to humans or not and where the soul resides in the physical body and
how to tell when the soul exits the body and death ensues has not
been critically examined from the point of industrial slaughter of livestock for meat and the welfare of the slaughtered livestock. The competent authorities in Islamic meat importing countries define death as
when the animal is completely still with none of its body parts moving.
The time it takes for this to happen is subjectively assessed and varies
widely. The concept of life, consciousness/sentience and the soul can
be understood from Islamic sources as depicted in Fig. 4. The soul or
the life-force is not a material thing, it is the spirit of God which He
breathes into each living being, and it has its own existence independent of the physical body (Masri, 1993). Death is the cessation of the biological processes due to the departure of the soul. This departure in
humans is facilitated by an angel and is a process not visible to anyone
outside the dying person. For non-human animals there is no consensus
on how the soul departs the physical body as to whether it is facilitated
by an angel or by God Himself — a view accepted by some Islamic
scholars (Saeed, 1997).
Scientifically, no official criterion of death of slaughtered animal has
been formulated. Terlouw, Bourguet, and Deiss (2016) in a recent review suggested that under the field or commercial conditions and following exsanguination, the absence of breathing and of brainstem
reflexes combined with adequate blood loss are sufficient indicators of
the irreversible loss of vital functions and death of slaughtered animal.
Borjigin et al. (2013) identified transient surge of synchronous gamma
oscillations that occurred within the first 30 s after cardiac arrest and
preceded isoelectric electroencephalogram that could be used to determine time of death for various species. Other approaches and opinions
regarding the issue and the basis upon which they were formulated
were previously reported (Farouk et al., 2013)