On Animals: Volume Two: Theological Ethics 9780567660862, 9780567669711, 9780567660879

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1 Towards a Christian Animal Ethics
Chapter 2 Using Other Animals for Food
Chapter 3 Using Other Animals for Clothing and Textiles
Chapter 4 Using Other Animals for Labour
Chapter 5 Using Other Animals for Research, Medicine and Education
Chapter 6 Using Other Animals for Sport and Entertainment
Chapter 7 Other Animals as Companions and Pets
Chapter 8 Human Impacts on Wild Animals
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index of Biblical References
Index of Authors and Subjects

Citation preview

On Animals Volume Two: Theological Ethics

On Animals Volume Two Theological Ethics David L. Clough

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © David L. Clough, 2019 David L. Clough has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Franz Marc, The Foxes 1913 © PAINTING / Alamy All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-6086-2 ePDF: 978-0-5676-6087-9 ePUB: 978-0-5676-6088-6 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For my father Roger James Clough whose love nurtured and inspired

CONTENTS Acknowledgementsviii Introductionxi Chapter 1 TOWARDS A CHRISTIAN ANIMAL ETHICS

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Chapter 2 USING OTHER ANIMALS FOR FOOD

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Chapter 3 USING OTHER ANIMALS FOR CLOTHING AND TEXTILES

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Chapter 4 USING OTHER ANIMALS FOR LABOUR

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Chapter 5 USING OTHER ANIMALS FOR RESEARCH, MEDICINE AND EDUCATION

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Chapter 6 USING OTHER ANIMALS FOR SPORT AND ENTERTAINMENT

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Chapter 7 OTHER ANIMALS AS COMPANIONS AND PETS

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Chapter 8 HUMAN IMPACTS ON WILD ANIMALS

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Conclusion237 Bibliography249 Index of Biblical References 281 Index of Authors and Subjects 285

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to those who liked On Animals Volume I enough to pester me about when Volume II would be available, and apologize to them that completing it has taken longer than planned. I have been helped in the researching and writing of this volume by a wide range of people it is my pleasure to thank here, without whom the gestation process would have been still longer. I am very grateful to colleagues in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Chester for ongoing receptive conversation about these themes, help in enabling research leave, contributing collectively to a warm and collegial environment for teaching and research, and recently agreeing to a default vegetarian catering policy. We are all grateful for Carly McEvoy’s invaluable role in guiding this aspect of departmental life, along with all others. Particular thanks is due to Dawn Llewellyn and Ben Fulford, with whom I met weekly through most of the writing of this book to report on progress with our various research projects and to offer mutual advice and support. I have also had the benefit of learning from students researching in related areas, including Jackie Turvey, Kris Hiuser, Peter Atkins, Emma Mist and Amy Bancroft. The University of Chester kindly hosted my inaugural lecture on animal ethics in 2013 and has been open to conversation recently about ambitious targets to reduce consumption of animal products. Beyond Chester, I have been grateful for ongoing conversation with fellow members of the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics, who in 2015 adopted a default vegetarian catering practice as a recognition of the importance of the issues discussed in Chapter 2, and made animals the topic of our 2016 conference, and with members of the Society for the Study of Theology, which has recently agreed on the same catering policy. I have also been glad to participate in wider deliberations with colleagues in North America through the Society of Christian Ethics and the Animals and Religion Unit within the American Academy of Religion. I was particularly grateful to the latter for co-hosting with the Christian Systematic Theology Section a valuable panel discussion on On Animals Volume I, coordinated by David Cunningham. Aaron Gross has supported my participation in American conferences through his impressive Farm Forward, and provided invaluable startup funding for the CreatureKind project, which I founded with Sarah Withrow King in 2015. Working on CreatureKind with Sarah, Margaret Adam and Jane Pearce has been one of the highlights of recent years, and we are all grateful to the wide range of support that we have received, especially from members of the UK and US Advisory Councils. The University of Winchester appointed me as Visiting Professor and became the first CreatureKind institution in 2016, as a result of the enthusiasm of its Vice-Chancellor Joy Carter for the interface between Christianity and animals. I have also been glad to have opportunities to engage

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with students and staff at many institutions where I have been invited to give papers related to this volume and work in progress, including the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity; King’s College, Aberdeen; a CAFOD/King’s College London seminar; Guildford Cathedral; Trinity College Bristol; New College Edinburgh; the Nordic Committee on Bioethics; the Oxford Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion; the Fernley Hartley Lecture trustees; the Systematic Theology Research Seminar at King’s College London; Harvard Law School; the Severn Theological Forum; the Sarx Creature Conference; the Animals and the Kingdom of God Lecture at Calvin College, Michigan; Regent College Vancouver; and Regents Theological College in Malvern. I am also grateful to the farmers, abattoir managers, research laboratories, and the racing stable that hosted me for site visits to learn first-hand about their work with other animals. Many people of diverse views have kindly discussed chapter drafts with me or provided valuable written feedback, saving me from unwise words and foolish errors. These include Margaret Adam, Carol Adams, Dave Aftandilian, Charlie Camosy, Chris Crosby, Matt Eaton, Derek Fry, Matt Halteman, Kris Hiuser, Dan Lyons, Bob Sluka, Chris Steck, Sarah Withrow King, and Lois Godfrey Wye. The responsibility for the errors that remain is, of course, my own. Margaret Adam also very kindly undertook compilation of the indices, with the capable assistance of Dominique Sadler. Finally, I am grateful to Mitsy for continuing to recall me to the everyday realities of life as a non-human animal, and to Lucy, Rebecca, Matthew and Anna for our ongoing domestic debate and practice about how to live well alongside other creatures. Chester August 2018

