I have seen halal slaughter done and I've worked in one of the world's largest Western-style abattoirs.

The differences are more to do with scale than ritual, but the halal I've seen was vastly more humane.

Hygiene standarda are same for halal or other methods - they only affect what happens to the carcass, and the halal rules have nothing to say about that. The halal requirement that the animal shouldn't know what's coming is NOT met by the standard Western industrial slaughterhouse, where the animal is dragged screaming into an inferno of blood and guts. "Humane stunning" is irrelevant once the animal is in a place like the one I worked in. It made the Manson massacre look like a hospice.

Anyway, avoiding meat raised using brutal American industrial-farming practices is far more important as an animal welfare issue. That is what the EU currently protects us from. It's not just about how the animal dies, it's about protecting it from an entire life of misery and pain before that.