The animal-rights movement raises questions about more than animals. Ultimately, it raises the question of whether a secular society can make sense of itself.
An image: I am 11 years old, and on a bright, spring day I stand on the banks of an irrigation ditch that runs near my school. Someone has caught a frog, and two boys are taking turns throwing their pocket knives at it. I can catch only occasional glimpses of the frog through the legs of my peers, who are crowding around, eager to see.
After many tries, a knife finds its target, and the crowd lets out an admiring groan. I press closer. The frog, split open, is leaking its guts. Still living, it scrabbles weakly in the dust. I turn away feeling sick and guilty. I know without a shadow of a doubt that what I have seen is wrong. This should never be done to a frog.
Another image: I am 31 years old, and on another bright, spring day I watch a goat die. I am in Kenya, and as is traditional in East African celebrations, a goat is being slaughtered for a barbecue. I have eaten meat right out of the cellophane all my life, but I have never seen a mammal die. So I stand with a huddle of African friends, watching the deed with horrified fascination. It is done quickly, without cruelty. The neck is slit and blood spurts out. The goat bleats, struggles, and then lies still. It is gutted, skinned, cut apart. Nothing is wasted. The intestines are cooked; the head goes into a pot for soup. The meat, even after it is cut into pieces for the grill, has a habit of twitching.
I feel a little shaken by what I have seen. I do not feel ashamed, but I do feel solemn. It is not so light a thing to take an animal’s life.
Confronting Speciesism
Almost everyone would accept what my 11-year-old mind concluded about the needless death of a frog: It was wrong.
About the death of the goat, not all would agree. Most people have thought that as long as the goat was killed for food, and did not suffer more than necessary, its killing was justified. A persistent minority, however, has questioned our right to use animals for our own ends, as though they were merely “things.”
Despite such differences of opinion, virtually all Western people have worked from the Christian premise that human beings were set apart by God for a special purpose and for special responsibilities. We are worth more than the animals, and we must act better than animals—so we have believed. Those who wanted to protect animals from suffering worked from this assumption, as did those who justified using and eating animals.
But no more. Today, the most visible animal-rights activists speak out against the belief that humankind has been put in charge of creation. This presumption, they claim, has led to the overwhelming slavery and abuse that animals suffer. They scoff at the Christian requirement that we treat animals kindly. It is, they say, like the requirement that slaveowners treat their slaves kindly. The activists’ goal is to set the animals free—free from all human control and domination.
“Humane treatment is simply sentimental, sympathetic patronage,” says Michael W. Fox, a veterinarian who directs the Center for the Respect of Life and Environment at the Humane Society of the United States.
Tom Regan, another well-known activist, puts it this way: “The animal-rights philosophy is abolitionist rather than reformist. It’s not better cages we work for, but empty cages.” Gary Francione, a law professor who litigates animal-rights cases, would not allow an animal to suffer even if the research led to a cancer cure: “I don’t believe it is morally permissible to exploit weaker beings even if we derive benefits.”
In a Harper’s magazine forum on the morality of animal experimentation, the theoretical possibility of implanting a pig’s heart to save a human baby’s life was raised. One animal-rights activist, who is sternly against such a possibility, said that the baby’s parents should be made to care about the pig. When another participant exclaimed, “I don’t want to change [the parents’] reaction. I want human beings to care about babies,” Ingrid Newkirk, head of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, retorted, “Like racism or sexism, that remark is pure speciesism.”
Speciesism, a term invented in Peter Singer’s foundational text, Animal Liberation, is the allegedly bigoted contention that human beings are more important than other animals. “It can no longer be maintained by anyone but a religious fanatic that man is the special darling of the universe,” Singer wrote, “or that other animals were created to provide us with food, or that we have divine authority over them, and divine permission to kill them.”
That makes animal rights one of the first social movements to claim an explicitly non-Christian point of view. Not all its members share this ideology, but the most publicized leaders speak against long-held Christian assumptions. Michael Fox, quoted in The Washingtonian, put it succinctly: “There are no clear distinctions between us and animals. Animals communicate, animals have emotions, animals can think. Some thinkers believe that the human soul is different because we are immortal, and that just becomes completely absurd.” Humane Society literature, according to writer Katie McCabe, has claimed since 1980 that “there is no rational basis for maintaining a moral distinction between the treatment of humans and other animals.”