I N T R O DU C T IO N

Why this Book? Human activity is having a very great and increasing impact on the lives of other animals. This impact is captured strikingly in Vaclav Smil’s estimates that in 1900 the combined mass of all domesticated animals (biomass) was 3.5 times that of wild land mammals, but by 2000 a nearly four-fold increase in domesticated animals accompanied by a halving of wild land mammal biomass meant that the domesticated animal biomass exceeded that of wild terrestrial mammals by twenty-four times.1 The biomass of the billions of chickens humans now raise for meat and eggs is about the same as the biomass of all wild birds.2 Livestock in these numbers cannot be sustained by available grazing land, which has resulted both in rapid deforestation and the use of over a third of global cereal output to feed to livestock.3 The rapid increase in numbers of farmed animals has been effected by a revolution in how animals are raised, with most now confined in monotonous industrialized systems that provide very little opportunity for the expression of species-typical behaviours. These new ways of making animals available for human use have also extended to fish: industrial trawling with nets that scrape the sea floor and are a hundred miles long has contributed to the depletion of wild fish populations by 90 per cent since 1900, and about half of the trillions of fish killed for human consumption each year are now derived from intensive fish farming, which depends on feeding farmed fish twice their body weight in wild-caught fish.4 The vast scale of the human exploitation of domesticated animals and the impacts of human activity on wild animals provokes the ethical question of whether this human practice can be justified. Addressing this question in dialogue V. Smil, ‘Harvesting the Biosphere: The Human Impact’, Population and Development Review 37:4 (2011), 619. 2 Estimated at the beginning of Chapter 8. 3 These statistics are surveyed in Chapter 2. 4 H. K. Lotze and B. Worm, ‘Historical Baselines for Large Marine Animals’, Trends in Ecology and Evolution 24:5 (2009), 257; Rosamond L. Naylor et al., ‘Effect of Aquaculture on World Fish Supplies’, Nature 405:6790 (2000), 1019. Estimates on the numbers of fish killed annually are developed at the beginning of Chapter 2. 1

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with traditions of ethical enquiry turns out to be complex and contested, because philosophers and theologians have disagreed even as to whether human treatment of other animals is an ethical issue at all. This book pursues the question of the ethics of the human use of other animals through a review of what we are doing to them – our uses of them for food, clothing and textiles, labour, research experimentation, sport and entertainment, keeping them as companion animals, and through interaction with wild animals – alongside a Christian ethical analysis informed by the theological account of animals developed in Volume I of this work. As discussed in Chapter 1 of this volume, there is significant common ground between the Christian approach to animal ethics developed in this volume and other approaches to animal ethics, such as animal rights, utilitarianism, virtue ethics and the feminist ethics of care tradition. Proponents of all these approaches find themselves in consensus on many of the most urgent and pressing questions of our current treatment of other animals. The surveys at the beginning of each chapter of what we are doing to animals, as well as some of the ethical analysis that follows, will therefore be of interest to readers well beyond the Christian tradition. Chapter 1 argues, however, that a Christian ethics of animals is distinctive from these approaches in its foundational recognition of other animals as fellow creatures of God, which enables it to be receptive both to approaches focused on the animals themselves, such as animal rights, utilitarian theories and Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities account, and approaches focused on our obligations to care for them, such as virtue ethics and a feminist ethics of care. Given the scale and intensity of human exploitation of other animals noted above and the novelty of current practice, it is striking that this is the first substantive modern academic monograph focused on the Christian ethics of the human treatment of animals.5 I very much hope that the survey and analysis presented here will act as a stimulus for other Christian ethicists to undertake much-needed further work in this area, including projects focused more narrowly and engaging K. Remele’s Die Würde des Tieres ist Unantastbar: Eine Neue Christliche Tierethik (Kevelaer, Germany: Butzon & Bercker, 2017) is the most obvious competitor for this claim, but two of the five parts of the book deal with theological themes parallel to those discussed in Volume I of this work, rather than ethics itself. There are other books that similarly bridge theology and ethics (such as most of Andrew Linzey’s works), often addressed at an audience beyond the academy (such as L. Hobgood-Oster, The Friends We Keep: Unleashing Christianity’s Compassion for Animals (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010); C. C. Camosy, For Love of Animals: Christian Ethics, Consistent Action (Cinncinnatti, OH: Franciscan Media, 2013)). Interestingly, there are also a number of older works with a focus on animal ethics, such as Humphrey Primatt, A Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and the Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals (London: R. Hett, 1776) or Abraham Smith, A Scriptural and Moral Catechism: Designed to Inculcate the Love and Practice of Mercy, and to Expose the Exceeding Sinfulness of Cruelty to the Dumb Creation; to Which is Added an Address to Ministers of Religion, Parents, Instructors of Youth and Christians in General (London: Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 1839).

