A schoolboy and his mother have been convicted of cruelty after carrying out the ritual slaughter of three sheep.
While the teenager agreed to accept a one-month suspended sentence from the Austrian court, his mother, from Turkey and who has lived in Austria for 16 years, refused to accept community service until she could ask her husband for permission.
She had also tried to negotiate with the judge so that she could pay money instead, but gave in when she was told that the only alternative was jail.
The Austrian-Turkish youngster, aged 18, who was not named and who lives with his family in the southern city of Graz, had butchered three animals on a nearby farm by cutting their throats with a sharp knife as a way of giving thanks for the fact that his father had recovered from a bout of illness.
The young student, who was 17 when he committed the crime, had called several local farmers and asked about sheep offered on the Internet. His family had wanted the sheep to celebrate the father’s recovery, and that meant they needed to be sacrificed in the traditional way.
The farmers agreed to the sale, and the young man wanted to kill them there to avoid a mess back home. He told the court: “I laid them on the ground and my mother held the legs behind, then I said a quotation from the Koran and closed the sheep’s eyes.”
He then cut the throats of the animals before they were loaded into the car. It took two or three minutes for the animals to bleed to death.
The defendant said he was unaware that he could not kill the sheep without anaesthetic, and was only told it was illegal when he was arrested, he claimed. In Austria, animals can only be slaughtered in licensed slaughterhouses, and must be given anaesthesia immediately after their artery is cut.
The mother, who has been in Austria for 16 years, also claimed ignorance of the law, saying: “We had to make a sacrifice.”
When she was told that she would have to do 150 hours of community work, she claimed that she was unable to do so as she had to look after her husband, and also said she needed in any case his permission before deciding whether she could accept the punishment or not.
Even when the judge insisted that she make up her mind herself, she still refused until she could get permission from her husband, saying that she wanted to ask him if he might be prepared to pay money instead of the community service.
When the judge pointed out that there was no money alternative, and the only alternative was jail, she finally accepted the community service order.
Two weeks earlier, another ritual slaughter scandal rocked Styria when a farmer agreed to lend a Turkish friend his field for a month to graze sheep but discovered they were being ritually sacrificed.
To the horror of locals who witnessed the scene, 79 sheep were slaughtered as part of the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha, also known as the Sacrifice Feast. The police were immediately alerted, and they managed to save the lives of 52 other sheep on the pasture.