Sputtering And Fuming
It is tempting to focus on the abrupt twists and turns in the logic of animal-rights activists. They point to science’s inability to document absolute differences between human and beast. But this hardly suggests that we should treat animals well. It should be instructive to note that mere animals eat each other: that is, whales eat seals, seals eat fish, all without evident taint of “speciesism.” Clearly, to animal-rights activists, human beings are special—special in their responsibility to treat animals better than many animals treat each other. The animal-rights movement would like to raise animals to the moral status of humans. It would be just as logical to lower humans to the moral status of animals.
But why hold animal-rights activists to a higher standard of logic than their opponents? The philosophy of animal rights does not seem coherent, but as a number of thinkers have noted, a secular philosophy of human rights has yet to prove coherent, either.
This is quite noticeable in the back-and-forth between animal-rights activists and the scientists, government officials, and journalists who confront them. Both sides argue fervently from a position firmly planted in the air. The activists ask: What gives humankind the right to decide an animal’s fate? Why should a monkey lose its life to save a child? In response, the sages of our society sputter and fume.
Scientists have been amazed and outraged as the protests of what they regard as a lunatic fringe have disturbed the sanctity of their laboratories. Although typically not philosophically inclined, scientists do have a solemn sense of purpose in what they do. This gets expressed in various ways. At the high end is the philosophical: We are pursuing the truth, they say. At the low end is the pragmatic: We are saving lives through medicine.
It is at the low end that scientists usually try to meet the animal-rights activists. John Kaplan, writing in Science, suggests that scientists show photos of “human burn victims or of quadriplegics to offset the pathetic pictures of the animals used in the research.” He assumes that people will favor the suffering of animals over the suffering of human beings, and he is probably right about that.
But as far as the activists are concerned, this begs the question. What right have we to make an animal suffer in our place? We would not consider it right to treat another human being that way. Why an animal? What makes us think we are so special?
Ironically, the biologists proclaiming urgently that every delay in their experiments may cost human lives are members of the discipline that has been at pains to show there is no dramatic difference between humans and other animals, that different species are merely different products of evolution. By their own criteria, one is not “better” than another.
But now scientists have made a different discovery: In their heart of hearts they believe that human beings are morally different from animals. Only they cannot say why they think so. They can only sputter with outrage that anyone would put a human being on the same level as a pig.
A Theology of the Beasts
The Bible is full of animals. This abundance is not surprising; it was written in a world where animals were part of the common environment. (By contrast, our involvement with real beasts has dwindled to encounters in zoos and supermarket meat cases). From a biblical perspective, animals are more than incidental: They remind us of the breadth of God’s kingdom and our place in it.
God reveals his interest in animals early on, in the repeated acknowledgment that “It was good” for waters, air, and land to teem with living creatures in Genesis 1. God delights in animals for their own sake. They were not created primarily as things over which to exercise human dominion. This perspective is behind Psalm 104, where a rich catalog of creatures—donkeys (significantly, wild donkeys), storks, goats, coneys, lions, and whales—are pictured (along with humans) as daily receiving their food from God.
God’s answer to Job is an even more vivid example of the Creator’s delight in his nonhuman creatures. God answers Job’s long complaint by showing him wild animals: lion, raven, deer, hawk, eagle, and those mysterious beasts Leviathan and Behemoth. He does so because they are wild, and thus outside human usefulness.
Noah and his friends
God is concerned for all of his creatures. Modern Christians have tended to leave Noah’s wonderful boatload of birds and beasts in the nursery, but in this story we see that all living creatures were to be saved from the Flood, not just the ones that were useful. The story also reflects the biblical assumption that men and women uniquely bear the image of God. This is evident in the technological ingenuity of the ark. It is even more evident in the fact that in building it Noah is carrying out God’s command. Both Noah’s skill and calling suggest that human beings have unique gifts and responsibilities in God’s kingdom.
This, then, is the biblical picture: Men and women are animals. They share creatureliness with the beasts. Saint Francis was right to address animals as “brother” and “sister.” But all people have something that no animal has: a responsibility to the Creator. It is in this capability of a responsible relationship with God—more than in God’s gifts of language, intelligence, and creativity—that human uniqueness is contained.
Gardeners and shepherds
Our unique relationship to God is described in Genesis 1:27 as “the image of God”; and based on that image, Adam and Eve are to “rule” and “subdue.” Does this biblical description (and observed fact) of human dominion give license for treating animals simply as raw material for human needs? No, for in Genesis 2 Adam is told to “guard” and “serve” the garden (the Hebrew word for “till” also means “serve”).