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more detail than is possible in a book attempting to engage the full breadth of human actions in relation to other animals. I hope, too, that it may play a role in provoking reflection in the wider church in relation to arguments presented here for significant changes in Christian practice, particularly in relation to our use of other animals for food.6 The Christian ethical analysis presented here depends at key points on the theology of animals developed in Volume I, so it may be helpful to summarize that here. Volume I considered the place of human and non-human animals in Christian doctrine, reflecting on their place in relation to God’s great acts of creation, reconciliation and redemption. Part I argued that creation is best understood as God’s gracious bestowal of being on all creatures, both for their own sake and so that they may glorify God in their participation in the triune life of God. All creatures are declared good by their creator in their own right; all creatures exist in utter dependence on God and mutual dependence on one another; no creature can be comprehended merely as the means to the flourishing of another. God’s animal creatures have particular attributes in common: they are fleshy creatures with the breath of life, especially dependent on other organisms for their survival, often the common subjects of God’s blessing and judgement, capable of response to God in a distinctive mode. Differences between animal creatures need to be understood in the context of this commonality, with attention given to the particular mode of life of each animal creature, and similarities between groups of animals – such as vertebrates, mammals or primates – not neglected in the task of specifying the particularity of the human mode of being an animal creature. Part II treated the doctrine of reconciliation, arguing that God’s other animal creatures cannot be neglected in accounts of the incarnation or atonement. Instead, Christians celebrate the New Testament confession of a God who took on creaturely flesh in order to reconcile not only human beings, but all things in heaven and on earth, and we should understand not only human beings, but all creation, to be the recipients of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. Part III argued that what God has created and reconciled, God has reason to redeem, exploring the majestic Pauline vision of the whole of creation liberated from its bondage, and the new patterns of peaceable creaturely living this new creation might require. Readers unconvinced about these doctrinal claims are referred to Volume I to examine the arguments presented there. This second volume explores the implications of this theological understanding of animals for the project of theological ethics. To take Christian faith seriously in this sphere means recognizing other animals as fellow creatures that glorify God in their flourishing, as fellow beneficiaries of God’s work of reconciling all things in Jesus Christ, and as fellow participants in the new creation. To see other animals in a theological perspective means recognizing that they, like us, My project CreatureKind (http://becreaturekind.org) is aimed at engaging Christians beyond the academy with the challenge of what it means to take animals seriously as a focus of Christian concern.

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are creatures of God, and belong to God. They do not belong to us. We do not have divine authority to use other animals without restraint in whatever way we wish. Instead, we must give consideration to what modes of interaction with other animals might appropriately reflect our shared participation in God’s gracious acts of creation, reconciliation and redemption. This book reconsiders the ethics of our practices in relation to other animals in the light of the theological account of animals developed in Volume I. Since publication of Volume I, it is notable that Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home contains a strong statement of the theological meaning and value of the lives of non-human animals, alongside its strong message on climate change. The letter opens by recalling the attitude to God’s creatures of the Pope’s namesake, St Francis of Assisi, who recognized bonds of affection with all his fellow creatures, addressing them as brother or sister. The encyclical then recognizes the need to join St Francis in a radical refusal ‘to turn reality into an object simply to be used and controlled’.7 We must, Pope Francis says, ‘forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures’; ‘the Bible has no place for a tyrannical anthropocentrism unconcerned for other creatures’.8 One of the reasons for rejecting irresponsible human dominion is that ‘The ultimate purpose of other creatures is not to be found in us. Rather, all creatures are moving forward with us and through us towards a common point of arrival, which is God, in that transcendent fullness where the risen Christ embraces and illumines all things’.9 Here the encyclical makes clear that God’s work of redemption includes non-human animals: the first time this has been stated in a papal encyclical letter. We exist with every created thing ‘as part of the universe, called into being by one Father’, forming together ‘a kind of universal family, a sublime communion which fills us with a sacred, affectionate and humble respect’, and the work of Christ embraces the whole of this created cosmos.10 The recognition of the place of other animal creatures before God and with us has ethical implications: the encyclical quotes the Roman Catholic Catechism to support its judgement that ‘Every act of cruelty towards any creature’, and any act that causes other animals ‘to suffer or die needlessly’ is ‘contrary to human dignity’.11 The encyclical makes clear that Christian theologians and ethicists must recognize the place of other animal creatures as belonging to God’s works of creation, reconciliation and redemption, which is a welcome indication that the arguments of Volume I may command broad assent among Christians. It does not, however, make any proposals for how this profound regard for non-human animal life should be expressed in our dealings with them. That is the task of this volume. Pope Francis, Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home (Vatican City State: Vatican Press, 2015), §11.  8 Pope Francis, Laudato Si, §§ 67, 68.  9 Pope Francis, Laudato Si, § 83. 10 Pope Francis, Laudato Si, §§ 89, 99. 11 Pope Francis, Laudato Si, §§ 92, 130.  7 

