Posted on 12/16/2011 7:29:56 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Some virtues are by accidents of history associated with utopianism, hostility to private property, anti-clericalism, and other core beliefs of the Left. I can scandalize a yoga instructor anywhere in the world by declaring myself an avid admirer of Margaret Thatcher, though I challenge you to read the yoga sutras and conclude from them that devotees must favor an overregulated financial sector.
Concern for the welfare and dignity of animals is such an issue, associated with nihilist leftists such as Peter Singer and local totalitarians who seek to regulate pets out of existence. But one need not believe that animals have been endowed with all the rights of humans to insist that they are more than a commodity that tastes good.
The conservative case against routine indifference to animal suffering has best been made by Matthew Scully in his 2002 book, Dominion. As I read it, the cat in my lap stretched out her paw and tenderly patted my cheek. “She would taste good,” I thought, was not a morally serious answer to the question, “Should I eat her?” And if it was not, how could it be a serious answer to this question: Should I eat an animal that has been separated from its mother at birth; confined its whole life to a pen in which it could not lie down to sleep or even turn around; castrated without anesthetic; force-fed; maddened by pain, fear, and sensory deprivation; and often inadequately stunned before slaughter, and therefore boiled and dismembered while still conscious?
Wayne Pacelle, the president and CEO of the Humane Society, is not notably a philosophical conservative. Nor has his record at the Humane Society been unimpeachable; Michael Vick remains — despite his apologies and Pacelle’s — as plausible a campaigner for his organization as O. J. Simpson would be for the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Pacelle has been too quick to praise animal shelters that are no more than killing machines. (There are better solutions: trapping, neutering, vaccinating, and releasing, for example.) He is not Scully’s equal as a prose stylist; his writing is a bit schmaltzy. But many of the arguments in his new book, The Bond, are compelling; some are new, and those that are not are cogently restated and worth restating.
Our instinct, he proposes, to care for animals is as much a part of our nature as our instinct to exploit them, and a better part of it. If Scully locates his argument, ultimately, in natural law and Christian theology, Pacelle appeals to the bond we instinctively feel with animals, one so ancient that to dismiss it as effete sentimentalism is surely to take the easy way out. This bond may be viewed through many modern prisms — genetic, evolutionary — but it has been observed from Aesop to Kipling. Children are born with a keen curiosity about animals; their horror at the thought that the animals are to be slaughtered must be trained out of them. It is well known that children who torture animals have something very wrong with them: They often grow up to practice this enthusiasm on humans.
I am happy to accept that animals are not humans and that the life of a human is more sacred than a cow’s. But it requires tergiversations of the mind and soul to accept that animals are thus like plants and their lives no more sacred than a carrot’s. We need not value animals more than children to ask, as Bentham did, whether they suffer, conclude that they do, and demand of ourselves that we limit the amount of suffering we impose upon them.
As Pacelle observes, it is not normal in human history to see animals as commodities much like plasma TVs even as we live in ever greater intimacy with them as pets. It is perverse to share our beds with cats and dogs as millions more of them every year are gassed or injected with sodium pentobarbital in animal shelters — a grotesque euphemism, as is the word “euthanasia,” for there is no shelter there, nor mercy in the killing of animals who are healthy, rambunctious, and young. They die terrified, and they die pointlessly: Very few are vicious, and most are capable of forming deep, affectionate bonds with humans. Revulsion at this is neither a left-wing sentiment nor a new one. “Though critics try to cast the animal-protection movement as something foreign, eccentric, and subversive,” Pacelle writes, “this cause has long been a worthy and natural expression of the great Western moral tradition.” William Wilberforce, he adds, is rightly remembered as a campaigner against cruelty to animals.
Pacelle’s tour d’horizon of the development of our understanding of animal nature raises important points. The Cartesian and Skinnerian views of the animal mind are dead. Since the cognitive revolution began in the 1950s, psychologists have grudgingly come to accept the obvious: Animals have minds. (No one without a Ph.D. in psychology could have failed to see this in the first place.) What kind of minds? We do not precisely know, but surely they have them.
