Case Studies: Europe, the Americas and Africa

The two companion pages in this series look at the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia. This page completes the survey begun on What the Investigations Show by turning to Europe, the Americas and Africa — three continents whose animal-agriculture systems are connected to the Muslim world less by geography than by trade, regulation and, in one case, an unresolved legal argument about what counts as an acceptable limit on religious practice.

Three very different stories

It would be a mistake to treat "the West" and "Africa" as single blocs here. The European Union is tightening welfare regulation for confined animals while simultaneously restricting how Muslims and Jews may slaughter them. The United States runs some of the largest and least visible confined feeding operations in the world, staffed by a workforce whose vulnerability was exposed starkly by the pandemic. Brazil is clearing forest to grow cattle and soy that end up, in significant volume, on halal-certified plates in the Gulf. And in the Horn of Africa, a form of animal keeping exists — pastoralism — that this whole series has otherwise had little occasion to discuss, because it is not industrial at all.

EU cages and End the Cage Age

Caged confinement remains standard across much of EU egg, rabbit and some pig production, despite decades of incremental welfare reform. In 2020–21, the "End the Cage Age" European Citizens' Initiative gathered more than 1.4 million verified signatures calling for an end to cage systems for laying hens, sows, calves, rabbits and other farmed species across the Union [1]. The European Commission responded by committing, in principle, to propose a phase-out, but implementation has been slow and contested, with the organisations behind the initiative pursuing further legal action to press the Commission to follow through. The episode is a useful illustration of a point made throughout this series: public concern about confinement is not confined to campaigning websites: it is now capable of mobilising a formal EU legislative mechanism, even if translating that concern into binding law has proven slow.

The stunning disputes: Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands

At the same time, several European jurisdictions have moved to restrict slaughter without prior stunning, which affects halal and kosher slaughter as classically practised. Denmark banned slaughter without stunning outright in 2014. Belgium's Flemish and Walloon regions followed with regional bans that came into force in 2019, permitting ritual slaughter only with reversible stunning that does not kill the animal. Muslim and Jewish organisations — including the Coordination Committee of Belgian Jewish Organisations and several Muslim umbrella bodies — challenged the Belgian bans before Belgium's Constitutional Court, which referred the case to the Court of Justice of the European Union. In December 2020, the Grand Chamber of the CJEU ruled that EU law permits member states to require reversible, non-lethal stunning even in the context of ritual slaughter, and that this did not amount to an unjustified interference with the freedom of religion protected by the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights [2][3]. The ruling did not ban ritual slaughter outright — it upheld a specific requirement for reversible stunning alongside it — but Muslim and Jewish groups involved in the case described it, at the time, as a serious curtailment of religious practice, while animal-welfare organisations and the Belgian regional governments described it as a proportionate welfare measure. The Netherlands has seen a related, longer-running political debate over similar restrictions without reaching the same binding outcome.

US CAFOs and line speed

The United States raises the overwhelming majority of its meat and poultry in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), a regulatory category defined chiefly by scale and waste output rather than by welfare standard, and slaughters it in plants that, for decades, have operated at some of the fastest processing-line speeds in the world. Yale School of Public Health research on the pandemic period found that the US Department of Agriculture had granted line-speed waivers allowing some poultry plants to process birds faster than standard federal limits, even as those same plants became sites of major COVID-19 outbreaks — raising the question of whether speed, worker spacing and disease transmission were connected [4].

Meatpacking labour and the pandemic

The clearest documented harm from this period fell on workers rather than consumers. A peer-reviewed analysis described US meatpacking plants during 2020 as "sacrifice zones," arguing that a largely immigrant, low-wage workforce bore disproportionate infection risk because of close-quarters line work, inadequate protective equipment and employer pressure to keep production running [5]. A 2021 US congressional staff memorandum found that coronavirus infections and deaths among meatpacking workers at the five largest companies were nearly three times higher than the companies themselves had previously disclosed [6]. A 2023 Government Accountability Office report concluded that federal regulators had still not resolved the underlying worker-safety hazards that the pandemic exposed [7], and CDC's own outbreak investigation of a South Dakota pork plant in early 2020 documented one of the earliest and most severe single-site outbreaks in the country [8]. This material belongs as much to the labour-justice discussion on Workers and Justice as to the animal-welfare discussion here, and the two should be read together: a system organised around speed and throughput tends to externalise risk onto whichever party has the least power to refuse it, whether animal or worker.