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At the beginning of this second volume, it is appropriate to recognize the danger that, in moving from a volume on systematic theology to a volume concerned with theological ethics, I am suggesting that ethics is merely the application of theory to practice. In fact, as I noted at the beginning of the first volume, the systematic theology of that volume was motivated by the prior ethical question of what we should do in relationship to our fellow animal creatures. The theology of that volume was therefore undertaken with this ethical task in mind, asking after the place of animals in Christian theology in order to inform reflection concerning how we should act. Systematic theology was not, therefore, the starting point of this process of enquiry, but a key stage in it, useful as a disciplinary environment in which competing perspectives can be evaluated in relation to their fit within a coherent theological scheme. The temporary freedom it permits from pressing ethical questions may open space for creative new theological insights that shed new light on the presenting issues. The work of theological ethics juxtaposes the fruits of this enquiry with particular contexts of practice – in this case, the various modes of our practice in relation to other animals – in order to discern where belief and practice cohere, and where they are disjoint and contradictory. The systematic theology of the first volume will therefore show its value insofar as it can help guide and determine the questions of Christian practice that are at issue here.

Is Animal Ethics Worth Our Time? One initial question that frequently arises when questions concerning ethical responsibility to animals are raised is whether we can afford to give ethical attention to other animals when there are so many urgent ethical questions concerning human beings. Surely, it is suggested, we should address those issues affecting human welfare before concerning ourselves with issues affecting other animals. It seems to me that we do not need to resolve the question of the relative importance of human and non-human animals in order to justify giving ethical attention to human responsibilities towards other animals. In a memorable scene from the UK National Theatre’s production of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, a First World War soldier tends to a wounded horse discovered trapped in barbed wire in the middle of no man’s land. An officer questions his actions, asking how, when so many millions of men have been killed and wounded, the soldier can consider it worthwhile to offer care to a horse. It is not a foolish question, yet within the narrative, and I think to us, it is clear that the officer is in the wrong. It is justifiable – or even morally required – to offer care to the wounded animal. This act of care is justifiable, not because horses are more important than humans, or even because they have an equal demand on our care, but because it is this creature in need, not another, that confronts the soldier, and to refuse this creature care we are able to provide without significant cost would be a moral failure. A situation in which we were faced with the question of whether to tend to a wounded horse or a wounded human where the lives of both were at stake and both could not be saved would need to be treated differently, of course. It seems

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morally obvious that in such circumstances we should prefer to save the human rather than the horse, but why this should be so merits consideration. In my view, it is difficult to provide a species-neutral reason why we should prefer to save the human. For Peter Singer, whose account of preference-utilitarianism has been hugely influential on the development of animal ethics,12 this choice could be based on the higher sophistication of the future preferences of the human being, but since it does not seem to me that we should choose between human beings on this basis, I do not see why the priority that should be accorded to creatures of different species should be specified in these terms. Faced with the horrible choice of saving a younger or older infant, it does not seem to me that we have reason to prefer saving the older on the basis of more sophisticated future preferences; we would do better to say there is no adequate criterion to prefer one to the other. The same argument would apply to most of the alternative species-neutral reasons we might offer. We should not choose between saving human beings on grounds of intelligence, or rationality, or degree of self-consciousness, or capacities and talents, and therefore should resist offering these reasons for choosing between creatures of different species. The question of the relative value of human and other animal life comes up a number of times in Jesus’ teaching. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus notes that God feeds the birds of the air and asks rhetorically ‘Are you not of more value than they?’ (Mt. 6.26). In Luke’s account the birds are identified as ravens but the comparison remains general: ‘Of how much more value are you than the birds!’ (Lk. 12.24). Both Matthew and Luke also record Jesus’ saying about sparrows, that two are sold for one penny, yet ‘not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father’ (Mt. 10.29) or ‘not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight’ (Lk. 12.6). The conclusion is the same in each gospel: ‘Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows’ (Mt. 10.31; Lk. 12.7b). Jesus makes a similar comparison when asked about the legality of healing on the Sabbath: ‘Suppose one of you has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the sabbath; will you not lay hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a human being than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the sabbath’ (Mt. 12.11-12). In Mark and Luke, Jesus responds to the challenge without the animal comparison (Mk 3.4; Lk. 6.9), but Luke includes a similar comparison in a different debate about Sabbath observance: ‘If one of you has a child or an ox that has fallen into a well, will you not immediately pull it out on a sabbath day?’ (Lk. 14.5) In relation to these passages it is important to note, first, that each of them affirms the value of the lives of non-human animals. God feeds the ravens and other birds of the air; no sparrow is forgotten by God; no one leaves a sheep or ox to suffer at the bottom of a pit or well, even when rescue requires breach of a Sabbath law. The rhetorical points that Jesus is making are persuasive because of the prior judgement that non-human animals are of moral account. We should note, secondly, that there is no suggestion of Singer’s original and key contribution to animal ethics was P. Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: Random, 1976). I discuss his theory, and its limitations, in Chapter 1.

