As for invoking the Name of Allah and the intention, the disagreement over both—together with its rationale—has already been set out in the Book of Slaughter. Because those scholars who require intention for a valid slaughter make it a condition, they rule that if a hunter releases his predator after a particular quarry but it seizes another animal, that second animal is not lawfully slaughtered; this is Mālik’s position. Al-Shāfiʿī, Abū Ḥanīfah, Aḥmad, and Abū Thawr, however, hold it permissible and say the meat may be eaten.

For the same reason Mālik’s followers differed about releasing a predator toward unseen game—such as letting it loose into a thicket or behind a rise when the hunter does not know whether anything is actually there—for the intention in such a situation is tainted by uncertainty.

The first of the six conditions peculiar to hunting is that the predator’s wound, when it does not pierce the animal’s vital organs, suffices only if the hunter cannot reach the quarry alive. By adopting this condition the majority of scholars relied on the report of ʿAdī b. Ḥātim in which the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said, “If you reach it alive, then slaughter it.”

Al-Nakhaʿī maintained: If you reach it alive and have no blade with you, release the dogs again until they kill it—an opinion to which al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī eventually inclined, citing the general verse, “So eat of that which they have caught for you” (al-Māʾidah 4).

On the strength of this same condition Mālik said: the hunter must not slacken in pursuing the game. Should he do so and then find it dead, its meat is lawful only if an arrow has pierced its vital organs; otherwise it is unlawful, for had he not delayed he might have reached it alive with its vitals intact.

The second condition is that the act originate with the hunter and continue without interruption until it strikes the quarry. Their disagreement over this point led to differing rulings on animals taken by snares or nets equipped with a cutting edge that penetrates the vitals: Mālik, al-Shāfiʿī, and the majority prohibit eating such game, whereas al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī permits it. For the same reason Mālik disallowed game taken when a predator was first dispatched, the hunter turned to something else, and the predator later returned to the quarry on its own.

The third condition—namely, that no participant whose own killing would not amount to lawful slaughter share in the fatal wound—is, so far as I know, unanimously accepted, because one cannot ascertain who actually killed the animal.

The fourth condition is that the hunter harbor no doubt about the identity of the quarry or about whether his predator killed it. On this basis the jurists differed over eating game when the place of its death lies out of sight. Mālik once said: there is no harm in eating it if you find on the animal a trace of your dog or your arrow, provided night has not fallen; once night passes, I deem it disliked. Al-Thawrī also considered it disliked. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb said: if night intervenes in the case of a predator’s kill, it is not eaten, whereas with an arrow there is disagreement. Ibn al-Mājishūn held that both kinds may be eaten when the vital organs have been pierced. Mālik states in the Mudawwanah that neither may be eaten once night has passed, even if the vitals have been pierced. Al-Shāfiʿī said: analogy dictates that