiculturalism. It is the replacement of one civilisational framework with another, conducted quietly, beneath the cover of tolerance.

The Left’s Sacred Blindspot

The left’s silence on halal slaughter is not accidental. It follows a logic that produces all its other blindspots. Minority cultures must be accommodated; any critique of Islamic practice is coded racism; therefore the animal welfare argument - however scientifically airtight - must be suppressed or qualified into irrelevance.

The cognitive dissonance required to hold these positions simultaneously is extraordinary. An activist who has picketed a rodeo for animal cruelty, and who simultaneously defends the right to slit a lamb’s throat while reciting Islamic invocations, has not found a principled position. They have found a hierarchy of protected groups and are applying it mechanically. The lamb pays with its life for their ideological comfort.

Liberal support for halal slaughter is, in this sense, a spiritual failure. It is the substitution of social approval - the desperate need not to be accused of racism - for the actual moral commitments they claim to hold. The animal matters, right up until the moment it becomes politically inconvenient for it to matter.

The Policy Case

The solution is simple, and its benefits compound.

Ban non-stun slaughter in the United Kingdom - not just production, but importation. Any meat sold in Britain must come from an animal stunned before slaughter. No exemptions. No grace periods for “community adjustment.”

Norway did it. Iceland did it. Denmark did it. New Zealand did it. Switzerland banned non-stun slaughter in 1893 - one hundred and thirty years ago. These are not far-right experiments; they are the straightforward application of animal welfare principles, applied without fear of being called a bigot.

There is an additional consequence worth stating plainly: a significant portion of those who refuse to integrate into British life organise their resistance around precisely these cultural markers. Food is identity. A Britain that says “our animal welfare law applies to everyone, without exception” is a Britain making a statement about what it is and who belongs here. Those who find that intolerable will make their own choices. That is their right. The door opens from both sides.

The shepherd does not let the wolves dictate how the flock is kept.

“I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd knows His sheep.” - John 10:14 (NKJV)