Halal or Kosher? Religious Animal Slaughter in Ireland

For years, the issue of religious slaughter has tended to be discussed in Ireland in the broadest and crudest possible terms. Halal and kosher are lumped together. Animal welfare concerns are dismissed as bigotry by some and treated as self-evidently decisive by others. The result is a debate that is heated and oddly out of date.

The numbers from the 26 Counties suggest something has changed. In 2020, 104,795 cattle and 940,529 sheep were slaughtered without pre-stunning under the religious derogation, a total of 1,045,324 animals. In 2021, the figure was 996,569. In 2022, it rose to 1,116,924. In 2023, it reached 1,140,752. Then the pattern broke. In 2024, the total fell to 569,938. In 2025, it fell again, dramatically, to just 116,502.

That is not a minor adjustment. It is a collapse driven overwhelmingly by sheep. Sheep slaughtered without pre-stunning in the 26 Counties fell from 1,034,292 in 2023 to 464,530 in 2024 and then to 60,998 in 2025. Cattle numbers also dropped sharply, from 106,460 in 2023 to 55,504 in 2025. This is far too large a change to be explained away as ordinary year-to-year variation.

So what happened?

The most plausible explanation is not that demand for halal meat collapsed, but that much of the halal sector moved from unstunned slaughter towards pre-stunning. That is certainly how Sheikh Dr Umar al-Qadri, an Islamic scholar and Director of the Department of Halal Certification Europe, reads the figures. When I put the numbers to him, he said they were “definitely consistent” with what he had observed himself. He described an abattoir that had once killed around 2,000 sheep a day without stunning, but later began stunning them “to make things easier” after concluding that pre-stunning animals was permissible under the halal standard in Ireland.

In al-Qadri’s account, this did not reflect a collapse in halal demand, but a change in practice. “The demand for halal meat market has only grown,” he said, “because not only has the domestic market for it grown, but so has the export market.” He also stressed that halal exports must comply with the standards of the destination country: “Halal meat exported abroad must comply with the regulatory standards of the country it’s being exported to. All countries with halal standards, with the only exception I’m aware of being Pakistan, allow for pre-stunning.”

That matters because one of the common assumptions in this debate is that halal necessarily means an animal’s throat is cut while it is fully conscious. It does not, and not just in Ireland either. The British parliamentary answer given to Rupert Lowe in March 2025 made that plain. In a survey of slaughterhouses in England and Wales, ministers said that 214.6 million animals were slaughtered for halal meat in 2024, of which 27.0 million were slaughtered without being stunned. In other words, about 87.4% of halal slaughter in England and Wales was pre-stunned.

That figure alone should encourage a rethink. The public impression is often that halal slaughter is essentially synonymous with non-stun slaughter. The official figures for England and Wales say otherwise. Most halal slaughter there is stunned. In the Six Counties, the picture is even

starker. In a February 2026 FOI response, DAERA said that all animals slaughtered at approved premises across the North of Ireland are stunned before slaughter. It also said that no approved premises there offer non-stun halal slaughter.

Taken together, those figures point in one direction. Across these islands, the centre of gravity in halal slaughter has shifted heavily towards pre-stunning. What the Irish figures seem to capture is not a stable traditional practice but a transitional one, especially in sheep slaughter, with the non-stun model giving way to a pre-stun model.

That, in turn, sharpens the moral question.

Irish veterinary opinion is hardly equivocal. Veterinary Ireland has said that “the slaughter of animals without prior stunning is unacceptable under any circumstances” and has called on the relevant Department to “stop the extensive use of slaughter without stunning as a priority.” PETA, in rather less measured language, has described ritual slaughter as “just cruelty by another name”.

It is easy to dismiss PETA as maximalist, and it can be difficult to dispute that it often is. But the broader point cannot simply be waved away. If the purpose of stunning is to spare an animal unnecessary pain and fear at the moment of death, then any system that leaves an animal conscious during the cut is bound to attract scrutiny. That remains true even if the number of animals killed that way is falling.

The halal side of the argument is not as straightforward as either its defenders or critics often suggest. Dublin-based media personality and Shia Muslim Siraj Zaidi, whom I spoke with briefly and informally, described himself as “mostly vegetarian”, and took a much stricter view, saying that “halal slaughter is never stunned”. That view is still held by some Muslims. But it is neither the only Muslim view nor seemingly the most common one, as reflected in regulatory data. Al-Qadri’s position was quite different. “As an Islamic scholar I would be in favour of pre-stunning as long as it does not cause death or stop the heart, thereby making the slaughter process easier for the animal,” he explained.

He also framed the issue in explicitly religious terms. “The only real difference between halal slaughter and non-halal slaughter,” he said, “is that in the case of halal, a Muslim is performing the slaughter and says a prayer saying ‘In the name of God, God is the greatest’ to effectively ask God’s permission to take a life, as we believe that all life is sacred and that a life can only be taken in very select circumstances, including for food.” He added that “the standards set by halal accreditation bodies involved input from numerous experts including Islamic scholars and veterinarians.”

For al-Qadri, the principle of minimising suffering is not foreign to halal but embedded within it. “The “Prophet “Muhammad told us to cause the animal as little suffering as possible,” he said. “That would mean things such as not killing animals in front of other animals, ensuring the knife used for slaughtering is kept sharp and that the animal isn’t stressed out.” In his account, the essence of halal lies not in refusing stunning, but in who performs the slaughter, the invocation of God’s name, and compliance with religious and welfare standards.

