Labelling meat as "stunned" and "not stunned"

The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union recognises animals as “sentient beings” and requires the EU and its Member States, when formulating and implementing their policies in certain key areas, to pay “full regard to the welfare requirements of animals”. The European Commission explains that: “This puts animal welfare on equal footing with other key principles, i.e. promotion of gender equality, guarantee of social protection, protection of human health, combating discrimination, promotion of sustainable development (…). Nevertheless, is well known that the EU regulatory frameworks are based upon conflicting principles: animal welfare considerations vs. human rights issue. EU legislation deals with animal welfare during slaughtering, but allows derogations; in force of them, ritual slaughter is performed without previous stunning, even though the first legislative provision concerning the welfare of farm animals, enacted in 1974, required animals to be stunned (rendered unconscious) before slaughter. Furthermore, there is not any Regulation making mandatory food labelling on how an animal was slaughtered and whether the animal was pre-stunned. The value of product labels is both practical and ethical, according to the ethical implications of food choices. We can argue that implementing ethic traceability of food entails creating a new kind of civil society, that could be recognized as ‘ethically competent’. In this perspective, EU laws need to be strengthened very considerably before they can be viewed as a fully comprehensive set of legislative measures, positive promoting animal welfare and also aware citizens. If on the one side labelling meat as “stunned” or “not stunned” could be an important way to problematize the consumption of meat, on the other side it could be risky both for human and animal ethics. In fact, if the need for this kind of labels will be pursued as a “single-issue campaign”, isolated from the more wider context to which it belongs, it could “encourage the idea that what some group does is worse than what the rest of us do” (Francione). In this sense labels would promote segregation among humans and, at the same time, sustain the false idea that what a group does of “better” - i.e. stunning - serves as a justification for not criticize its practices. In the case of ritual slaughter the comparison among different traditions is far than clear. Traditions promoting ritual slaughter - as Jewish and Islamic - seems to prolong the sufferance of animals but, at the same time, they provide a conceptualization of animals as God’s creatures whose lives do not belong to humans but to God (Patton - Foltz). Therefore their slaughter needs to be inserted inside a sacral contest. On the contrary, Western tradition and its secular way to look at animals promotes a shortening of the pain of slaughtering but at the same time it looks to animals from an instrumental point of view. Being aware of the quandary emerging from the comparision of these different practices, labelling meat could be a way to help consumers to reflect on the provenience of their meats, only if this innovation will be sustained by campaign investigating animal lives and not human traditions.