HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? Part 9.
DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS?
Last week I cautioned that, in preparation for eternity, our current life style must much more focus on the way we treat creation. Every scrap of paper comes from wood pulp; every kilometer we drive harms all of creation, but especially the flora section of the environment.
I am more and more beginning to believe that we can only be part of the New Creation – and we are speeding toward its coming witness the turmoil everywhere, both environmentally, politically and economically – when we now regard God’s work of art as sacred, which, naturally, must also include the animal world, and the question: Do Animals have rights?
My wife and I have been almost exclusively vegetarian for many decades. It all started in 1972, now more than 40 years ago, when I bought a book Diet for a Small Planet where I discovered that it takes many pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat. Realizing the plight of billions who go hungry, we went off meat then and there. It helps that meat eating is not very healthy: fatty, full of pesticides, often saturated with antibiotics, making us more susceptible to infection. Physically we have done well on our meat-less diet, eating a lot of green stuff and many bean varieties, basically in line with the Mediterranean diet.
Just like trees, animals too are an important part of creation, and just as we have to learn to see trees as our indispensable allies so too we must see animals as friends and companions, creatures from which we can learn.
Job was of that opinion. Here is a quote: “But ask the animals, and they will teach you; or the birds of the air and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? In his hands is the life of creature 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?
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. Last year 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?
In Genesis 2 God named the first couple Adam and Eve. Later that same human pair were, in turn, given the task 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, actually the only creation-friendly way for permanence. 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.
I am sure these ‘biblical’ animals were free-ranging, and the fish was not raised in off-shore fish-farms. Now most of what we eat is mass-produced in cages, closed pens and force-fed for quick maturity.
All this commercial raising of eggs or broilers or calves or fish is only possible because of cheap and abundant energy, either fuel oil or propane. The recent disasters in the Gulf of Mexico, train derailments lately 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 is conditional upon carbon availability, so the raising chickens in cages and cows in crowded quarters will soon become impossible as the Peak Oil-clock stands a few seconds before mid-point, meaning that the days of using ten energy calories to produce one food calorie will vanish.
We need new approaches to living
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 green grass pastures where they can thrive naturally.
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.
Elephants are an excellent example of community living.
I found an amazing article in the Winter/Spring edition of The New Atlantis, some 22,000 words, too long to reproduce here.
Here is how it started: “The birth of an elephant is a spectacular occasion. Grandmothers, aunts, sisters, and cousins crowd around the new arrival and its dazed mother, trumpeting and stamping and waving their trunks to welcome the floppy baby who has so recently arrived from out of the void, bursting through the border of existence to take its place in an unbroken line stretching back to the dawn of life.
“After almost two years in the womb and a few minutes to stretch its legs, the calf can begin to stumble around. But its trunk, an evolutionarily unique inheritance of up to 150,000 muscles with the dexterity to pick up a pin and the strength to uproot a tree, will be a mystery to it at first, with little apparent use except to sometimes suck upon like human babies do their thumbs. Welcome to the world: This newborn hasn’t yet stood up and stretched its legs, let alone figured out how to use its trunk.
Its appendage is flailing off its face to breathe, drink, caress, thwack, probe, lift, haul, wrap, spray, sense, blast, stroke, smell, nudge, collect, bathe, toot, wave, and perform countless other functions that a person would rely on a combination of eyes, nose, hands, and strong machinery to do. Once the calf is weaned from its mother’s milk at five or whenever its next sibling is born, it will spend up to 16 hours a day eating 5 percent of its entire weight in leaves, grass, brush, bark, and basically any other kind of vegetation. It will only process about 40 percent of the nutrients in this food, however; the waste it leaves behind helps fertilize plant growth and provide accessible nutrition on the ground to smaller animals, thus making the elephant a keystone species in its habitat. From 250 pounds at birth, it will continue to grow throughout its life, to up to 7 tons for a male of the largest species or 4 tons for a female…..
When this new-born elephant is twelve or fourteen, she will go into heat (“estrus”) for the first time, a bewildering occurrence during which her mother will stand by and show her what to do and which male to accept. If she conceives, she will have a calf twenty-two months later, crucially aided in birthing and raising it by the more experienced older ladies. She may have another every four to five years into her fifties or sixties, but not all will survive.
Some more excerpts of this article.
From a religious, anthropocentric perspective, it might be said that while animal virtues do not entail morality for the animals themselves, they reveal to us the goodness in creation; as the medieval theologian Johannes Scotus Eriugena (that same person I mentioned in my Gnostic Article, The Real American Religion a few weeks ago) wrote, “In a wonderful and inexpressible way God is created in His creatures.” From a more biological view, it might be noted that people mostly do not choose their dispositions either, that behavioral tendencies are more determined than we like to tell ourselves, and that blame and credit for such things are often misapplied in human contexts too…..
One of the major clues that elephants have something we would recognize as inner lives is their extraordinary memories. This is attested to by outward indicators ranging from the practical — a matriarch’s recollection of a locale, critical to leading her family to food and water — to the passionate — grudges that are held against specific people or types of people for decades or even generations, or fierce affection for a long-lost friend…..
Like humans, most traumatized elephants do not become violent, but just absorb their hurts in confusion and sadness and respond to them in other familiar ways. In The Dynasty of Abu (1962), the zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson recounts the story of an elephant named Sadie, who was practicing but failing to learn a circus routine. Finally she gave up and bolted out of the training ring, causing her to be chastised (not cruelly, he stresses) “for her supposed stupidity and for trying to run away.” At this, she dropped to the ground and dumbfounded her trainers by bawling like a human being. “She lay there on her side, the tears streaming down her face and sobs racking her huge body.”
In almost half a century of close association with the Abu [elephants], including and even after reading a substantial part of the vast literature concerning these majestic creatures, I have not encountered anything that has moved me so greatly, and I write this in all seriousness and humility. Its ineffable pathos constantly brings to mind that most famous verse “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). What on earth are we to make of a so-called “lower animal” crying?
But the latter idea — that humans, although capable of conscious self-direction, are as mutely carried along by the force of selection as your friendly neighborhood amoeba — simply elides the question, while the former raises many more; the tiger is as much God’s creature as the lamb. In any case, the capacity for “choosing” is a binary conceit that gestures at something much fuller, an inner realm of awareness, selfhood, and possibility. In other words, a soul.
So far these quotes. Questions abound. That we can learn from animals is a biblical concept. The truth will become evident in the New Creation.
In my book Day without End animals are our friends. There you will find a scene describing a soccer game between lions and tigers with elephants as goal posts and huge grizzly bears as goalies. Find out who the referee is.
Go to Lulu.com and look for the book below.
In my next blog I will conclude this series with: The Rise and Fall of Christianity.
Day Without End
Price: $2.50 (downloadable ebook) or $7.54 (paperback)
A brief description
God is nothing without his creation, is nothing without His earth, is nothing without the human race. We too, we are nothing without God. God needs the earth to show who He is and what the meaning of his creation is. We can only prove that we love God when we show love for his creation, while God’s love is evident in our love for fellow humans. Day Without End shows that we have learned our lesson, that we, with God’s law written on our hearts, are finally ready to live in God’s creation, to explore his infinite Body, in the way it was originally intended. Of course, to accurately visualize a renewed earth under a renewed heaven is impossible. Yet if we don’t think about the Hereafter, we cannot have one, because it’s exactly there where we all will have our final destination. In the mystery of God becoming a human being, it is evident that this earth and not heaven is God’s permanent dwelling place.