Mercy in the Hadith

The Qur'an sketches a theology in which animals are communities and signs; the hadith literature fills that sketch in with practical, often startlingly specific, instruction. Some of these reports are among the most widely known in the entire corpus — repeated in children's storybooks and Friday sermons alike — while others are more obscure, carrying weaker chains of transmission or narrower scholarly acceptance. Both kinds matter for an honest picture of what the Prophetic tradition says about how animals ought to be treated, and both kinds require care about grading, wording, and the limits of what a given report can be made to prove.

The thirsty dog and the imprisoned cat

Two paired narrations, both graded sahih and found in both Bukhari and Muslim, are usually presented together because they form a matched contrast: one rewards kindness, the other punishes cruelty, and in both cases the animal is one that classical society did not always hold in high regard.

Both reports are notable for what they refuse to make relevant. Neither hinges on the dog or cat's usefulness to humans, ownership status, or ritual purity (dogs, in particular, are treated with caution in matters of ritual purity within much of the fiqh tradition, which makes the reward for aiding one in this hadith all the more pointed). What each hadith foregrounds instead is the animal's basic need — for water, for food, for freedom of movement — and the moral weight of a human response to that need. Al-Nawawi's commentary on these reports treats them as establishing, at minimum, that withholding basic sustenance from an animal in one's power is a sin serious enough to warrant hellfire, and that providing it is a good deed serious enough to warrant forgiveness of prior sins — a striking symmetry given how minor the acts themselves (filling a shoe with water; failing to release a cat) might otherwise appear.

\u201cIn every living being there is a reward\u201d

The thirsty-dog report is often paired with, or cited alongside, a shorter hadith that generalises the principle explicitly.

"Moist liver" (kabid ratba) is an idiom for any living creature — a way of saying that the reward for kindness is not confined to a specific species or to animals of recognised utility. Commentators note that the hadith arose from a direct question about whether kindness to animals carries religious merit at all, and that the Prophet's ﷺ answer widens rather than narrows the category of beneficiaries. This report is frequently invoked as a general principle standing behind the more specific narrations that follow.

Ihsan in slaughter

Perhaps the most legally consequential of these hadiths concerns the manner of slaughter itself, since it is here that mercy and permitted use meet most directly.

This hadith is central to Islamic discussions of animal welfare precisely because it does not treat slaughter as ethically neutral simply because it is permitted. Killing for food is not in question in this report — the hadith assumes it will happen — but the manner of killing is placed under the same demand for ihsan that governs prayer, trade, and every other domain of life. Classical fiqh manuals draw from this and related reports specific rulings: the blade must be sharp, the cut swift, the animal should not see another animal being slaughtered, and it should not be dragged roughly to the place of slaughter. The Companion 'Abd Allah ibn 'Umar is reported to have rebuked a man for sharpening his blade in front of the animal to be killed, on the grounds that this multiplied its distress — a report often cited alongside Muslim 1955 as evidence that the Prophetic generation took the psychological experience of the animal, not merely its physical pain, as morally relevant.

This is precisely the ground on which the anonymous open letter circulated to Shia Muslims on the livestock industry presses its own case. The letter argues that industrial slaughter — animals moving through high-speed lines, often disoriented, injured or only partly stunned before the cut, having queued within sight and smell of others being killed ahead of them — cannot honestly be described as ihsan in the sense Sahih Muslim 1955 requires, and it puts the question directly: can killing at that speed and under that degree of animal distress still be called excellence? Its own answer is no. That is the letter's argument and its own reading of ihsan, not a settled ruling; mainstream fiqh has generally treated the validity of a slaughter as a separate question from the surrounding conditions of the facility, and no major Sunni or Shia authority has held that failures of ihsan in an industrial setting void the lawfulness of the meat produced there. See Slaughter and Stunning for how mainstream fiqh actually treats stunning and mechanised methods.

What the Prophet ﷺ forbade

Alongside positive instruction in ihsan, a cluster of hadiths records specific prohibitions.