Lest there be any doubt that cruel dominion is not licensed by Genesis 1, consider Ezekiel 34, in which the prophet speaks God’s wrath on the “shepherds of Israel” who use their power not to strengthen and heal the sheep, but to rule over them “harshly and brutally.” Significantly, the word used here for “rule” is the same word used in Genesis 1 to describe human dominion.
To be sure, Ezekiel 34 is using metaphorical language for how people ought to rule other people. But the passage clearly reflects two biblical assumptions about animals. The first is that animals are to be cared for. The second is that human beings have the right, responsibility, and power to exercise over animals both care and use. (Even the gentlest shepherd knew it was the fate of lambs to be slaughtered.)
We encounter here the deep mystery of suffering. It is the warp on which the creation as we know it is woven, so much so that our Lord Jesus Christ can be described as a suffering animal: “the lamb slain before the foundation of the world.”
The animal-rights movement unwittingly recovers two profound biblical truths. The first is that we are responsible for the animals. Indeed, we have a legitimate power over them. Whether we use them (gently or harshly) or seek to keep them free and wild, we are reflecting the image of God.
The second truth is that our power is to be exercised in service. As Christians, we express power in this way because that is the way our Creator and our Lord express power, in whose image we are made.
Thus it is an appropriate (though a very solemn) thing to take the life of an animal to nourish our own life. But it is appropriate also to extend to animals the kind of peace that the fourth commandment suggests when it says “even your animals” will have a sabbath to the Lord.
We have far to go before we fully realize our heritage as the children of God and coheirs of the Second Adam, which Paul says all creatures eagerly await. But we can begin to exercise our powers over the beasts with care, as though they were indeed our fellow creatures. That stewardly care is called for whether we raise animals for food, or use them for science, or for our delight—like God himself—in their wildness.
By Loren Wilkinson, professor of interdisciplinary studies and philosophy at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Why Christians Should Care
Andrew Linzey is chaplain and director of studies at the Center for the Study of Theology, University of Essex, and is recognized as a leading theologian in the field of animal rights. He has compiled two collections of writings on the subject: Animals and Christianity and Christianity and the Rights of Animals (both published by Crossroad). CHRISTIANITY TODAY talked to Linzey on his visit to the United States last October.
On the evangelical roots of animal-rights concerns: The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded by Arthur Broome, an Anglican priest and an evangelical of sorts, who gave up his London church to work full-time for the society. He called the first meeting—at which Wilberforce was present. He employed the first anticruelty inspectors; and he went to prison to pay for the society’s debts. He eventually died in oblivion. It’s a very heroic tale. Arthur Broome has been insufficiently recognized. He was supported by people like Wilberforce, Shaftesbury, and the Clapham Sect, which became particularly opposed to animal cruelty—which took such forms as bear baiting, cock fighting, and cock throwing (throwing stones at cocks tied to a post).
The claim of the evangelicals was that habitual cruelty to animals desensitizes us and makes us less than human.
On the place of the human race in creation: For centuries Christians have misunderstood their Scripture, especially Genesis 1, when it comes to our responsibilities to the created world. Keith Ward in his paraphrase of the Old Testament, entitled The Promise, says that man is made a god in creation and the animals are put there to serve him. I think precisely the opposite is the case. We are put in the world to represent God and to serve the world.
The uniqueness of human beings consists in the fact that they can become the servant species. We are uniquely endowed by God to share with him in his moral rule. The world is unfinished and there is a role for humankind in focusing the love of God.
On the biblical basis for caring for animals: In Genesis 1, we read that man is made in the image of God, given dominion, and then a diet was commanded for both animals and humans which excludes flesh food. If dominion really meant a license to do what you want with creation, it wouldn’t have a prohibition about eating meat. Genesis is describing a state of peace in creation. God, the Creator, wishes order, harmony, and peace; and I believe a challenge to Christians today is to discover a role of making peace with creation, after having spent centuries at something like war.
We must take the creation seriously without worshiping nature. Many people indulge in a kind of biological pantheism. People look at how the world interacts and think, “Ah well, this is marvelous, this is how God wants it to be, how God even is.” Now if you take a trinitarian position, you cannot just say the world as it is is God’s order. It is fundamentally flawed.
Between Genesis 1, which excludes flesh from the diets of animals and humans, and Genesis 9, which permits it, come the Fall and the Flood. In our post-Fall world, our relations with creation are different. And compromise and difficult choices are essential.
I’m not one who thinks that killing animals is always wrong. There is a distinction between what is good and what is right. I don’t think the killing of animals is ever good. In other words, I don’t think in heaven they’ll be killing animals. But I think it’s sometimes right, and this can be justified by circumstances. For example, in the mercy killing of animals; in self-defense, for example, if a lion were coming to me now with hungry jaws I wouldn’t say, “Enjoy me”; and also if I were starving for food.
