And at the beginning of your post was the crux of the matter.
Humanization of beasts...while not even being willing to speak out for murdered babies.
And outrage at those who point out that those created in the image of God are a far higher priority.
Enough is enough.
God’s people must not be silent while chickens are chosen over children.
Ever since God created both man and animals, and ever since He gave them to us for food, and to have them around us for us to tend, our treatment of them has been a concern. Remember, Jesus called Himself “the Good Shepherd,” and spoke of how He cares for and protects His sheep while a hireling doesn’t. If we didn’t understand taking good and adequate care of sheep from some sort of experience, and if God approved of cruelty towards them, then how could we possibly understand Jesus calling Himself the Good Shepherd? While secular humanists are off-base in their desire to elevate animals to human status, just as they are on murdering unborn children, they’re off-base on everything. They believe in secular humanism. So in their world-view, chickens are chose over children. Christians are not to oppose them by just being the opposite of what they are, but to offer our own world-view. We have to look to the Lord, for when life begins, but also, so far as we have responsibilities for the laws and the rules of the world, on something like the proper treatment of animals. Christians can, therefore, support laws making animal abuse a crime. People can do terrible things to their pets, for example, and in the light of God’s Word, I believe they should face criminal penalties for doing so, even if what they’re destroying is their own property. It’s one thing to destroy your own inanimate object, but another to destroy a beast for the purpose of making it suffer in the process.
I see where you’re coming from, but disagree that it is not relevant. God tells us how to live, not just what not to do. His own Word says someone who is righteous will have regard for the lives of his beasts. That doesn’t mean not slaughtering them for food, but taking appropriate care of them, and not needlessly making them suffer. Part of God’s Word can’t be ignored for the sake of another. One could list a great many “minor” sins and say they pale in comparison to the legalized killing of the unborn, so we shouldn’t spend time on them, but that would not be right, because all sin separates us from God.
As Jews say, God gave them a method of slaughter that was most humane to the animals.
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/222241/jewish/Why-Do-Jews-Practice-Shechita.htm
But again, we have to consider that the chief reason for God wanting people not to inflict unnecessary suffering on animals is that it either hardens our hearts, or shows our hardened heart. The latter was the case of the prophet Balaam, who beat his donkey that had faithfully served him. Balaam’s beating of his donkey was directly related to his disobedience towards God, in which he used his prophetic gift for monetary gain, and that resulted in his death.
There are people whose full-time jobs are to deal with these animals, either business-wise, or physically in their care and slaughter. If their jobs involve brutalizing animals, or causing that to happen, that will tend to harden their hearts and lead them to other sins, out of a guilty conscience. It will drive them away from God, if they must act viciously or cruelly. Consider that God chose to make both plant and animal life (and before the Fall, man and all animals only ate vegetation, which is a state of affairs that seems promised to be restored when Creation is finally redeemed). God deliberately chose not to make animals like plants, but to give them many features similar to ours. And it is clear that God made things that way because how we regard them in some way relates to how we regard people, and God Himself. Someone who could torture animals could do that to humans, and even if he doesn’t, can’t have a tender heart towards other people, babies includes, and also can’t be right in his heart towards God. And that includes inflicting torture for the sake of making a living. A lot can happen in modern factory systems of slaughtering animals that wouldn’t happen in the ancient world.
This is from your reply:
“Not relevant.
In any way shape or form.
Because I am not advocating animal cruelty.”
The problem with that is that there’s a lot more involved than that. Do you believe that there should be any laws against animal cruelty? People have been known to drag animals behind cars and set them on fire, for example. For you to be consistent in your belief, then you can’t believe in any laws about animal cruelty or their welfare whatsoever, since laws just don’t happen by themselves. First people must come to recognize a wrong and believe that a law is needed, and then people must spend time passing the law.
On criticizing people who care about the suffering of animals but not the killing of unborn children, yes the truth has to be proclaimed about life in the womb, but that has to be done remembering that we are all sinners, and only by the grace of God do we see the taking of life through abortion for what it is. The Bible says we are to humbly try to correct others, not thinking ourselves better than they are, because we aren’t. No doubt that someday God will change the hearts of at least some of those very people, and we are to assist in that. That means proclaiming the truth, but part of the truth is that we are sinners just as they are. We have just accepted God’s forgiveness, which was purchased through Jesus’ death.