Don’t expect the animals are going to be too excited with the court’s ruling!

A ruling that carnivores can really “sink their teeth into”!

Yet another example of how the law is utterly unable to cope with crime when religion rears its ugly head. If slaughtering animals is illegal, it’s illegal. Period. If Mr. Merced’s need to spill blood in the name of religion is that important to him, his proper recourse is to leave the U.S. and find some place that welcomes this form of religious practice. I truly don’t understand what the problem is: religion is not a license to ignore the laws that apply to everyone else, and that applies to Santeria, mainstream religions, or Cthulhu worship.

“religion is not a license to ignore the laws that apply to everyone else”
So, its illegal to kill animals in the US?
And there’s too much we don’t know here to offer outright condemnations. I mean his method of slaughter may be significantly more humane than that behind the animals slaughtered for the meat Americans buy in their grocery stores (which wouldn’t be that hard considering how inhumane that is). How do we know he doesn’t consume meat from these sacrifices? In which case, is it so evil to have a religious ritual involved in the slaughter of an animal you intend to eat?
I personally think its hypocritical to call this evil and then turn a blind eye to the American system of grossly inumane animal slaughter.

One more point I forgot:
If hunting for sport is legal in this country, then why should what this guy is doing be illegal?
I mean….. going out and shooting various animals with no intent to eat them for personal fun = good and legal, while
Killing animals to follow the dictates of a religion that’s been around for thousands of years = bad and scary

Sticking to the non-religious terminology, this man slaughtered animals for non-commercial purposes. Hands up to all the hunters that have skinned, prepared, and/slaughtered the animals you killed. Now all those who didn’t have licences, keep you hands up.

My question is this: Where does he obtain the animals?
If he goes to a farm, buys a chicken, sacrifices it and then eats it, well that’s no so different from scarfing down chicken McNuggets, except that he cuts out the middle man and adds a religious element to the whole thing.
But is that what he’s doing? Or is he quietly stealing and then killing neighborhood pets? I wish the article went into more detail about this aspect of it.

Sorry, perhaps I should have been clearer. First, I am a vegetarian (for combined reasons of health and support of animal rights), and I would like to see meat consumption decline and fade away as a relic of the past.
But as for this news item, here is why I oppose the court decision:
Slaughtering livestock for food is a legal form of business, using animals for biomedical research is officially permitted, and sport hunting is licensed. I personally object to all of these activities and have spoken out against them for the past 30+ years. But I recognize that the nation as a whole still considers meat part of a standard diet, still believes that vivisection is relevant to human health, and still thinks a man ain’t a real man unless he goes off into the woods with a high-powered rifle and blows away critters.
Even so, individuals are not generally permitted to go around slaughtering animals just because they feel like doing it. So, using the same analogy I used in the cases involving Bible-besotted parents who chose prayer over medical care while their sick children died, I will ask: if an avowed atheist who killed animals in the back yard just for the fun of it would be arrested and convicted, then so should a person who kills animals in the name of religion.
If religious people are allowed to do things that non-religious people would be arrested for doing, then we have two sets of laws (or at least two standards of enforcement) based on religion–and that seems like a clear violation of the 14th Amendment and the principle of equal justice under the law.

Just so you know, I’m also a vegetarian (over 12 years now) and I personally find animal sacrifice distasteful. But, just stepping outside my own feelings here and looking at what we as a coutry legally allow people to do to animals already, I can’t help but see someone who earnestly wants to sacrifice animals according to the dictates of his/her religion to be less of an evil than hunting for sport.
As for the hypothetical ‘atheist in the back yard’ you mentioned, I wonder if intent doesn’t count here. I mean this atheist is presumably doing this for no other reason than sadism. The same isn’t true with practitioners of Afro-Caribbean religions.

In many areas of the country we have replaced/removed the former top predators so I do believe without human hunting pressure some species, such as deer for starters, would expand beyond where it’s healthy for them and tolerable for us. So it is reasonable to encourage people to take up guns or bows and be predators, as we surely were to some extend in days of serious yore. And of course many of us, even perhaps with trepidations, do want meat in our diets.
But as for killing animals in or behind our homes, there are health issues that perhaps should and no doubt do reach the level of passing laws. So we get back to the issue of religion vs the public good. I don’t know the answer but probably the governmental unit should be required to demonstrate a need for such laws in any case and perhaps in the case like a ceremonial killing where the meat is eaten or disposed of immediately the laws could be laxer. Many of us have taken fish home and cleaned and eaten them and surely broken no laws.
I’m sure we don’t want a house with bloody bits scattered about and not cleaned up, but probably there are such houses anyway and I’m not aware of house police. So I seem to be coming down on the side of the Santerian provided he doesn’t cause anyone to get sick.

Does intent matter? Did the devout morons who prayed while their sick children died for lack of basic medical care intend for their children to die? No! They are nice people, honest, sincere, generous–and they stood by and watched as their children died, and they remain convinced that they did what they had to do. Does their good intent excuse them? You may say that slaughtering a chicken is hardly in the same class as allowing a child to die, but if that is the issue, where do we draw the line between crimes we will or won’t excuse in the name of religion? And which religion? And what happened to equal protection under the law?
People who break the law do not get a pass on the basis of being religious lunatics.

I thought this was illegal to kill turtles in America for any reason.
But, this is Texas. Recently on the news a politician fr. TX, said something about something other than Santeria, and he smiled and said, “We do things differently in Texas”. They are very proud of this fact of being different.

The sign one is greeted with on the border entering Texas, at least in the area I entered from the west, was “Don’t Mess With Texas”. Not welcome, just don’t mess with them.

Israel has suffers from religious practices related directly to the slaughter of Israeli’s.
America suffers religious from religious practices related to the slaughter of chickens.
By comparison, there is broad historical and cultural consensus concerning the problems presented by the former and minor political and philosophical problems with the latter.
But why does this difference exist?
Is morality involved? Whose? How do you know morality is involved?
Since all laws have roots deeply set in morality, why should either be illegal? Why should laws change for one case but not the other?
Who ya gonna’ call?
Even Ghostbuster’s can’t answer this call.

Guess they could call “Chicken Man”. Unless any of you were in Baltimore in 1976 or 1977, you probably won’t know who that is…a radio charactor on a morning show. Just thought I’d answer GC’s question about who one might call.