That definitional dispute is more than a narrow theological question. It affects the statistics themselves. If officialdom counts pre-stunned meat as halal, but some Muslims reject that categorisation, then people speaking about “halal slaughter” may be speaking about two different things at once. One side hears “halal” and thinks of a religious certification category, the other hears it and thinks of a particular method.

Al-Qadri also drew a distinction between halal and the older Sunni doctrine concerning slaughter by the People of the Book. When I asked him about the view, still held by some Muslims, that meat in Ireland is generally permissible because it is slaughtered by or under the rules of the People of the Book, he replied: “I would agree with the majority Sunni view that while slaughter from the People of the Book is permissible, this is for Kosher only in this day and age,” because Christians, in his view, “do not slaughter as People of the Book.”

Kosher slaughter, or shechita, is different. Here the controversy remains much more intact as the practice does not permit any method of mechanical pre-stunning. Shechita UK, a group based in Britain which advocates on behalf of kosher slaughter, maintains that shechita is itself humane. Shimon Cohen, speaking on behalf of Shechita UK, told me that kosher slaughter accounts for “tiny tiny numbers”, about 0.3% of all animals slaughtered in England and Wales. Shechita UK has used the same figure publicly, citing the Food Standards Agency’s 2024 Slaughter Sector Survey.

The 0.3% figure matters not just because it shows how relatively small the kosher sector is, but because, when set beside the much larger and mostly pre-stunned halal sector, it underlines how misleading it has become to treat halal and kosher as one uniform issue.

There is, however, one further Irish complication. Deli 613 in Dublin told me that its kosher meat is sourced from Europe, much of it apparently slaughtered in Poland, as well as via a supplier from Britain which also sources beef from Poland. It also said there had been substantial kosher slaughter in Ireland, mostly for export, until 2020, when it stopped and has not resumed. If so, the matter in Ireland is now less one of current local shechita than of imported kosher meat and the standards under which it is produced.

This matters because the welfare issue is not just whether the animal is stunned, but also how it is restrained. Britain’s regime requires upright restraint for cattle in religious slaughter. Some continental systems have historically used rotating or inversion restraints instead. PETA, in one of its interventions on the issue, specifically called for an end to “inverted restraining devices” in favour of “a more humane, upright pen”, noting that such equipment had been ruled out in Britain on humane grounds. The criticism of rotary and inverted restraint is not simply that the animal may remain conscious after the cut, but that inversion and harsher restraint may themselves increase distress and suffering. Defenders of shechita, however, have contested some of those welfare claims and argued that criticism of older restraint systems has often been used to attack the practice more broadly. Even if little to no kosher slaughter is taking place locally in Ireland, imported meat may still connect Irish consumers to practices taking place elsewhere.

On the central welfare controversy, Cohen was emphatic. Shechita UK has also recently pointed to newly published peer-reviewed literature it says supports its case, including a 2025 paper it

summarised as showing that cerebral blood flow in cattle falls below 5% within seconds of the shechita cut. When asked whether Shechita UK accepted that there can be a variable interval before loss of sensibility after the cut, especially in cattle, Cohen replied by stressing that what outsiders interpret as signs of consciousness may not be what they seem. “Involuntary spasms,” he said, “without knowledge it looks horrid, with knowledge it is not as horrid.” When pressed on whether concerns about that interval were essentially exaggerated, his answer was blunt: “Massively overstated.” He said that the law requires the animal to be rendered “insensitive to pain as quickly as possible” and also said that “someone shoots the animal if it doesn’t die quickly”. In his view, “this is our method, how we must do it, it is one of the most humane methods.” He also argued that stunning itself is hardly free of suffering: “Stunning is not instant. A captive bolt is painful, CO2 gassing takes minutes, waterbath stunning causes immense suffering.” In his view, “RSPCA and other animal welfare groups push some nonsense that stunning is about animal welfare. It’s not. It’s just ignorance.”

In short, Shechita UK’s position is not simply that shechita should be tolerated, but that it is a humane method of slaughter and that its critics understate the suffering associated with conventional stunning.

The standard defence of the current legal exemption is religious liberty. Al-Qadri himself, despite favouring pre-stunning, brought up that he would not support banning shechita when it was mentioned in my conversation with him. “While I am in favour of pre-stunning animals before slaughter, we are not calling for unstunned slaughter to be banned,” he told me. “We may disagree with it, but I think it’s important that it isn’t banned, for the sake of religious liberty and diversity.” That view exists and clearly carries weight for some. But the numbers now raise a question that is harder to avoid than it was a few years ago.

If most halal production has already shifted towards pre-stunning, if approved slaughterhouses in the Six Counties do not carry out unstunned slaughter at all and if the remaining non-stun segment is smaller, narrower, and far more exposed than before, then the practical meaning of the exemption begins to change. It is no longer a broad accommodation for a growing sector of religious meat production. It is increasingly an exemption for a more limited and contested practice.

That does not automatically settle the matter. Nor is it clear that the case against unstunned slaughter is quite as straightforward as mainstream discussion often suggests. There is, after all, a wider ethical argument about whether killing animals for food can ever be wholly unproblematic, whatever method is used. But it does alter the balance of the argument. The more the market itself moves towards pre-stunning, the less persuasive it becomes to present unstunned slaughter as an unavoidable feature of modern pluralism. The more the practice contracts, the more plainly the question stands. What, exactly, is being defended, and how should that be weighed against the welfare cost to the animal?