Do they suffer? Of course. Do they love? Everyone who has lived with a cat or a dog knows the intensity of their emotions. Not just the cats and dogs, either; the natural world is bursting with stories of animals who have formed loving bonds with humans — lions, tigers, elephants, all the way down the phylogenetic tree to octopi. What are we to make of the sight of a monster crocodile who slobbers his way toward the edge of his pool, snorting with satisfaction, in order to be chucked under his chin by his trainer? That is a reptile, after all, one whose ancestors were on the planet millions of years before humans appeared. The capacity for this behavior appears to be at least latent throughout the animal kingdom. Is it right to observe this and conclude that our behavior toward animals is morally unimportant, or, as Pacelle characterizes the arguments of critics, that “animal welfare is ultimately a trivial matter — the product of effete modern sensibilities?” No, I agree with Pacelle: Our treatment of animals is a measure of our character, and to mistreat an animal “is low, dishonorable, and an abuse of power that diminishes man and animal alike.”
In any event, I’ve not yet noticed that anyone who cares for animals is diminished in his capacity to care for humans. To the contrary, in fact. Surely our compassion is not in such finite supply that we must measure it out in teaspoons lest there be none left.
The book ranges over a horror of commonplace cruelties, from puppy mills to sport hunting, but common sense suggests to me that of all these cruelties, industrial farming is both the worst and the one we least wish to think about. It is good, many conservatives will respond, because it is efficient: The world needs cheap food. Profits are good, and wealth is good — but most will allow that some industries are profitable and vile. That it is possible to make a fortune as a pornographer does not mean it is noble. That it is possible to become rich by making music that glorifies gang culture and cop-killing does not mean we ought to admire those who do so.
Still: It is immensely difficult to arrive at a position of personal decency untainted by contradictions or hypocrisy. Animals, when left to their own devices, often die of disease or eat one another. It is absurd — if only because ought implies can — to suggest we must do something about that. Perhaps here the principle should be Arthur Hugh Clough’s: “Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive / Officiously to keep alive.”
Still: Many animals, my beloved cats included, are obligate carnivores. I feed them meat — yet I have rescued and liberated mice from their clutches. No reason for this, I know; just sentiment.
As for laboratory animals, I’m willing to leave the moral gray area as a gray area and concentrate on the obvious abuses. Only the obtuse would endorse torturing primates, for example, to do research that serves no higher purpose than to put out a paper no one will ever read establishing for the 50th time that primates don’t seem to like being tortured. I’m more willing to accept sport hunting and medical research on certain animals, under limited circumstances, than I am factory farming. The way the animals are cared for is important, as is the point of the research. That the answers to these questions are difficult, and that our principles come into conflict, does not mean we should shrug at the questions or say that they do not exist.
All farming, not just the industrial production of meat, causes harm to animals. Plowing and harvesting cause immense suffering to field animals; as Barbara Kingsolver aptly put it, “I’ve watched enough harvests to know that cutting a wheat field amounts to more decapitated bunnies under the combine than you would believe.” “Cruelty-free” is a marketing slogan, not a serious argument. Yet the fact that some animals must suffer is not an argument for absolute license. We are not obligate carnivores, and we have a great deal of choice about how much meat we eat and how we treat the animals we eat before we slaughter them, if to slaughter them we are determined. At least we might ask ourselves whether they were permitted to run; sleep unmolested; enjoy the company of their own kind; experience sunlight, daytime, and nighttime; and express the instincts with which they were endowed by their creator. We choose to impose the hell of factory farming upon them so that we can eat something that tastes good and costs less. The word for this, as Matthew Scully remarked, is gluttony; it is not a virtue.
