Eid: The Mozlem Mass Slaughter of Animals

"Eid-ul-Azha, a festival of great spiritual importance in the Islamic Lunar Calendar, has, according to Hamid Ahmad, Pakistan Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, now turned into an event dominated by commercial trading in animals (18). Almost all Muslims (male and female) who can afford to take part in the ritual, will kill, or have killed, a sheep or goat. As an option, says Ahmad, a cow or camel can be jointly slaughtered by seven Muslims. It is celebrated throughout the Islamic world.
This slaughter is described as 'ritual' by Ahmad. He says:
"This religious slaughter is connected with the Muslim festival of Hajj. At Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the largest annual gathering of Muslims takes place to perform the Hajj and the religious slaughter. On this occasion, in Saudi Arabia, the worlds largest slaughter of animals takes place, something like 2 million animals are slaughtered in three consecutive days. Millions of sheep, goats and other live animals are exported from Australia, New Zealand etc. to meet the demand."
Ahmad says:
"It is a religious preference that the person offering the animal sacrifice should make the cut to the jugulars...with his/her own hands. The second best choice is that the offerer must be present at the time and place of slaughter. Whilst the cut is made, Islamic verses are uttered and the animal is laid down with its face towards Mecca."

Other countries also import live animals for their annual requirements - eg France imports live sheep from Britain for the festival of Eid-el-Kabir.

Under EU law (Council Directive 93/119/EC), it is illegal to slaughter conscious animals outside licensed slaughterhouses. Yet at slaughter sites in France, the authorities turn a blind eye to the illegal killings which take place each year....
In March 2000, we visited one of the Eid-el-Kabir slaughter sites at Stains, near. Paris.

We took video footage of sheep being killed, skinned and disembowelled in front of one another. We filmed conscious sheep being held down and having their throats cut with blunt knives. It typically took several cuts to slice the animals’ throats and they took minutes to die.

The film shows animals being dragged around the shed by the leg, fleece and horns.

Animals waiting to be killed have their legs tied together with string and are left lying on the floor. Some sheep struggle and try to stand up. Others lie on the floor, exhausted and gasping for breath.
French police were at the entrance to the site but they did not watch the killing or make any attempt to prevent it from happening."

These sacrifices were in vain - because people did not follow the instructions of the Qur'an. The animals’ throats were not cut with a sharp knife. They could see one another and were not treated with kindness and consideration.

Article author Fuad Nahdi says that there is a need to reevaluate the annual sacrifice: “British Muslims are addicted to meat. It is estimated that, per capita, we eat at least twice the amount of meat consumed by the average Briton. Among one of the Prophet of Islam’s most succinct counsels to his community was warning them, ‘not to make your stomachs the graveyards of animals’. Most scholars have taken this as a warning against excessive meat consumption. If this is so the British Muslim community is dangerously against a basic Islamic teaching.” 
Read more on the history of animal sacrifice in UK here.