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competition between human and non-human interests in these passages. The particular care God exercises towards human beings does not subtract from the providence shown towards other animals. Finally, it is significant that the aim of these passages is not to set out a creaturely hierarchy. The sayings about ravens, sparrows, and birds in general, are consoling words to an anxious audience, affirming God’s graciousness towards human beings through appeal to an example from the natural world. Pulling a sheep or ox from a pit or well is primarily an illustration of why in emergencies Sabbath legislation can be set aside; Luke’s inclusion of a child alongside the ox is instructive in making this clear. These texts reflect an assumption of human priority rather than aiming to establish it and are consoling precisely because Jesus’ audience is already convinced that they are of more value than the non-human comparators. Obviously, these texts do not support a species-neutral moral perspective: in the horrible scenario of both a sheep and a human child drowning at the bottom of a well and we had the opportunity only to save one, we have clear grounds for preferring the child: ‘How much more valuable is a human being than a sheep!’ The Bible passages do not make clear the reason humans have more value than birds or sheep: we are certainly not able to conclude that God prefers two legs, or opposable thumbs, or more rational or intelligent creatures, or selfaware creatures, or creatures with a view of their future. If we needed to reach a comparative judgement about creatures similar to us in several of these respects, such as intelligent extra-terrestrials, we would need to reflect further on this question. Biblical texts and later theological traditions were written by human authors for a human audience, so are inevitably concerned with questions of human value, identity and role. In interpreting them to inform our understanding of the relationship between humans and other animals, we need both to recognize the appropriateness of this address to humans, and the perspectival limitations that may result from it. While these sayings of Jesus rule out a flat moral equivalence between humans and other animals, they are equally clearly not grounds for Morpurgo’s soldier to agree with the officer seeking to demonstrate the futility of his task of caring for the injured war horse in the context of vast human need. God cares and provides for non-human animals; there is no reason that humans should not follow this example. The issue would only become acute in situations of irreconcilable conflict between human and non-human interests. On the same basis as the sheep and child example above, if a tiger is about to kill a child and the only way to prevent the attack is to kill the tiger, the tiger should be killed. If in a situation of famine, the choice is forced between feeding livestock and feeding humans, human needs should be prioritized. It is crucial to recognize, however, that most situations in which humans relate to other animals do not represent irreconcilable conflicts of this kind. Many of the spheres of practice discussed in this volume seem to function on the basis that human interests should always prevail over the interests of other animals even when such conflict is not necessary. Raising animals for fur is one clear example: the human interest here in gaining luxury goods does not represent an irreconcilable conflict in relation to the cruelties inflicted on wild animals in

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order to supply them. If the flourishing of non-human animals is valued at all, as must be the case in a theological context, such practices are recognizable as immoral: indulging human whim at very great non-human cost. This is not because arctic foxes or mink should be valued in the same way as humans, but because to value them at all is to recognize that their interests should not be set aside for trivial human interests. It will be part of the work of this book to discern where irreconcilable conflicts justify inflicting suffering or death on non-human animals, and where such treatment is unjustified because the conflicts are not of this kind. One confirmation of the unavoidable complexity in evaluating human and non-human interests is to consider how categories of ‘neighbour’ and ‘person’ should be considered in a theological context. Oliver O’Donovan notes that in Christian thought persons are not valuable because they possess certain generic characteristics, such as rationality or personality, but because they are individuals called into being by God and valued before they possess any characteristics at all, citing God’s word to Jeremiah: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you’ (Jer. 1.5). O’Donovan notes that Jesus refused an answer to the lawyer’s question ‘Who is my neighbour?’ in its own terms (Lk. 10.29), focusing the lawyer’s attention on the question of how to be a neighbour to those he meets, rather than providing a boundary for determining who should and should not be considered his neighbour.13 Ian McFarland takes the point one step further: ‘the crucial ethical judgement in my behaviour toward those I meet on the road is not primarily the determination of the general category under which they fall … but rather the way in which I define my relationship to them in all their particularity’.14 Drawing on McFarland’s analysis, Neil Messer suggests that the start of a Christian answer to why we should value other human beings is not based on any generic characteristics, but ‘because they are neighbours whom God has given us to love’ and argues that, if we were to encounter a human/chimpanzee hybrid our question should not be ‘Is it human?’ but ‘How am I called to be a neighbour’ to her?15 We can see, then, that even apart from a consideration of other animals, it is foreign to Christian thought to draw boundaries between those one is required to care for and those one is not. As Messer notes, humans are neighbours given to us to love, so there is no question about our responsibility towards them. This means Peter Singer’s suggestion that infanticide should be made permissible for young infants, because they fail to meet the criteria for personhood,16 is a moral absurdity O. O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics (Leicester: Apollos, 1994), 238–40. 14  I. McFarland, ‘Who is My Neighbor? The Good Samaritan as a Source for Theological Anthropology’, Modern Theology 17:1 (2001), 64 (republished as I. McFarland, ‘Who is My Neighbor? The Good Samaritan as a Source for Theological Anthropology’, in Theological Issues in Bioethics: An Introduction with Readings, ed. N. Messer (London: Darton Longman & Todd, 2002)). 15 N. Messer, Respecting Life: Theology and Bioethics (London: SCM, 2011), 121, 137–8. 16  P. Singer, Practical Ethics, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2011), 151–4. 13 