Although it is not precisely the argument Pacelle makes, one seems to me implied: The more an animal has the capacity to love us, the more shameful it is to mistreat it. It is partly that dogs love and trust us so that makes our betrayal of them so shameful; it is morally relevant that no one has ever said, “He’s loyal as a snake.” Unlike Pacelle, I support comprehensive No Kill legislation of the kind promoted by Nathan Winograd, and hope to see it enacted in every American city.
As for factory farming, I doubt the practice can be changed until widespread moral revulsion takes hold. I encourage the stirring of conscience. To me, those cows and pigs in factory farms look a lot like the cats and dogs who have laid their heads on my chest.
Before you object, ask yourself: Are you sure? Really? Are you sure you are not twisting yourself into rhetorical knots to justify your impulse to do anything you please to creatures who cannot object? After all, if you come across a paper bag in the gutter and it seems something’s in it and you don’t know if it’s alive, you don’t kick it, do you?
— Claire Berlinski is a freelance journalist who lives in Istanbul amid a menagerie of adopted animals. She is the author of There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters
The point of the column is that it is possible to care about animals and object to animal cruelty without becoming a vegan or supporting the right of snail darters to sue.
Also:
Genesis 9:1-29
And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man. ...
Why would the Lord require a reckoning of both man and beast of the lifeblood each have have taken? Wouldn’t that be absurd if the beast cannot hope to attain WITHOUT the capability to understand either the crime or the punishment to either a higher or lesser station resulting from said reckoning.
Concur. Anyone who can’t enjoy animals is missing an ingredient.
Proverbs 12:10
A Righteous man cares for the needs of his animal,
But the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.
As long as we still remember that they’re animals and property, not something or someone with “rights.”
I don't deny a dog's love ... but I contend, (and previously owned/adopted animals seem to bear witness), the "love" is based on the care of the dog.
Perhaps I should qualify MYself ... I believe love is a decision, not magic and fireworks.
We learn the magic and fireworks as we discover our decision was a good one.
Gandhi just shot up several points in my chart of great men.
Yes there is no proof, only superstitions. Man was created in God's image. God's image is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In the Garden, our Spirit died and we became dead to our Father. Every person from then on was doomed to Hell and destruction without being born again in the Holy Spirit. Animals were not created in the image of God. They were put here for our use. If you aren't born again with the Spirit of God, then you too are condemned. God's Commandments say "Thou shalt not kill", yet there are instructions on how to butcher animals. The Commandments are for us, not animals. The true meaning should read, "Thou shalt not murder", as we are instructed on the crimes that demand capital punishment. God's men went to war and used self defense also. Trying to make it more complicated than it is, is what you are doing. You are "choosing to believe something false because you don't accept God's plan and prefer to cling to your own fables. That is where error begins to creep in to the culture. I suppose this is how so called "Christians" seem to accept abortion and gay marriage. They have rejected what God has said and choose their own "gospel".
I'm not trying to make this bigger than it is, but it is error to think animals will be in heaven. The Bible talks about spewing out the "lukewarm". Who are they? They are the people that find Jesus somehow lacking to satisfy you so you make up things to suit you. When the Pharisees asked about who would be a mans wife in Heaven that had been married multiple times, Jesus said none of them. Jesus is enough. If you and you spouse both go to heaven, you will know each other, but you will not be married. You are married to Jesus. Your job in Heaven will be to worship Jesus, not to throw a ball to Fido. There are no verses that say your earthly animals will be with you in Heaven.
Early in my walk, my conscience asked if I was willing to die for Jesus. You and I may be in the time of the AntiChrist. Are you going to take the mark if the soldiers execute your child in front of you? Your Spouse? How about your pet? If you aren't willing to give your life to Jesus, why would He claim you as His bride? I believe in the Rapture and pray I will be worthy to go before the wrath of God cleanses the Earth, but we must realize that if we are left behind, the horrors that await us. If you think your dog is as valuable as you are to God, I can guarantee trouble for you. The Bible was given to us for wisdom. We can know what God thinks of us, what He is doing, and what will happen to His people. This childlike notion that fido will go to heaven is a fable that clouds people's judgement.
