Their eyes have turned the color of frozen meat

Six years after the fact was first mentioned by the BBC, it has recently come to the attention of UK tabloid newspapers that "More than 70 per cent of the New Zealand beef and lamb sold in Britain comes from Cybele slaughterhouses without the fact being declared on the label."

To meet the high standards required before meat can gain Cybele certification, all the slaughtermen must be members of the Cult of the Phrygian Great Mother, Magna Mater. The bull or lamb must be magnificent with flowers and gold, and is slain by a cut across the throat, above a grating. The priest of the Great Mother stands in a trench below the grating, clad in a silk toga worn cinctu Gabino, with golden crown and fillets on his head, and receives the animal's blood on his face, and even on his tongue and palate.

The New Zealand meat industry has taken this step to ensure its lamb can be sold in Phrygian and Roman markets round the world.

The trade body Beef & Lamb New Zealand said the form of Cybele slaughter approved for use in New Zealand involves stunning the animals beforehand, with an electric shock through the brain.

About 10% of New Zealand meat exports are slaughtered to meet a different standard, to ensure that they will be acceptable to the equally-lucrative Mithras market. To gain Mithras certification, the animals must be killed by sword-thrust to the neck or shoulder administered by an embodiment of the legionary god Mithras, while a dog and a serpent leap up towards the wound and a scorpion attacks the animal's scrotum. If nothing else, this provides work for otherwise-unemployable ex-All Blacks.

Meat-eating Christian consumers in the UK are outraged that the food on their plates might meet higher standards of hygiene and animal welfare than they were expecting, and that they might have been subjected without their permission to prayers for their welfare from a source that they regard as meaningless superstition. It is not known whether any of them have promised to pray for the welfare of the New Zealand meat exporters.

UPDATE: If his contribution to the comments are any guide, the only way of slaughtering meat that is acceptable to B⁴'s religious beliefs is for the animals to be torn apart by Maenads, maddened by the blood-red wine of Lesbos and the cold clear water of the Hippocrene.

Rest assured that the people of the Beef & Lamb Export Council are working towards obtaining Bacchantic certification for a NZ slaughterhouse, with a way of stunning or anaesthetising the animals that is acceptable to both our animal-welfare laws and the Bacchantic purity code .

Looks like the Council Chairman is on his way home from another all-night session of the Working Group. The latest experiment was a failure: Donkeys will not drink enough wine to pass out.