Letter From Jenny Moxham about The annual slaughter of Eid festival
Letters From All-Creatures.org and The Mary T. and Frank L. Hoffman Family Foundation

Letter from Jenny Moxham
August 27, 2018

As published in The Nation (Thailand), August 27, 2018

Imagine picking up the morning newspaper and reading the headline “One hundred million massacred”.

I imagine you’d be horrified. But this is no fictitious scenario. This massacre actually occurred on August 21. But don’t search for the headlines. There won’t be any. There never are, because the victims of this massacre were camels, goats, sheep and cattle. 

Muslims portray the annual Islamic Festival of Sacrifice – or Festival of Eid – as a “joyful” celebration, but it is actually a festival of monstrous cruelty. I have just looked at a video taken in 2017 that shows a bull being “sacrificed”. After being dragged into a tiled area, his back legs and front legs were tightly bound together, causing him to fall heavily to the floor. Then all four legs were tightly bound together. As men laughed and took photos on their mobile phones, his throat was slowly cut open. As the terrified and suffering bull vocalised, heaved and struggled, the men leaned on him and a river of blood surrounded him. It was not a quick death.

Animal sacrifice was formerly a big part of the Hindu Gadhimai festival, but in 2014 the compassionate decision was made to end the practice. It’s high time Muslims did the same and relegated this brutal and archaic ritual – which inflicts so much suffering on innocent animals – to the Dark Ages.

— Jenny Moxham Monbulk, Victoria

Return to: Letters