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in a Christian context, because a duty of care to infants has been recognized as non-negotiable, whereas criteria for personhood have been subject to change and dispute.17 For Christians, there is no question as to whether human life should be valued, so there is no possibility of the kind of trade-offs of Singer’s scheme, where some humans are judged below the line of personhood while some non-humans are judged above. In a Christian context, moral valuation is not a zero-sum game, so we can be both passionately committed to the protection of human life and concerned about fellow creatures beyond the human family, to whom we may be called to be neighbours, as was Morpurgo’s soldier working to free the horse from barbed wire. Another way to picture the complexities of accounting for our responsibilities towards human and non-human neighbours is to recognize that to be a neighbour to someone is to recognize our closeness to them, and we can be brought close to others in multiple ways. One aspect of the scandal of the parable of the Good Samaritan is that the priest and the Levite who passed by were inattentive to the way their geographical closeness to the man who lay wounded by the side of the road meant their lives had become entangled with his in a different kind of closeness, as potential – and quite possibly non-substitutable – care-givers to someone in dire need. The story encourages us to judge that their reason for discounting this kind of closeness was that the wounded man was not close to them in religious terms, and that their interpretation of the relative importance of these two kinds of closeness was a profound moral mistake. There are many other ways we can be brought close to others: if I purchase a shirt manufactured in a factory in Bangladesh where the workers are mistreated, I am brought close to them through the supply chain that joins us, a proximity campaigners use as an effective tool to call consumers and retailers to account. We are also brought close to others through relationships within families, or between friends, or through common membership of particular groups, including religious ones. Common species membership is another way in which we can be close to others, and is operative in imagined cases where we are asked to choose between saving a human and saving a sheep: we empathize far more deeply with the desperate human on the grounds of our common species membership, recognize the immensity of the life that is lost, and the gap in the lives of other humans the life will leave. These different ways in which we can be close to others cannot simply be ranked: there is a strong sense in which I am closer to other humans than I am to Mitsy, the cat who shares our home, but I also recognize the fact that the daily intimacy of my relationship with her means I would mourn her loss far more deeply than the deaths of humans I am not brought close to in my daily life. What Morpurgo’s soldier recognized in tending to the horse on the battlefield is that the lack of The problem of beginning medical ethics from the concept of personhood is pithily expressed in the title of S. Hauerwas’s essay ‘Must a Patient be a Person to be a Patient? Or, My Uncle Charlie is Not Much of a Person But He is Still My Uncle Charlie’, Journal of Religion, Disability & Health 8:3-4 (2005), 113–19.

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common species membership between him and the horse was a moral irrelevance given the way that he had been brought close to the horse as creature-in-need and potential care-giver, just as the Samaritan in Jesus’ parable recognized that his lack of common religious affiliation was no reason not to stop and provide help. The ways in which we are brought close to other animals, whether wounded at the side of the road, or as companions in our homes, or because their lives are linked to ours through the supply chains of the products that we buy, means that we are often required to recognize them as neighbours and act in response.18 There is one other possible way in which the discussion of ethical issues concerning human practices in relation to other animals might be thought to be at a human cost. It might be conceded that it is appropriate to give moral consideration to other animals, but given all the pressing human ethical issues that require our attention, we should avoid spending time writing and reading books like this one that address non-human ethics. On this account, taking time to reflect on ethical issues affecting non-human animals improperly consumes a finite resource of moral ‘air-time’. This concern is misplaced, however, because we are capable of giving consideration to more than one ethical issue at a time, and because the flourishing of human and non-human animals turns out to be strongly connected. I should give money to help provide for those who are homeless and I should also change my lifestyle to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that it creates. Once I have recognized my responsibility in both areas, I can act on both without either being compromised. In fact, there are win-win actions I could take: reducing my consumption of certain goods and services would both reduce my carbon footprint and mean I had more money to give away. In a parallel way, giving ethical consideration to non-human creatures does not mean reducing our concern for human ones, and in very many cases we will find that actions that benefit non-human animals will also bring benefits for humans. For example, as discussed in Chapter 2, the intensive rearing of cattle requires feeding them food crops that could otherwise feed many more humans than the meat produced, so the human food supply, animal welfare, and the wider environment would all benefit from reducing the numbers of animals raised in this way. Cultivating compassion towards other animals frequently also results in increasing one’s compassion towards humans; cruelty towards non-human animals is often a precursor to cruelty towards human ones.19 The intersections between the exploitation of humans who Karl Barth’s account of near and distant neighbours is in the background here, which I discussed in D. Clough, ‘Eros and Agape in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 2:2 (2000), 199–203. 19  As discussed in Chapter 1, this is Kant’s argument, which he illustrates with reference to William Hogarth’s engravings ‘The Progress of Cruelty’ (I. Kant, Lectures on Ethics, ed. P. Heath and J. B. Schneewind, trans. P. Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 212–13). Modern studies have also documented a strong link between abuse of nonhuman animals and violence towards human beings. For a recent survey, see C. P. Flynn, ‘Examining the Links between Animal Abuse and Human Violence’, Crime, Law and Social Change 55:5 (2011), 453–68. 18 

