DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS?

But ask the animals, and they will teach you; or the birds of the air and they will tell you; or ask the plants of the earth, and they will instruct you.  … In his hands is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being.
Job 12: 7-10.

One of my dear friends loaned me two books on Animal Rights: “Do Animals have Rights,” by Alison Hills, an easy read which gave a measured approach, and “The Case for Animal Rights,” by Tom Regan, a hard slog and much more radical. In it he refutes the still current view that the animals we eat, hunt, and experiment on are, in the words of Rene Descartes, “thoughtless brutes.” His opinion is that animals are sophisticated mental creatures who have beliefs and desires, memories and expectations, who feel pleasure and pain and experience emotions, and like us, animals have a basic moral right to be treated in ways that show respect for their independent value.

Is he right?

Years ago, while on my way to Bancroft for business, I noticed a freshly killed bird on the side on the road and its partner standing next to it as in mourning.

We all know that chickens are kept in cages and cows in confined conditions, not unlike people in faraway countries, packed in favelas, in shantytowns, and other make-shift slums. A few months ago a fire in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, killed hundreds of people because they could not escape their packed places. We condemn it where it concerns people. Should we also agitate against the same situations for animals?

There is a curious passage in Genesis 2, where God named the first couple Adam and Eve. Later that same human pair were given the right to name animals. It seems to me that this signifies that we have a certain power over animals, which is plain in later biblical episodes.

At first, in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve apparently were vegetarians, eating only from the plants and trees. Later, with Noah, this changed. Abraham provided (Genesis 18:7) the Lord with meat from a calf, tender and good. The same happened when the Prodigal Son re-appeared. Jesus ate fish. Also the Bible is full of animals being slaughtered for ceremonial purposes.

Can our mass-production of animals continue? The on-going disasters in the Gulf of Mexico and the production of Tar-Sand oil are real signs that the easy energy has been used and that EROI or Energy Returned On Investment becomes ever smaller with the result that the fuel price creeps up, and air-and water pollution is growing by leaps and bounds, heralding hard times ahead. Just as heat at the hint of a hand or cool at a computer command, so the days of the raising chickens in cages and cows in crowded quarters will soon become impossible as the oil-clock stands a few seconds before mid-point, meaning that the days of using ten energy calories to produce one food calorie will soon be over. As an aware Christian I believe that we should welcome the days when chickens revert back to their natural pecking order and contended cows roam the vast expanse of prairies where they belong.

But back to my original question: Do animals have rights? Yes, they do. Do chickens and other incarcerated animals have rights? Yes, they do. Just as the people in Bangladesh and elsewhere have the right to be housed decently, and live comfortably, so, if my Bible is true, animals too have the right to exercise their freedom of movement. Job’s words thousands of years ago are still relevant today. What we have lost is the wisdom animals can teach us. We no longer have the ability to understand what the birds are trying to tell us. We no longer know how plants can enlighten us. We are paying lip service to the knowledge that in God’s hands are the life of every living being – animal, birds, plants – and the breath of every human being. It is exactly our ignorance of “the wider world out there” that has led to the mechanization of animal production.

However, our first duty is to see that people everywhere in the world live in humane conditions, as God has named them and they are made in His image. As long as this is not the case, we cannot demand that animals have priority over humans.

Bert Hielema (bert@hielema.ca) uses solar power to mow his grass – trying not to cut too soon the many different wild flowers.   

LAMENT FOR PLANET EARTH

Isaiah 24:5-6

The earth is defiled by its people;
they have disobeyed the laws,
violated the statutes
and broken the everlasting covenant.

Therefore a curse consumes the earth;
its people must bear their guilt.

Today these words are truer than ever. Just as Chernobyl was a horrendous man-made nuclear disaster so the Gulf of Mexico calamity is a man-made oil disaster of similar magnitude, doing direct damage in days what Global Warming is doing in decades. We, who drive cars, heat houses and use electricity, bear equal responsibility with BP.

“We have broken the everlasting covenant.” In Genesis 9 God made a covenant with us. A covenant is a contract through which two parties pledge troth, just as in a marriage. 1 Samuel 18:3 describes such a procedure. There David and Jonathan take over each other’s possessions, symbolized by exchanging their clothes and weapons. They also mingle blood, by cutting a small incision in their arms and touching these wounds so that the blood flows together, and then, as a sign of this covenant, slightly infect them, so that scars remain. Jesus, head of the New Covenant, did exactly the same when he sealed the covenant with his blood, his wounds still visible on his hands today.

In the Genesis’ covenant God gave everything he had – the entire earth and the heavens – to humanity, on the condition that we give ourselves to God, as in Mark 12:30, “Love the Lord with heart, soul, mind, best expressed in our love for creation. It’s exactly that covenant that we have discarded, and I don’t have to elaborate, as the brokenness of society and nature is all too evident everywhere. It is plain that this Covenant goes far beyond bible reading and Christian school and church attendance.

The saying goes that “The Future belongs to those who prepare for it today,” which is especially true for Christians, because they know their future: the renewed creation. With that in mind, the real challenge facing Christians today is genuinely lamenting the state of planet earth, and attempting to prepare for life in the earthly New Creation. That’s why we have to minimize “sinning against the earth which is now the most dreadful thing,” to quote Nietzsche again, who, when he saw a horse whipped to death by a drunken owner, lost his mind, so affected was he by animal cruelty.

How can we minimize ‘sinning against the earth’, and maximize preparing for eternity? A little detour first. Basically there are three distinct economies: the primary economy, the natural world of soil, seas, and forests; the secondary economy, producing goods and services by our labor; the tertiary economy, the fabrication and exchange of money.