There are more myths than just this one, like angels look like women or babies, but pretending a dog will meet us in Heaven is very prevalent.
You also made the statement that Heaven wouldn't be Heaven without them. I've heard from homosexuals that stated that they don't want a God that would condemn them to Hell. You get Heaven with Jesus, or you can go somewhere else,.... you choose.
Gandhi just shot up several points in my chart of great men.
I love reading the responses to articles like this. They are a humbling epxerience. They help to keep me from thinking too arrogantly that all conservatives are rational, decent people and all libs are dumb raving lunatics.
There are alway knuckleheads who simply don;t get the simple thrust of the article and instead go into inane, idiotic quasi-religious arguments about the reality of the soul of animals and other arcane nuances.
I just wish God made all conservatives more rational and more thoughtful and more humane in their thinking. It might make it easier to keep the PETA nuts from painting us all as people like you “Chuckles”.
There is no excuse for treating a creature of God badly, but they are not human.
When I shoot a deer, I hope to have one shot kills. I have passed up shots that I didn't have confidence for a clean kill. I think treating animals cruelly is a sign of mental imbalance. To somehow derive satisfaction tormenting an animal because they can't fight back is abhorrent and sick. By the same token, shooting a hog in the head and skinning them for sausage is what they were born for.
The Bible tells us how to treat our animals, but it also tells us how to treat our slaves. It doesn't say we have to have slaves, just how to treat them if we had them. He wants respect and care with His possessions. Treating an animal with respect shows respect for God.
BTW, as an aside, this is why Americans have always striven to treat prisoners and POW's with respect. As much as we would like to skin an Al Quida alive, the law doesn't allow for it. As Christians, we are to respect ALL life, even non believers.
There is proof of Heaven? There is proof of Hell? There is proof of God? Pleas show me. Or are you going to cite scripture in your interpretation only. There are others out there who's interpretations I will take over yours.
I'll take my chances and stick with my beliefs.
“Rights” implies some type of contract, some give and take, some ability to understand one’s part. You are exactly correct.
Yes, the premise is loaded and flawed.
Conservatives and Christians have historically been the ones behind all welfare-type agencies, starting with hopsitals and homeless and charity organizations of all kinds.
Godless liberals who worship the creation bastardize ideas of ‘charity’ and ‘welfare’ and take them to such extremes that most people can’t even relate to. Hence we get the wild positions of the left. There’s no sound foundation underneath and nothing to balance their opinions in common sense.
Animals have souls and spirits.
If you look at the OT hebrew “soul” is nephesh. It’s regularly used when talking about the living - man and animals. What we’ve translated as “life” is many places could also be translated “soul” or “a living soul”. The well known “the life of the body is in the blood” has the term “nephesh” in it.
The spirit is the individual component unique to each animal and person. Their and our ‘personality’ as it is. Their animality if you object to calling an animals’ uniqueness a ‘personality’.
Remember when the world was still perfect and not fallen, nothing was made to die. the animals and man were not made to grow old and die. They were to live forever and fill the earth. On the perfect earth (not current earth) topography and such were all different but much better conditions for life than what exists now.
Nobody was a meat eater either. No animals killed others. The animals had grass of the field. Man had herbs and fruit bearing plants and trees.
Everything God made was supposed to live forever. ANimals and man. All His creations that had spirits and souls (spirits within living bodies). Or “spirits in the material world”.
I’ve noticed that my cat just quietly watched when a bug crawls by. Aren’t they supposed to instinctively attack smaller creatures?
Having watched the Animal Rights lobby eat away at the rights of the purebred dog fancy for the past 20 years I see Wayne Pacelle, HSUS, PETA and anyone who spouts their nonsense as the opposition. Their ultimate goal is for humans not to interact with animals at all. If someone doesn’t want to eat animals or wear animals or do any of those things, I’m fine with that. But when they want to legislate what the rest of us do I’m NOT fine with that. And believe me, that is exactly what they want to do.
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