Brazilian cattle and soy in the Amazon and Cerrado

Brazil is the world's largest beef exporter, and cattle pasture expansion remains a leading driver of deforestation in both the Amazon and the drier, biodiverse Cerrado savanna to its south. A widely cited PNAS supply-chain study traced the deforestation risk embedded in Brazilian beef exports back to specific ranches and municipalities [9], and Trase's 2023 analysis found that deforestation linked to pasture expansion for beef increased by roughly 60% between 2016 and 2020 despite zero-deforestation commitments made by major producers [10]. This matters directly to Muslim consumers because a large and growing share of this beef is halal-certified and exported specifically to Middle Eastern and North African markets: reporting has described Brazil displacing Australia and New Zealand as a leading Gulf supplier, with around 40% of Brazilian beef exports to Arab countries already carrying halal certification [11]. Brazilian environmental researchers at Imazon have gone further, analysing dozens of Amazon-region slaughterhouses licensed to export to MENA markets and finding that essentially none demonstrated adequate control over deforestation risk in their own supplier base [12][13]. The halal mark on this beef verifies the slaughter; it says nothing about the forest the cattle's pasture may have replaced, a gap discussed in general terms on Halal Certification.

Horn of Africa: live export and pastoralism

Somalia, Ethiopia's Somali Region, and Sudan supply large numbers of live sheep, goats, cattle and camels to the Gulf, much of it timed around Hajj and Eid al-Adha demand. Unlike the industrial systems described elsewhere in this series, this trade sits on top of genuine pastoralist livelihoods: mobile herding across arid and semi-arid rangeland, practised by communities for whom livestock sale is a primary source of cash income rather than an industrial commodity chain. Feinstein International Center research at Tufts University found that live-export earnings are unevenly distributed across pastoralist wealth groups, with better-off households capturing most of the benefit, but that the trade overall remains a critical part of rural Horn of Africa economies [14]. Periodic Gulf import bans, usually imposed over disease concerns such as Rift Valley fever, have historically caused severe, well-documented economic distress in exporting regions when they hit, as reporting on Ethiopia's Somali Region has shown [15]. More recently, recurrent drought linked to climate variability has been reported as compounding market disruption around Hajj-season demand for Somali livestock exports [16].

The ethical picture here is genuinely different from the rest of this series, and it is worth saying so plainly. Pastoral husbandry — herding animals across open rangeland, moving with the seasons, milking and occasionally slaughtering from a herd whose animals live largely as they would without human intervention — is close to the model of animal use the classical Islamic sources actually had in view. The welfare concerns that arise in this trade are concentrated overwhelmingly at the export stage — loading, sea transport, conditions at Gulf ports — rather than in the pastoral system itself, which is a genuinely different case from a confinement feedlot or broiler shed and should not be flattened into the same critique.

West African poultry imports

In the opposite direction, several West African countries — including Ghana, Senegal and Cameroon — have seen frozen chicken imports, much of it originating from intensive European and Brazilian poultry operations and sold well below the cost of local production, expand rapidly enough to undercut and, in some regions, substantially displace domestic smallholder poultry farming. This is less a story about animal welfare at the point of production than about how the price advantages of industrial confinement systems in one region can hollow out a very different, far less intensive form of animal agriculture elsewhere — smallholder poultry keeping that, in West Africa as in the Horn of Africa pastoral case above, does not resemble the industrial system this series otherwise describes.

An Islamic-ethics reading

This region's case studies pull in more than one direction at once, and the honest response is to let them. The Belgian and Danish stunning disputes turn on haqq Allah, the right belonging to God that the classical requirement of a specific, unstunned method of slaughter is usually understood to protect; European courts have held that a state's welfare interest can justify limiting how that right is exercised, and Muslim and Jewish communities affected by the rulings have disputed that balance. Nothing here resolves that dispute; it is a live legal and political argument, not a settled one, and readers should treat it as such.

La darar — no harm, no reciprocating harm — bears directly on the pandemic-era meatpacking record: a system that increased line speed while a documented respiratory disease spread through a workforce with no realistic ability to refuse the risk is a fairly direct case of harm imposed on the vulnerable for the sake of throughput, and it sits alongside, not beneath, the animal-welfare concerns usually foregrounded in this series. Fasad fil-ard, corruption on the earth, is the most natural category for deforestation driven by cattle pasture and feed-soy expansion in the Amazon and Cerrado, particularly where — as Brazilian researchers found — the export licence chain shows no real control over whether the beef came from newly cleared land; a Muslim buyer relying on a halal mark alone has no way to know whether the animal they are eating stood on a forest two years earlier.

The Horn of Africa material is a useful corrective to any temptation to treat this whole series as a case against animal husbandry as such. Pastoralism is not industrial animal agriculture, and the concept of ihsan in animal care — space, movement, natural food, a life recognisably like the one the animal would otherwise live — describes the pastoral herd rather more closely than it describes a broiler shed or a gestation crate. The harms documented in this region cluster where pastoralism meets the industrial export system, at the point of loading and sea transport, not in the herding itself. That distinction matters for the argument made on Is Factory-Farmed Meat Haram?: whatever conclusion a reader reaches about industrial confinement, it should not be assumed to extend automatically to every form of animal husbandry practised in the Muslim world today.