These prohibitions target practices that were evidently current in seventh-century Arabia — using a tethered animal for archery practice, marking livestock by branding the face rather than a less sensitive part of the body — and in each case the Prophet ﷺ is reported to have intervened to stop them. A broader principle sits behind both: the prohibition of muthla, mutilation, whether of a living animal, a slaughtered carcass, or even (in a related and much-discussed set of reports concerning the treatment of enemy dead in war) a human body. Fiqh works typically treat muthla as forbidden regardless of the target, on the reasoning that it serves no purpose beyond causing suffering or degrading a body for its own sake.

The burnt ants and the grieving bird

A pair of related incident-reports, both preserved by Abu Dawud with parallels elsewhere, describe direct Prophetic reactions to specific harms witnessed on campaign.

Hadith specialists note that this composite report is transmitted with some variation in wording and chain quality across collections, and specialists differ on the precise grading of individual versions, though the core narrative is widely accepted and frequently cited by scholars writing on animal welfare, including al-Hafiz Masri. Its content is nonetheless doubly instructive: first, in the rebuke over the ants, which establishes fire as an especially severe form of harm reserved, by implication, to divine prerogative; second, in the command to return the chicks, which treats a parent bird's distress as morally legible and worth correcting even mid-journey during a military campaign, where such a detour was not strictly necessary to any military objective.

The camel that complained

A further widely cited, though less uniformly graded, report describes an encounter between the Prophet ﷺ and an overworked camel.

This hadith is one that scholars flag with more caution than the Bukhari/Muslim material above: its chains are discussed at greater length by hadith critics, and gradings range from hasan (acceptable) to weaker assessments depending on the specific route of transmission. It is nonetheless treated by many later scholars, including Masri, as broadly reliable in substance if not uniformly strong in every chain, and it is regularly invoked in discussions of the duty of the owner (rabb al-dabba) toward a working or productive animal — feeding it adequately, not working it beyond its capacity, and being answerable, in some sense, for its treatment.

Withholding water: an a fortiori argument

A further widely circulated report concerns the withholding of water from an animal. The open letter to Shia Muslims on the livestock industry cites a version of this report to al-Kafi, warning that whoever withholds so much as a small measure of water from an animal will be called to account before God. The general theme — that denying an animal water is a serious wrong — is well attested across the hadith corpus and sits comfortably alongside the thirsty-dog report discussed above; the letter's own precise wording, however, is presented as its rendering of the source rather than as a single, independently verified quotation, and should be read with that caveat. From this premise the letter builds what is, in form, a fortiori (qiyas awla) reasoning: if withholding a little water is grave enough to invite divine punishment, then, on the letter's argument, prolonged confinement, the wholesale denial of movement, permanent separation from mothers, and the unremitting low-grade pain the letter says are routine in intensive livestock systems must be graver still. That is the letter's inference, not a hadith in its own right, and its force depends on accepting the letter's contested factual description of how animals are actually kept — a description this site treats as the letter's claim rather than as an independently established fact.

The letter pairs this reasoning with a sira report it attributes to Manaqib Al Abi Talib: that on the march toward Mecca, the Prophet ﷺ posted a Companion, named in some versions as Ju'ayl b. Suraqa, to guard a nursing dog and her puppies from the road so that the army would not disturb or harm them. The same episode appears, with a different citation (al-Salihi al-Shami's Subul al-Huda), in the academic study by Mohsen Javadi and Asghar Masoudi on animal rights in Islam, which treats it as one of several sira reports showing the Prophet ﷺ acting to protect a mother animal and her young even where doing so cost the army time on campaign. Read as a report of the Prophet's ﷺ own conduct rather than as a legal text, it is invoked by both the letter and the academic study for the same underlying point: that mercy toward a mother animal and her offspring was treated as worth active intervention, not merely passive tolerance.

