If Rupert Lowe’s Anti-Halal Campaign Succeeds it Could Lead to a Ban on Country Sports

The independent MP Rupert Lowe, once part of the Reform stable until a tiff with Nigel Farage, has been waging a campaign this summer to have the halal slaughter of meat banned on the grounds that slitting the throat of a live animal is cruel and barbaric.

One of his recent Facebook posts on the subject said:

In a self-respecting Britain, halal slaughter would be outlawed. It doesn’t matter if the communities affected are too large, or it’s too difficult. We treat our animals with care and respect. We don’t slit their throats, and allow them to bleed to death in the most cruel and unnecessary pain. It needs to be banned – all non-stun slaughter needs to be banned.

He wants UK humanitarian standards, involving stunning before slaughter, to be imposed on halal and kosher meat.

Lowe, MP for the impoverished Norfolk constituency of Great Yarmouth, is also in favour of chucking all illegal immigrants out of the UK. In April this year, he co-sponsored an Early Day Motion in Parliament headed “Mass Deportation of illegal immigrants”, which expressed “grave concern at the continued presence of over one million illegal migrants in the United Kingdom” and called for “the Government to implement a comprehensive national strategy to identify, detain, and deport all individuals found to be residing in the United Kingdom illegally”.

So a cynic might believe the anti-halal campaign is in fact a clever ruse to deter uncompromising Muslims from coming to the UK. But even if Lowe did not co-sponsor the EDM with that in mind, it is easy to suppose that a great many people who are disturbed by the economic and cultural effects of mass migration, from predominantly Muslim countries, might see it as a great deterrent. And a wonderful way to look pro-animal rather than racist.

There are two problems with this. The first one is that, according to all the reports I’ve read, upwards of 80% of halal meat in the UK – the sort you see in all supermarkets now – is stunned before being killed. The likelihood is that more traditional unstunned throat-slitting is carried out privately in the poorer Muslim ghetto communities, where people tend to close ranks when nosy officialdom comes knocking at the door. Policing it would be extremely difficult.

The bigger problem I foresee, though, is that such a law could easily be co-opted to support the endless campaigns against shooting game in the UK. This matter was by no means settled by the recent vote by MPs against a ban on grouse shooting. That was not primarily about cruelty but about conservation.

The League Against Cruel Sports, Animal Aid and Protect the Wild are prominent examples of anti-field sports charities.

A great many Labour, Liberal and Green MPs – even some Tories – support their campaigns, publicly or otherwise, as do many journalists in all forms of mainstream media.

As Animal Aid (headed by the BBC TV presenter and anti-field sport fanatic Chris Packham) says: “Many birds will not receive a ‘clean’ fatal shot and may die a slow lingering death from their wounds, if they have not died on hitting the ground.”

It is undoubtedly true that the clean fatal shot is not always a given (although the slow lingering death is rare). I have been on a great many shoots myself and, though everybody who wields a shotgun in the field wishes it were not so, there are of course woundings as well as clean kills.

Often the creatures are effectively dead but showing reflexive movement caused by residual electrical activity in the nervous system. Sometimes, however, birds will be winged, hit the ground and convulse, or even run, until picked up by the gundogs. Nobody likes to see this, but the birds have minds of their own and can be unpredictable, making a clean shot difficult, and wind direction can be equally capricious – and of course the skill levels of the shooters themselves can vary.

This is where Rupert Lowe’s campaign against halal slaughter, if successful, could open a door to laws which ultimately change the countryside every bit as much as mass migration has changed so many of our inner cities. A ban on shooting would be an attack on communities and jobs in rural areas where shooting has been a way of life for well over 150 years.

And I see no reason why the campaigners would restrict it to game birds. Deer stalking occasionally results in woundings – a situation which all stalkers seek to rectify immediately, but there is undoubtedly suffering by the animal for a time.

It is perhaps worse with fishing, particularly the type known as angling, where there is no intention to eat the fish – it is ‘played’ and reeled in to maximise the ‘sporting’ element, before being released to have its mouth impaled another day (Labour has long supported angling, claiming, with no credible scientific evidence, that fish feel no pain).

Rupert Lowe likes to shoot game birds. He owns shotguns and employs a gamekeeper. Perhaps he likes to fish and stalk as well. Towards the end of that recent Facebook post, he wrote: “I don’t want millions and millions of animals to endure a wicked and brutal death.”

I hope, for the sake of all who enjoy country sports, he doesn’t live to regret those words.

Damien McCrystal is a former City Editor of the Sun.