THERE are some religious-freedom arguments where even the time-honoured principle of “live and let live” fails to provide democracies with any easy answers. One such dispute concerns animal slaughter. It is an issue which can create unlikely coalitions, uniting Muslims and Jews (who share certain beliefs about how animals should be killed for meat) against an odd combination of animal-lovers, secularists and the nationalist right.

Belgium, a country which has more than its share of inter-faith and inter-communal tensions, is the latest place where slaughter methods have come under scrutiny. The legislature in Belgium’s French-speaking south has just voted to ban the killing of animals without stunning (ie, anaesthetising) them first. According to classic Muslim or Jewish teaching, animals should be killed by a single cut to the throat, administered while the beast is in a healthy state. Representatives of Belgium’s 40,000 Jews and 600,000 or more Muslims said the vote sent an extremely negative signal to religious minorities.

Although the matter is highly sensitive for both faiths, Muslim religious authorities have in recent times allowed slightly more room for compromise. Some Islamic legal pundits accept the idea of prior stunning as long as the animal remains healthy before the blood is drained. In other words, the stunning must be light and death must still be caused by rapid blood-letting.

That grey area helps to explain a proposal adopted by the main parties in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking north of Belgium, in March. As of 2019, they resolved, it should be illegal in that region to slaughter smaller animals such as sheep and chickens without prior stunning. For cattle, however, it is harder to administer a stunning blow without also causing death. So the Flemish politicians resolved that cattle should be stunned immediately after the throat-cutting, until such time as a reliable method of non-lethal stunning before bleeding was developed.

Doubtless that was seen as an attempt to meet religious concerns half-way. However the response from both the affected religions to developments across Belgium has still been grumpy. Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, called the francophones’ move “the greatest assault on Jewish religious rights in Belgium since the Nazi occupation of the country in the second world war”.

European Union law generally requires stunning before slaughter but it allows member states to make exceptions for religious communities. American law and jurisprudence also make explicit provision for killing animals according to religious precepts. But Sweden and Denmark, both EU members, insist on anaesthetising before slaughter. Residents of those countries who want meat that is produced with other procedures must import it from elsewhere. Soon, it seems, Muslims and Jews in Belgium will be in a similar position. By contrast, Germany’s constitutional court has upheld the right of people to slaughter beasts in accordance with their religious beliefs.

The gallery of characters and organisations that have weighed into this debate is impressive. David Cameron, Britain’s former prime minister, once said he would have no objection to eating halal meat, produced according to Islamic principles. In 2015, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) vowed to ban slaughter without stunning. UKIP’s current leader Paul Nuttall has backed off that pledge but a ban is still favoured by some of that party’s senior members. Marine Le Pen, the defeated candidate in this month’s French presidential election, is another politician of the nationalist right who supports a ban on killing without stunning.

In Britain, non-stun slaughter is opposed on ethical grounds by the British Veterinary Association (whch gathered more than 100,000 signatures in support of its view), and also by the National Secular Society, whose campaign director Stephen Evans says that “in 21st-century Europe, there is no good reason why animal welfare should be subservient to religious dietary rules.”

In many European countries, the debate is particularly charged because many initiatives to ban religiously based slaughter, both during the Nazi era and well before it, had an unmistakably anti-Semitic tinge. Slaughter by the shechita (traditional Jewish) method was outlawed in Germany soon after Adolf Hitler came to power. But there is also one example of a powerful Jewish voice which was raised in opposition to all animal slaughter: the writer and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was a staunch vegetarian. He once said: “As long as human beings go on shedding the blood of animals, there will never be any peace. There is only one little step from killing animals to creating gas chambers.”