Right and Meat So To Do

Last year I gave up meat for Lent - not that I eat very much anyway - though I'm not sure I will do the same this year. I was invited to dinner by a couple of resolutely carnivore friends and forgot to tell them my decision, and had to be served the only vegetarian option they had in the house, a tiny and hastily-defrosted supermarket quiche.

A number of my resolutely non-carnivore friends could be found a few days very vocally approving the decision of the Danes to ban ritual slaughter of animals . 'Animal rights come before religion', commented the Danish minister of food and agriculture, and as far as many people are concerned virtually anything comes before religion, let alone animal rights. This has suddenly found an echo in this country as the new president of the National Veterinary Association has called for religious slaughter of animals to be banned here too.

At the weekend, while preparing Sunday lunch (incorporating the leg of a chicken, in case you wonder) I found myself not bothering to turn off the Food Programme on Radio 4, a broadcast which annoys me as much as it occasionally interests me. I partly blame this on the lingering memory of its former presenter Derek Cooper whose near-recumbently laid-back delivery brought on, I found, a experience of mingled rage and somnolence. They do also go on a lot about artisan cheeses, and how the poor should go out and shop at farmers' markets and it would be so much better for them, and that sort of thing.

Anyway, on this occasion there was a feature on the astonishing Dario Cecchini, a Tuscan eighth-generation butcher and evangelist for traditional butchery. Here he is, as displayed on italianfinedining.it, in the middle of his 'act' - for act it very much is - in which he butchers a pig while quoting Dante. Sr Cecchini says that butchery is 'an ancient art, an art which in ancient times would have been practised by priests because it was their role to resolve the terrible dilemma of killing so that people could eat. They were the ones who carried the heavy responsibility of slaughter, but it came with a respect for the animals that provided the meat. Butchers are the link between life and death'.

I had never thought of it this way. The ancient ritual regulations on the slaughter of animals were intended to provide for the most humane death possible at the time, hedged and controlled by structure and form and only entrusted to technicians who, dedicated as they were to the God who controlled life and death, were supposed to approach slaughter with humility and care. That's what religious slaughter was supposed to ensure, for which any strictly ritual concerns with, for instance, draining the animal of blood, were just dressing.

But seeing it like this opens the possibility of change. Ritual forms of slaughter are no longer the best human beings can manage and, in the same way that we no longer expect religious professionals to be experts in the identification of infectious disease (as the Torah specifies), so we need no longer entrust animal welfare to religious regulation either. Banning ritual slaughter could be seen as a victory for the principle it was invented to safeguard.