FOR ‘THE party for the Animals’, with its two seats in the Dutch parliament, yesterday’s vote to ban Jewish kosher and Islamic halal methods for animal slaughter represented both a triumphant vindication of its values and a real political achievement for the tiny group. And yet for many Dutch people, credit and blame will actually go to right-wing maverick politician Geert Wilders. He had no hand in the Bill but his campaign against Islam has set a context for the debate that transformed an animal rights issue into another battle in the ongoing war against toleration of cultural difference in immigrant communities.
The Dutch, it has to be said, are not the first. Bans exist in Switzerland, Iceland, Luxembourg, Norway and Sweden, while New Zealand introduced one and then retreated, and a lively debate is under way in Australia.
The challenge, like the debates in France on the public wearing of the veil, or Switzerland’s ban on minarets, is how a pluralist society reconciles freedom to practise religion with other, arguably, equally important core values, in this case animal rights.
And in truth there is no easy, one-size-fits-all answer. The space we allow religious practitioners – what the courts call their “margin of appreciation” – is a function of the relative value we place on the conflicting rights. Clearly the right to life trumps a religiously inspired imperative to kill wayward cartoonists, while, at the other end of the scale, democracies reconcile themselves without problem to the coexistence of systems of religious schools.
When it comes to cutting the throats of conscious animals, most people find the practice unnecessarily cruel and would wish to ban it. But many, albeit uncomfortably, will see the issue as occupying that grey area of necessary compromise to accommodate cultural difference. “For us, religious freedom stops where human or animal suffering begins,” the Party for the Animals argued. But both Muslims and Jews insist, though not unanimously, that ritual slaughter – shechitah for Jews – is not just a tradition, but a religious requirement, and that stunning before killing is not acceptable. They see the bill as a xenophobic bid to marginalise immigrant communities.
In the real world degrees of tolerance of religious or ethnic minority practices are a function of the extent to which issues like the veil or shechitah become proxies or ciphers for a growing broader intolerance and prejudice. The Dutch Bill, however worthy, will feed that climate, deepening suspicion and division.