Section Three: On the Form of Slaughter Specific to Hunting and Its Conditions
The jurists concur that the slaughter peculiar to hunting is al-ʿaqr—inflicting the fatal wound—but they differ greatly over the conditions governing it.
If you examine the underlying principles that generate these disagreements, apart from the requirements that relate to the weapon and to the hunter, you will find eight conditions in all:
Two are common to both kinds of slaughter—whether the animal is hunted or domestically held—namely, intention (niyyah) and the pronouncement of Allah’s Name (tasmiya).
The remaining six are exclusive to the slaughter of game:
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If the weapon or predator that struck the quarry has not pierced its vital organs, the animal must be dispatched with ordinary livestock slaughter provided the hunter can reach it before it dies from the wound or the blow. If its vitals have been pierced, such further slaughter is not obligatory, though it remains recommended.
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The act that strikes the quarry must originate from the hunter himself, not from some independent cause—neither from the implement alone, as with a snare, nor from the predator, as when a dog sallies forth on its own.
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No party whose own killing is not deemed lawful slaughter may share in inflicting the fatal wound.
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The hunter must be certain of the very animal that was struck; uncertainty can arise when the quarry passes out of sight.
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At the moment of release the quarry must not already have been under the hunter’s control.
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The animal’s death must not result merely from terror of the predator or from its being stunned by a blow from it.
These are the foundational conditions whose acceptance or rejection has produced the differences among the jurists. At times they agree on the necessity of a given condition yet dispute whether it is fulfilled in a particular circumstance—for example, the Mālikīs’ consensus that the act must begin with the hunter, and their disagreement over game taken when the predator slips from his hand or leaves by itself and he then incites it: is such a kill permissible or not? The case teeters between satisfying the condition and failing to do so.
Similarly, Abū Ḥanīfah and Mālik agree that if the quarry is seized while its vitals are intact, it must be slaughtered if the hunter can do so before it dies. They part company, however, when the hunter frees the animal alive and it dies in his hand before he can perform the slaughter: Abū Ḥanīfah rules it impermissible, whereas Mālik allows it, treating it like the earlier case in which the hunter could not extract the quarry from the predator until it died. The situation hangs between saying, “He reached it with its vitals unpierced and out of the predator’s grasp, so he was negligent,” and saying that no negligence occurred.
Since these are the principal conditions required in hunting—together with the other conditions concerning the weapon and the hunter himself that will follow—we must now state which of them the jurists agreed upon, which they disputed, the reasons for their disagreement, and the main subsidiary questions that arise from it.
Thus we say: As for