Belgium Bans Religious Slaughtering Practices, Drawing Praise and Protest - Sensationalist Headlines

Then regulate mandatory stunning, don't fuck over religious groups just because you can. You know as well as I do the entire point of this ban is not to reduce suffering to the animals but to screw with particular minority groups because they're other people than the majority. The normal methods of butchery are honestly just as brutal and violent as the Halal and Kosher methods, and at worst they offer the animal maybe seconds more of suffering than normal methods. If you don't want animals suffering, don't eat meat.

That's asinine. Just because animals can suffer doesn't mean that all animal suffering is equal.

The law requires animals be stunned before slaughtering so it's essentially that. I agree that the differences in suffering between halal and non-halal slaughtering seems to be negligent to non-existant but at the same time I can't really see why stunning the animal actually goes against proscribed religious law.

A) most fundie groups reject stunning because they're fundies B) stunning is still not a complete killing, just a basic anesthetizing before killing them, whereas halal specifies that the animal has to be alive while being bled out. So it's not really the same thing.

That's... exactly what's happening here though? Pretty much all the wording in the article implies that they removed the possibility of getting religious exemptions from the stunning requirements. There's nothing saying that halal/kosher slaughter is banned. They're just not allowed to kill animals without stunning them first.

I was unschooled (neglected, anything I wanted to do) from the ages of 9-16. My parents tried to get me to go to school but I had an extreme anxiety disorder and refused, and they didn't really force me. If I hadn't gotten mental help I might've been fucked, but I did, and made up freshman/sophomore year of highschool up with online classes in the last two years. I graduated with a 3.8 GPA, and am in my second year of college in a full relationship. It's odd, because I know the isolation was damaging to me, but my entire social identity was the 'smart kid' and even at 21 now most of it is just an extension of that. In my six year isolation I taught myself to read and write using forums on the internet, learned about a great deal of things that many call me knowledgeable for now, and in general developed a large intellectual curiosity about a variety of subjects. It was odd, because I lived a life of constant terror of growing up just to live in my mom's basement, and the reason I never went back to school was because I thought I'd be too stupid to learn due to me not having gone to school..... But those insecurities drove me to learn as much as I could. All in all, I'm not sure what to think of the experience. I think the school system can desensitize people to the wonder of learning since it's not of their own volition, but I also think school should be mandatory and noone should go through the tortuous isolation I did.

It's French, not Belgian though.

Complaining about the specifics of the slaughtering of animals is beside the point when it comes to caring about their well-being. Why care so much about the last few seconds of their lives, but not give a shit about the rest of it? Especially when most of them are born and raised in appalling conditions, halal or not? Feels like a lack of proper priorities to me.

It's possible to care about both. I don't see why pursuing one should mitigate the other.

Well, it evidently does when it comes to law. Regulatory slaughtering methods are basically the most humane they can get compared to what used to be the norm a few centuries ago, but when it comes to the everyday life of animals, the opposite is true.

And Belgium is the second largest consumer of foie gras in the world.