1,721,128 research outputs found
Labelling meat as "stunned" and "not stunned"
No full textThe Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union recognises animals as “sentient beings” and requires the EU and its Member States, when formulating and implementing their policies in certain key areas, to pay “full regard to the welfare requirements of animals”. The European Commission explains that: “This puts animal welfare on equal footing with other key principles, i.e. promotion of gender equality, guarantee of social protection, protection of human health, combating discrimination, promotion of sustainable development (...).
Nevertheless, is well known that the EU regulatory frameworks are based upon conflicting principles: animal welfare considerations vs. human rights issue.
EU legislation deals with animal welfare during slaughtering, but allows derogations; in force of them, ritual slaughter is performed without previous stunning, even though the first legislative provision concerning the welfare of farm animals, enacted in 1974, required animals to be stunned (rendered unconscious) before slaughter.
Furthermore, there is not any Regulation making mandatory food labelling on how an animal was slaughtered and whether the animal was pre-stunned.
The value of product labels is both practical and ethical, according to the ethical implications of food choices.
We can argue that implementing ethic traceability of food entails creating a new kind of civil society, that could be recognized as ‘ethically competent’.
In this perspective, EU laws need to be strengthened very considerably before they can be viewed as a fully comprehensive set of legislative measures, positive promoting animal welfare and also aware citizens.
If on the one side labelling meat as “stunned” or “not stunned” could be an important way to problematize the consumption of meat, on the other side it could be risky both for human and animal ethics. In fact, if the need for this kind of labels will be pursued as a “single-issue campaign”, isolated from the more wider context to which it belongs, it could “encourage the idea that what some group does is worse than what the rest of us do” (Francione). In this sense labels would promote segregation among humans and, at the same time, sustain the false idea that what a group does of “better” - i.e. stunning - serves as a justification for not criticize its practices.
In the case of ritual slaughter the comparison among different traditions is far than clear. Traditions promoting ritual slaughter - as Jewish and Islamic - seems to prolong the sufferance of animals but, at the same time, they provide a conceptualization of animals as God’s creatures whose lives do not belong to humans but to God (Patton - Foltz). Therefore their slaughter needs to be inserted inside a sacral contest. On the contrary, Western tradition and its secular way to look at animals promotes a shortening of the pain of slaughtering but at the same time it looks to animals from an instrumental point of view.
Being aware of the quandary emerging from the comparision of these different practices, labelling meat could be a way to help consumers to reflect on the provenience of their meats, only if this innovation will be sustained by campaign investigating animal lives and not human traditions
Ritual slaughter : legal and theological inconsistencies
No full textWhen speaking about ritual slaughter, we should take into consideration the respect of both specific cultural-religious differences and animal welfare. Although disapproving of a particular cultural custom risks discrimination, potentially, it is equally dangerous to approve all othered cultural practices in the name of tolerance, without considering justice. In this specific case, it is also paradoxical to promote a particular kind of slaughter as “more merciful” (read: “more just”) since we are still talking about killing a living being, that is, an animal for non-necessary goals: humans do not need meat in order to survive. In the light of these contradictions and aware of the interests that are at play, in this presentation we will try to delineate the paradoxes and contradictions in the actual European legislation about slaughter and ritual slaughter, moving from a legal and theologian point of view.
Religious slaughter has been performed in Europe for centuries alongside conventional slaughtering (the one that involves preslaughter stunning). Relevant legislation of the European Union, such as the Council Directive 93/119/EC on the protection of animals at the time of slaughter or killing (1993), deals with animal welfare during slaughtering but allows derogations so that Member States can retain the right to authorize religious slaughter without prestunning in their own territory under official veterinary involvement. There are principally two types of religious slaughter: the Muslim method for Halal meat and Shechita for obtaining Kosher meat for Jewish consumers. However, some considerable variations in current practices produce confusion about the rules regarding religious requirements; regulatory frameworks are based upon conflicting principles (animal welfare considerations vs. human rights issue).
So there is a need for reviewing religious requirements as well as the pertinent legislation, with particular reference to obtaining information relating to current guarantees of animal welfare offered in the field of religious slaughter.
It is proposed:
• a synthetic analysis of current literature concerning academic and public debates on religious slaughter compared to conventional slaughter and on animal suffering and standards for protection;
• a reflection on the controversial and fiercely debated area of the ultimate slaughter of sentient beings: if it is to meet economic and consumer demand more than the same dogmas, that induces Governments to accept ritual slaughter as a right of religious freedom, up to permit deviation from the requirement to stun animals prior to slaughter.
Moving from a theological perspective, the discussion on ritual slaughter will be con- ducted on the base of two concepts: compassion – which is a fundamental regulation of the three Abrahamitic religion – and justice. Considering some notable passages from Torah, Qur’an and the New Testament we will try to show the futility and also impiety of killing animals for food, especially in a society where non-cruel food is not only easily available but also environmentally and socially recommended
Teaching animal ethics to understand animal welfare
No full textThanks to higher consumer expectations that animals in the production process are treated with appropriate care, there has recently been a significant increase in the attention given to issues related to animal welfare across Europe. For this reason, from the 60s onwards several attempts to define a concept of welfare that applies to animals reared for human ends have been made. Providing veterinary students with ethical frame- works and teaching them a correct approach to animal welfare will help integrate science-based knowledge about animals and preferences with ethical values, which will strengthen ethical welfare vocabulary and reasoning skills of future practitioners
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Accurate modeling of integrated multilayered optical devices by TLMIE method
No full textIn this contribution we introduce the 3D full-wave TLMIE method for the analysis and design of complex devices in the area of integrated optics. Theoretical results are compared to measured data, showing very good agreement. We than provide design criteria for the optimization of the device
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
- …