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are marginalized on grounds of their race, migrant status, gender or poverty, and the exploitation of non-human animals, are evident at many points in the book: Chapter 2 discusses the disproportionately female, black and Latinx, and migrant workers in meat-processing plants and feminist insights about the monopolization of the reproduction of female animals; Chapter 4 notes that the treatment of slaves by slave-owners in America was informed by the prior use of non-human labour; Chapter 6 connects the shocking racism of European colonialism with the sport hunting of big game in Africa; Chapter 7 records the inability of colonial explorers to understand the relationship between indigenous peoples and nonhuman animals in South America; and Chapter 8 notes the continuity of aspects of colonialism in modern conservation projects and concern about population growth in Africa. There are, of course, examples of potential actions that would improve the wellbeing of non-human animals only at substantial human cost, such as when a planned nature reserve would disrupt the lives of indigenous peoples. As discussed in Chapter 8, however, experience shows that resolutions to such human/wildlife conflicts that do not protect the interests of local people are, in fact, very unlikely to be successful. An additional rationale for giving space to consideration of human ethical responsibility towards other animals in the face of pressing human needs is that numerous Bible passages already confront these tensions, offering regulations about treatment of animals that are at least inconvenient to their human owners, if not creating outright hardships for them. The regulations for the Sabbath specifically require that domesticated animals should share in the Sabbath rest (Exod. 20.8-11, 23.12, Deut. 5.14), and even wild animals are noted as beneficiaries of the Sabbath for the land (Lev. 25.6-7). First-born male livestock must remain with their mothers for seven days before being sacrificed (Exod. 22.30), donkeys trapped under their burdens must be set free even if they belong to one’s enemy (Exod. 23.4-5; Deut. 22.1-4), kids may not be boiled in their mother’s milk (Exod. 23.19; Deut. 14.21), widely understood as representing a lack of respect to the mother and kid,20 a mother bird should not be taken with her fledglings or eggs (Deut. 22.6-7), and oxen should not be muzzled while treading grain (Deut. 25.4). The wrongness of consuming blood is that ‘the life of every creature is its blood’ (Lev. 17.14), making clear the requirement to respect the life that is common to human and non-human animals. The instruction not to yoke an ox and donkey together (Deut. 22.10) is plausibly interpreted as a concern for the wellbeing of the animals. Livestock must not be cross-bred (Lev. 19.19), which clearly relates to concerns about ritual purity, but also sets limits on human manipulation of domesticated animals. A cow or ewe may not be slaughtered with her young on the same day (Lev. 22.28), again placing limits on the human use of domesticated animals out of respect for them. Taken together, these laws in relation to human treatment of other animals demonstrate that fellow animal creatures are entitled to respect, both on the basis of the life they share with humans and because they too labour and are in need of rest and food. See discussion in A. Cooper, ‘Once again Seething a Kid in Its Mother’s Milk’, Jewish Studies, an Internet Journal (JSIJ) 10 (2012), 1–34.

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Israelite law concerning non-human animals indicates their place in God’s purposes and therefore the proper regard that should be shown towards them. At times, however, Christians have exegeted Paul’s interpretation of the command not to muzzle an ox in 1 Corinthians 9 to suggest that God does not care for oxen. Paul quotes the command and then immediately asks his readers ‘Is it for oxen that God is concerned?’ (v. 9). His rhetorical question anticipates the answer ‘no’, and has led Christians to judge that God is not concerned for oxen, and, by extension, that God is not concerned for any other animals.21 This is not the import of the passage, however. David Instone-Brewer notes that the structure of his argument in vv. 9-11 depends on an existing consensus among rabbinic Jews. This consensus is not, however, that God does not care about oxen, but rather that one should not speculate about God’s motives in commanding certain things, because this detracts from the literal observance of the decree.22 Instone-Brewer notes that it is hard to understand the reticence of contemporary Jews in this regard, but that it is based not on insensitivity towards other animals, but on the realistic attitude that the law is written for those who can read it.23 God gave the law to humans; humans will benefit from obeying it; humans are to obey it without concerning themselves about God’s motives in commanding. Paul is therefore appealing to a well-known rabbinic principle of interpretation of the law in this passage, and not to any shared judgement that God has no concern for oxen or other animals, which would contradict the very many texts in the Hebrew Bible affirming God’s providential care for all animals.24 Christians have ample reason to be concerned about the ethics of their practice in relation to other animals. Doing so follows a biblical precedent, does not depend on any judgements of moral equivalence between humans and other animals, and there is reason to think that attending to how we treat other animals will also benefit humans, rather than the reverse. For example, St Hilary of Poitiers’ commentary on Matthew argues that Jesus’ teaching in Mt. 10.29 that not one sparrow falls to the ground apart from the Father cannot mean that God cares for sparrows, because this would contradict Paul’s statement about oxen in 1 Cor. 9.9. (Hilary of Poitiers, Commentary on Matthew, Fathers of the Church, trans. D. H. Williams (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), ch. 10, §18, 121). 22  D. Instone-Brewer, ‘1 Corinthians 9.9–11: A Literal Interpretation of “Do Not Muzzle the Ox”’, New Testament Studies 38:4 (1992), 556. 23 Instone-Brewer, ‘1 Corinthians 9.9–11’, 557–8. 24  See Vol. I, ch. 2, for a broad survey of biblical texts relating to non-human animals. Karl Barth agrees that the text should not be interpreted as showing that God does not care for oxen, citing Ps. 36.6b ‘you save humans and animals alike, O Lord’, though his interpretation of Paul’s intention is less convincing than Instone-Brewer’s here (K. Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. III/3, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. W. Bromiley and R. J. Ehrlich (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), 174). In his discussion of this passage, Stephen Clark notes that Paul knew very well that God cares for oxen, as is evident from his vision of the whole of creation liberated from its bondage in Rom. 8.18-23 (Stephen R. L. Clark, The Moral Status of Animals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 196–7). 21 