The fundamental theological question is, “Are we going to respect what is given us in creation?”
On the relation between animal rights and the gospel: In Christ you have a model of lordship involving service, which gets played out in the Gospels consistently: when he washes dirty feet, when he heals the sick, when he associates with outcasts and the marginalized. That Christological paradigm—power expressed in humility—is the model of how we should exercise our lordship or dominion over the animals.
It is rather sentimental to think that God is only concerned with the human species. If God is truly the Creator of all things, all creatures have standing in his sight. We may want to rubbish the natural world; we may in our arrogant humanism think that we can’t see a reason for their existing; but a Christian cannot say that. A Christian has to say it’s a disordered world, but it’s a world that has some kind of integrity; and that the way to understand it is not through humanism but through a theocentric approach—to affirm God is to affirm that every creature is a loved creature.
Interview by David Neff.
Dangerous Thinking
A 1988 Newsweek cover story ended with these remarks on vivisection:
The question is whether the practical benefits of vivisection constitute a moral justification for it. If mankind’s interest in finding a better treatment for AIDS doesn’t justify conducting lethal experiments on individual humans, an ethicist might ask, why does it justify performing them on monkeys? Why doesn’t a monkey deserve moral consideration? What is the relevant difference between a human subject and an animal subject?
To reply that the human is human and the animal isn’t only begs the question.…
Another possible answer is that we humans enjoy certain God-given prerogatives. We are, after all, the only creatures the Bible says were made in God’s image.…
It may be a difference, but it’s not an empirical, observable one. It has to be taken on faith.…
Maybe there is no reasoned moral justification [italics added].… Whatever the answer, scientists can no longer afford to pretend that their critics’ moral concerns are frivolous. Profound questions are being raised, and ignoring them won’t make them go away.
On that uncertain note, the long article ended. On a similar note, a 1990 New Republic article by Robert Wright essentially accepted the argument that no moral distinction can be made between animals and humans. The belief that humans are in a special category, wrote Wright, “is a perfectly fine thing to believe, but it’s hard to argue for. It depends much more on religious conviction than on any plausible line of reasoning.” And of course, Wright assumed, religious conviction was ruled out of reasonable discussion. Unfortunately, Wright also showed where his assumptions can lead: “Human rights … isn’t some divine law imparted to us from above, or some Platonic truth apprehended through the gift of reason. The idea of individual rights is simply a non-aggression pact.… It’s a deal struck for mutual convenience.”
Wright showed the danger of excluding religion from questions that are inherently religious. Investigating animal rights through pure logic, without revelation, can easily turn against human rights, and ultimately against animals. If human rights are merely “a deal struck for mutual convenience,” then anybody who doesn’t buy into the deal (Stalin, say) is morally free to go his or her own way. And of course it makes no sense at all to extend the deal to animals, whose protection and care is certainly not a matter of mutual convenience. Humans will only care for animals if they believe that it is a calling, not a “deal.”
As Richard John Neuhaus has put it, “The campaign against ‘speciesism’ is a campaign against the singularity of human dignity and, therefore, of human responsibility.… The hope for a more humane world, including the more humane treatment of animals, is premised upon what they deny.”
Opponents of animal-rights activists also sometimes fall into logic that is inherently dangerous. Why should medical researchers sacrifice animals for human welfare? Journalist Katie McCabe suggests an answer of sorts in her Washingtonian expose of animal-rights activists, “Beyond Cruelty.” She points out that the debate “has been framed … as everything but what it really is—a moral argument that penetrates to the definition of humanity.” She then quotes businessman Richard Kelly: The debate “is not an argument that philosophy or religion or even science can solve.… In the end, human beings and their needs are the only argument that matters.”
This is a kind of “defending my family” argument. It goes, “I don’t know who’s better, them or us. But I know that if I have to choose, I’m fighting for us.” This is pure speciesism, if you please. Anything that enhances, protects, or increases the joy of the human race is good. Why? Because it’s my team. This is a form of humanism that justifies animal experiments, but a great deal more—too much more. There is no limit to what it will justify in the name of the human race.
What we see through the lens of this controversy is a society that has lost faith in the religious view it was built on and has nothing suitable to put in its place. The religious sentiments continue—on the part of animal-rights activists, the sympathy for animal suffering, and on the part of scientists, the belief in human pre-eminence—but the sentiments have lost their foundation. When someone challenges them, the response is the agitated indignation of people who are sure they are doing the right thing, though they cannot say why. Animal-rights activists cannot articulate why they care about the death of a frog, or the death of a child. Nor can scientists say why they would kill a frog to save a child. They argue from feeling—a feeling that banks on thousands of years of a faith in which they no longer believe.
