Ritual slaughter is the practice of slaughtering livestock for meat in a ritual manner. Ritual slaughter involves a prescribed method of slaughtering an animal for food production purposes. Animal sacrifice by contrast involves motives beyond mere food production.

The current term in use that includes Jewish and Muslim slaughter together is Religious slaughter

Walter Burkert in Homo Necans discusses animal sacrifice as arising from the anthropological transition to hunting. With the domestication of livestock, the hunt was gradually replaced by the slaughter of livestock, and hunting rituals were consequently transformed to the context of slaughter.

In antiquity, ritual slaughter and animal sacrifice was one and the same. Thus, as argued by Detienne et al. (1989), for the Greeks, consumption of meat not slaughtered ritually was unthinkable, so that beyond being a tribute to the gods, Greek animal sacrifice marked a cultural boundary, separating "Hellenes" from "barbarians". Greek animal sacrifice was christianized into slaughter ceremonies involving Greek Orthodox Christian ritual, known as kourbania.

Dennis Kelly (born 1970) is a British writer for both the theatre and television. He is perhaps best known for co-writing BBC Three's sitcom Pulling with actress Sharon Horgan and for co-writing Matilda the Musical with comedian Tim Minchin.

Kelly grew up on a council estate in Barnet, North London, in an Irish family and was brought up a Catholic. His father was a bus conductor, and Kelly, one of five children, left school at 16 to work in Sainsbury's.

While working in supermarkets, he discovered theatre when he joined a local youth group, the Barnet Drama Centre. He took a degree in Drama and Theatre Arts when he was 30 and received a first from Goldsmiths College, London.

Kelly wrote his first play Debris when he was 30; he says he wrote it imagining he'd give himself a part. Staged at Theatre 503 in 2003, it transferred the next year to Battersea Arts Centre. It was well received and he went on to write the controversially titled Osama the Hero which was produced by Hampstead Theatre, beginning a long relationship with the theatre that he would return to often.