Hardness of heart and habitual meat-eating

A distinct strand of the open letter's case does not rest on a specific ruling at all but on a moral-psychological warning found across the Islamic tradition: that habitual, excessive meat consumption is said to harden the heart and dull spiritual sensitivity. The strongest textual anchor for this theme, cited by the letter, is a saying attributed to Imam 'Ali in Nahj al-Balagha, among the sayings collected as Hikam (Wisdom) 5 and related aphorisms, warning against letting the stomach's appetite for meat become a governing habit of one's life. Nahj al-Balagha is a compilation whose individual attributions and chains of transmission are discussed at length by specialists — some sayings within it are very widely accepted as authentically 'Ali's, others are debated — and readers should hold that variability in mind rather than treating every line in the collection as equally certain.

Two further sayings the letter and much popular literature repeat need a more direct caveat. The line "do not make your stomachs graveyards for animals" and the comparison "meat has an addiction like wine" circulate widely in devotional writing and online Islamic content, often presented as hadith without a specific citation. Careful review finds their provenance genuinely uncertain: neither is reliably traceable to a sound chain in the standard Sunni or Shi'i hadith collections, and specialists who have looked for their origin have generally been unable to confirm sahih attribution to the Prophet ﷺ or to a specific Imam. This page treats both sayings as moral exhortation of disputed origin rather than as proof texts, and readers should be sceptical of any argument, on any side of this debate, that leans its conclusion on either line as though it were established hadith. That scepticism does not erase the underlying theme — a concern that habitual indulgence in meat can crowd out spiritual attentiveness — which is attested, with better provenance, in Nahj al-Balagha's genuinely well-regarded material and in the broader ascetic strand of the Prophet's ﷺ own diet discussed below.

The letter also returns to the al-Kafi report on withholding water from an animal, discussed above, and extends it into an a fortiori (qiyas awla) argument of its own using a different, better-established hadith: the imprisoned-cat report (Sahih al-Bukhari 3318 and Sahih Muslim 2242), in which a woman is condemned for confining a cat until it died of hunger and thirst. If confining a single cat to death is grave enough to be named explicitly as a cause of hellfire, the letter argues, then the deliberate, lifelong confinement of animals bred and kept for the entirety of their lives in restrictive housing — never released to move freely, forage, or express basic behaviour — is at least as serious, and arguably more so, since it is sustained across a whole life rather than occurring once. The inference has real force as moral reasoning: the classical hadith condemns confinement without provision, and lifetime industrial confinement does not, on its face, look categorically gentler than the imprisoned cat. But it remains an inference the letter draws, not a hadith that addresses livestock housing directly, and it is worth noting what the analogy does not settle: the cat report concerns denial of food and water leading to death, a fairly narrow and extreme case, while housing conditions across industrial systems vary considerably, and provision of feed and water is standard even in the most restrictive confinement systems the letter criticises. The argument is stronger as a case for urgent welfare reform than as a case that the resulting meat itself becomes unlawful for the consumer. For how this fits into the wider argument, see the full step-by-step case.

The Javadi–Masoudi catalogue of prohibited harms

Alongside the open letter's advocacy, a genuinely academic study offers a more systematic hadith-based catalogue of the same territory. Mohsen Javadi and Asghar Masoudi's "Animal Rights from the Islamic Perspective," published in the peer-reviewed journal Pazhuhesh-ha-ye Akhlaqi in 1392 SH (2013), draws on both Sunni collections (Kanz al-'Ummal, Abu Dawud, Ibn Sa'd, al-Damiri) and Shi'i sources (Wasa'il al-Shi'a, Bihar al-Anwar, Jawahir al-Kalam, Nahj al-Balagha) to assemble a list of practices the hadith literature treats as harms to be avoided. It is worth being clear about what this study is and is not: it is an academic article situated in a Qom scholarly milieu, it assumes the lawfulness of riding, milking, slaughtering and sacrificing animals throughout, and it nowhere argues for vegetarianism or veganism. Its contribution here is a careful sourcing of the specific harms the tradition names.

