If we all ate halal, would it make any difference?

There’s been a tempest in a soup pot this week with the PQ claim that meat in Quebec is mostly halal, an issue that echoes a recent kerfuffle in France. It’s not been entirely clear whether the problem is that halal slaughtering is (or can be) less humane than what we do anyway, or if there’s some obscure objection to eating an animal that somebody said a Muslim prayer over as it died. La Presse looks at the weird hypocrisy of the claim, given that regular old battery chickens are not exactly treated well either, and Voir has a couple of columns on the same topic. Rima Elkouri tries to calm the hysteria.