That helpfully illustrates my next point, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that. Statistics produced by the Food Standards Agency on the number of mis-stuns are a requirement under legislation and—recent parliamentary questions have asked about this—they show that an unrealistically low number of mis-stuns have been reported in the UK. For example, in 2011, just six cattle were officially reported as having been mis-stunned. My hon. Friend will accept that that is an unrealistic number, too. Following a series of follow-up questions to the Department, the previous Minister conceded that those statistics may not be complete and may represent only a fraction of the actual numbers. I look forward to the Food Standards Agency reviewing its reporting methods.
Many researchers believe, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North said, that shechita is at least as humane as other methods, if not preferable in light of the animal welfare benefits, although others, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), believe that conventional animal slaughter is preferable. However, there is agreement that making any assessment of the pain felt by an animal is incredibly difficult. As a result, the Government’s position has always been that the scientific evidence in this area is inconclusive. No study has ever replicated shechita in a laboratory environment, and therefore no accurate scientific assessment of shechita has ever been carried out. It seems incongruous to me to presuppose that consumers do not have a right to know that an animal has been slaughtered by mechanical methods, or mechanically stunned prior to slaughter by one of the legal methods that I have mentioned. All of those, including the mis-stunnings, as I have said, are supposed to be recorded in slaughterhouses but are not. Labelling a meat product as not stunned before slaughter suggests that no stun takes place at all, when shechita in fact incorporates an effective stun at slaughter.
Some Muslims accept stunning as being consistent with halal, provided that the stun only renders the animal unconscious but does not kill it. That means that the animal will be alive but unconscious at the point of throat cutting. It will die from loss of blood, not from the stun. It is crucial for Muslims that the stun does not kill the animal, so they want to be assured that the stun is recoverable—that if the stun was not followed by throat cutting, the animal would recover consciousness.
I believe that labelling meat as not stunned before slaughter is pejorative and discriminatory, because it effectively places religious slaughter methods in a second-class category. I call on the Government to end the constant criticism of religious practices by introducing comprehensive food labelling, or rather by producing religious food labelling. The EU strategy on animal
welfare from 2012 to 2015 states that the Commission plans to study the issue of labelling meat that comes from animals that have not been stunned before slaughter. The study is likely to be published shortly. I urge the Government to seek the introduction of a fully comprehensive food labelling scheme, and not simply to use the half-truth about “meat from slaughter without stunning”.
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