Among the practices the study documents as forbidden or strongly disliked: branding an animal on the face, which the Prophet ﷺ is reported to have cursed on seeing a donkey so marked (Abu Dawud 3/26 no. 2564), with marking recommended instead on the ear; mutilation (tamthil) of an animal, cursed in a report given in Kanz al-'Ummal and Mizan al-Hikma; separating a mother from her young, illustrated by reports of a bird whose chicks were taken while she circled in distress, and by Imam 'Ali's instruction to his zakat collectors never to separate a nursing she-camel from her calf; milking an animal without leaving a share for her young, and more specifically milking "with long nails" so as to injure the udder, corrected in the Prophet's ﷺ instruction to Sawada b. al-Rabi' to trim his household's nails before milking; loading or riding an animal beyond its capacity, addressed in the six rights of a mount reported from Imam al-Sadiq's family chain (feed it, water it, do not strike its face, do not burden it beyond capacity, do not make it walk beyond its strength); and animal fighting, which Imam al-Baqir is reported to have disliked alongside castration and sterilisation of animals. The study calls such acts "ugly and satanic," language it grounds in Qur'an 4:119, where Satan boasts he will command people to alter God's creation by mutilating cattle. Read together, the Javadi–Masoudi catalogue and the hadith discussed elsewhere on this page point in the same direction: the tradition names specific, concrete harms rather than treating animal use as a domain outside moral scrutiny — while continuing to treat the underlying use, including slaughter for food, as lawful throughout. On how this catalogue compares with the letter's more sweeping conclusion, see Scholarly Voices and Animal Rights in Islamic Law.

The Prophet's ﷺ own table

Alongside these instructive reports, a large body of hadith material simply describes what the Prophet ﷺ himself ate, and it is worth including here because it is often invoked from more than one direction in contemporary debate. Numerous reports in Bukhari's chapters on food (Kitab al-At'ima) and on asceticism (Kitab al-Riqaq) describe a diet built around dates, barley bread, milk, and water, with meat appearing as an occasional rather than daily feature of the household's table; 'A'isha is reported to have said that the family of Muhammad ﷺ sometimes went a month without a fire being lit for cooking, subsisting instead on dates and water. At the same time, other sahih reports describe the Prophet ﷺ eating meat, including at feasts, sharing in the distribution of sacrificial meat, and expressing preference for particular cuts. Both sets of reports are well attested; the honest conclusion is that the Prophet's ﷺ pattern of eating was materially modest and meat-light by the standards of any era, and certainly by the standards of industrialised diets today, while meat itself was neither rejected nor treated as central to his personal practice.

Reading these reports responsibly

Both readings can claim genuine textual support, and neither requires distorting the hadith to make its case; the disagreement is less about what the reports say than about how far their underlying logic should be generalised to circumstances — vast confinement operations, mechanised transport, high-speed slaughter lines — that did not exist in the world these reports describe. What can be said with confidence is that indifference to an animal's suffering finds no comfortable home in this material. Whatever position a reader ultimately takes on meat, dairy, or animal products more broadly, the hadith corpus leaves very little room for the claim that how an animal is treated is simply outside the bounds of Islamic concern.

It is worth stating plainly where the open letter's use of this material lands relative to that discipline. The letter marshals a real and substantial body of hadith and sira material — much of it, like the ihsan-in-slaughter and thirsty-animal reports, sound and uncontested — to argue that meat, dairy and eggs are today haram. That conclusion is a minority advocacy position from an anonymous source with no institutional standing, not a fatwa, and not the position of any named marja' or hawza body; the letter's own closing section calls its conclusion an "ijtihadi fatwa," but that is a description the letter gives itself, not a status it holds. The overwhelming mainstream position, Sunni and Shia alike, continues to treat meat, dairy and eggs as permissible. Readers can judge the letter's own case for themselves at the open letter.