The Spectrum Of Christian Thought
Despite all efforts to rule religion out, the debate over animal rights remains inherently and fundamentally religious. That is not to say, however, that religion offers only one answer. Hinduism, for example, has its own view, to which some animal-rights activists are attracted. And within Christianity there is room for tremendous differences—room for the chicken farmer viewing his birds as meat-making machines, as well as for Saint Francis preaching sermons to them.
The chicken farmer claims familiar scriptural supports. According to his view, God intended animals to serve human ends, and it is no cruelty to use them for their created purpose. Genesis 1 describes how humankind was charged with ruling “over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air … and over all the creatures that move along the ground” (v. 26, NIV). Genesis 9:3, furthermore, records how God gave all living creatures to Noah and his family for food. Biblical people—including Jesus—were flesh eaters. They were also animal users—shepherds and fishermen and dirt farmers who used animals to plow and thresh. The Bible treats this as normal.
Another view of animals is also explicit in the Bible, however, and gives a different (though not necessarily contradictory) perspective. It is presented most vividly in Psalm 104. There, animals find their niche in creation alongside humanity, not beneath it. Some animals are of no use to humankind—may even be hazardous to human persons. Lions “seek their food from God” and go to bed when humans go out to work. In the sea can be found “leviathan, which you formed to frolic there” (Ps. 104:26, NIV). Animals, however useful they are to humankind, are supremely valuable to God, who made them in their uniqueness for his own purposes.
As Karl Barth described creation, humankind “is not set up as lord over the earth, but as lord on the earth which is already furnished with these creatures. Animals and plants do not belong to him; they and the whole earth can belong only to God.” Thus our responsibility is not to use the living creatures of the earth for our own purposes, but to rule the earth in such a way as to ensure that all God’s creatures are able to fulfill his purposes. In some cases—the whale, the lion—that surely means leaving them to be themselves.
Between these two emphases—the instrumental and the ecological—there are many possibilities. On one side are the pragmatic, workaday realities of society as we know it. By this, certain animals are good for food, for wool, for experiments. If this good involves some bad—some unavoidable pain, for example—that is how life often is on a fallen planet, a tradeoff between good and bad, nurture and suffering.
On the other side is the good of the peaceable kingdom, where the lion will lie down with the lamb, and no one will hurt or destroy. So it was in Eden, so it will be in the end—and so we ought to try to make it today.
What both ends of the Christian spectrum share is as important as their differences. Both sides believe that humanity has a unique calling, and that our relationship to animals must be worked out within that calling. Christians do not share the modern uncertainty about what on earth we are here for, an uncertainty that adds a wild and flailing quality to secularized debates over animal rights.
A More Peaceable Kingdom
The animal-rights movement would like to change the world dramatically. Some changes can be made fairly painlessly. We could do without furs, for instance. At some level, though, there is little doubt that animal rights are in conflict with human need. Nearly all scientists say, for instance, that medical research requires animal experimentation. Give it up, and you just as surely give up cures for a thousand diseases. It is difficult to imagine our society giving those up without stronger reasons than animal-rights activists have so far offered.
More likely, a goal disdained by activists will be fulfilled: Our society will try to be kinder to animals, even as it uses them and eats them.
The industrialization of food production, global pollution, and the crowding out of wilderness bring new questions about our treatment of animals. Today lions can go their independent way only if we set aside space for them to do so. Whales will survive to frolic only as we restrain our tendency to use them for our ends. God made them; we can now unmake them. One hopes that the animal-rights movement will prod our society to think seriously about such issues.
We can share another hope: Perhaps if activists keep asking questions, they will lead us to the realization that no society can be purely irreligious. We must, when asked for the reasons behind our commitments, be able to say more than “science.” Scientists who have discovered so many wonderful secrets of the universe have yet to discover an ethic. Science has its ethical commitments, but they are inherited, assumed.
At our society’s center, increasingly, is confusion. Having shed Christianity, we have no framework for thinking about ecology, suffering, life, and death—whether for animals or for humans. This void will be filled, perhaps with a resurgence of Christian humanism, or perhaps with something else. No lasting society is truly and fully pluralistic, in the sense of not having any core beliefs. If animal-rights activists accidentally bring this point home, they may do more for humans than they do for animals.