The problem we face is that the natural primary economy has essentially no place in current economic policy. Our capitalistic system assumes that soil, seas, forests will always be there to provide the secondary and tertiary economies with our wants. So the plight of planet earth is ignored, of which the Gulf of Mexico and its wetlands is just its latest casualty.

The Gulf disaster: it makes me cry. This area is incredibly rich in nutrients and diversity, on which in season each day 25 million birds land to replenish their diminished stamina. These coast-land bird refuges are relied on by all 110 neo-tropical migratory songbird species, because of their vast marshes and miles and miles of beaches. Imagine: the just born birds being fed with tainted fish or abandoned because their parents have drowned in oily muck: these once life-giving swamps and bogs have now become the Louisiana killing fields.

Raj Patel in his book “The Value of Nothing” writes that we know exactly the price of everything – the tertiary economy – but the value of nothing – we don’t value the water, the air, the soil or the birds. He notes that if we take all these primary economy costs – pollution, transportation, carbon foot print – into consideration, a hamburger should cost $200.00.

“Therefore a curse consumes the earth,” so evident in the Gulf of Mexico, where we just have destroyed the jobs of tens of thousands of fishermen, the lives of millions of birds, and made the waters there useless for Life, so that we can drive that mile to the store in air-conditioned comfort, taking God’s name in vain in the process, oblivious to the plight of Planet Earth.

The best preparation for eternity is first to pray for environmental wisdom, then to think locally and act locally, by buying as much as possible local food and produce and articles from nearby sources. Growing your own is still the best solution: it’s healthier, requires no transportation and freshness is guaranteed: that is new creation economics.

Bert Hielema (bert@hielema.ca) relocated from suburban St Catharines in 1975 to rural Tweed. His many writings can be found on ‘hielema.ca’.

CC7

May 4 2010

Does the earth feel pain? Of course, if you believe what the Bible says in Romans 8: 22, where it is recorded that the whole creation has been groaning from pain. It must be screaming now that oil is destroying very vulnerable wetland in the Southern states.

What is the ultimate price we are willing to pay for oil, not only in dollars but especially in natural habitat destruction? The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is just the most recent  The other costs are more hidden: air pollution, asthma, global weirding, so perhaps the latest news that we are approaching PEAK OIL should perhaps be regarded as Good News. The bad news is that the approach of Peak Oil means that the easy stuff is gone which increases the danger of getting out whatever is left.

Who says that we are approaching Peak Oil? The United States Joint Forces Command in a press release a few weeks ago has told the world that “a severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity.” It suggests that “by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day.” The report warns that a chronic constraint looms behind the immediate crisis: even under “the most optimistic scenario … petroleum production will be hard pressed to meet the expected future demand”.

Less available energy for the world’s household can be compared to a family suddenly facing job losses or decreasing wages. That would not in itself be a bad thing, if prices would also decline and so purchasing power maintained,  but if the cost of living goes up, that family will experience a double whammy, and may be reduced to sudden poverty, it not worse.

A family needs money to operate, just as oil is needed to keep the world economy going: money can be created out of nothing, that’s why banks are so profitable, but that is not the case with Oil, which is becoming ever more difficult to obtain, while demand goes up, because India and China, with close to 40 percent of the world’s population, have an increasing appetite for energy, which will produce mushrooming prices.

Less oil will actually produce more pollution, because everyone, including China –already using 80 percent coal to generate electricity – will increase the use of much higher polluting coal, especially as electric cars become all the rage.

The recent eruption of that volcano whose name I cannot possibly remember, which stopped airplane traffic dead, is but a pinprick prelude of what is at store when high octane airplane fuel will no longer be plentiful and cheap. It will not disappear, of course, but tripling the cost of the airplane power source will put an effective stop to all but the most necessary air travel. And that will only be a minor nuisance compared to other inconveniences, such as food costs, or even its very availability.

During the past five decades agriculture has become energy-intensive in every respect. The earth we own has, by and large, lost its natural state and its soil has become a chemical soup laced with pesticides and herbicides – both synthesized from oil – and other chemicals. With the price of nitrogen fertilizers, produced from natural gas, increasing exponentially at the same rate as its carbon-brother oil, and tractors and other farm machinery burning diesel fuel and gasoline, with crops trucked long distances, and food packaged in oil-derived plastic, by the time it has traveled from land to mouth, very few people will be able to afford it.

One hundred years ago 70 percent of the population was rural. Today, 2010, in its US census forms there are so few full-time farmers, that such a category no longer is included in the list of occupations. It can be safely said that with no oil, or only extremely costly fuel, society as we know it, will cease to function.
Jeff Rubin, former economist with the CIBC, in his book, Why Your world is about to get a whole lot Smaller, oil and the end of Globalization, writes that our long-distance food supply, will cease to function and local produce, a 100 feet diet, will become the norm. With a 100 feet diet I mean that you will step outside your door into you garden and eat your own produce. Of course that will not be possible when you live on the 15^th floor of a condo downtown somewhere, so, with high fuel prices, these places might not be your best bet anymore. Jeff Rubin sees 60 cents for a pound of bananas or $4 for a dozen oranges or cheap California lettuce or impossible to eat Mexican tomatoes as a quirk of history, only made possible through the temporary spurt in cheap fuel.

What should we do, in the light of these circumstances?

More about that in a next column.

Bert Hielema (bert@hielema.ca) has a web site – hielema.ca – on which essays, books, and more than 500 columns are available free of charge.