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A Complex Web Mitsy, the family cat, has just interrupted me at my desk, seeking attention from the only other member of the family at home. She is a reminder to me of the difficulty and complexity of the project of working out our ethical responsibilities towards fellow animal creatures. She was part of a litter of semi-domesticated cats at a local farm, facing an uncertain future if not adopted. She came to our notice, though, not merely as a creature in need, but also a desirable addition to our family: our daughter Rebecca, then nine years old, had been urging such an adoption for years. So we took her from her mother at the age of about eight weeks, arranged for her to be vaccinated to protect her health and spayed to avoid the problem of additional kittens for which to find homes, and for the past seven years she has lived with us. She is the only non-vegetarian in the household, on the basis of what currently seems to me ambiguous evidence concerning whether cats can thrive on a vegan diet. We provide food for her regularly and sometimes at her request, keep a litter tray clean, allow her freedom of movement within and outside the house. Outside the house she has been both the victim of violence from other cats, almost losing her tail from a vicious bite when she was young, and the perpetrator of violence towards other animals. She is a poor hunter, for which I am grateful, but she has sometimes brought into the house dead birds that she may have killed, and we have rescued mice and frogs from her attention. As discussed in Chapter 7, there are a range of ethical reasons not to keep cats as companion animals: they cause harm to local wild populations of birds, small mammals, and other animals, and many breeding practices are problematic for animal welfare. These seem good reasons not to domesticate a wild cat, or not to breed more domesticated cats, but whatever the outcome of such discussions, this fellow creature, Mitsy, is before us and needs our care. We live, then, with a feline member of our household who has different dietary habits to its human members, whose occasional violence towards other local fellow animals brings other members of the family to tears, whom we have sterilized in order to avoid the complications associated with her reproduction, who for the most part seems to appreciate our company and attention and who is loved in return. This is not a straightforward relationship. Now I am distracted by a loud buzzing from the window. Wondering about opening a window to allow an insect to escape, I see that it is too late: a fly is trapped in the web of a spider half their size, and their panicked buzzing results from their struggle to avoid being completely bound in silk by the spider. Their efforts are unsuccessful: the buzzing is replaced by an eerie and queasy silence as the spider transports the enwrapped fly to their lair, softens their meal with digestive juices and begins to feed. I am faced with a familiar quandary: should I have attempted to protect the fly from the spider as I would have done a mouse in Mitsy’s clutches? Any such intervention would obviously deprive the spider of food, but perhaps the stakes for the spider are not life and death in relation to this meal, as they surely are for their prey. I am confident many ecologically minded friends would urge me not to interrupt the natural course of relationships between predator and prey,

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but it is by no means clear to me where the boundaries of such a policy of nonintervention would be. If I came across a wounded rabbit, for example, it seems that this non-intervention would require me to leave him for a hungry fox, or allow his corpse to be a host for maggots to thrive in, rather than show mercy to the rabbit and attempt to nurse him back to health. Again, my responsibilities in relation to these other creaturely near neighbours are by no means clear. Beyond the house, the complexities multiply. Chaffinches feed at our bird table and squirrels feed on what falls to the ground. We might call these animals ‘wild’, in contrast to Mitsy’s domesticated status, but they are interacting with local humans, and their relationship with us must be seen on a continuum with the relationship the family has with Mitsy, rather than in an entirely different category.25 A sparrowhawk periodically swoops in to take a bird from my neighbour’s garden in a display of aerial coordination that is nothing short of awe-inspiring. On a morning walk yesterday I spotted a spectacled bear, Visayan Warty Pigs, four cheetahs, Przewalski horses, two European black vultures, and listened to the whoops of monkeys or apes I could not identify: all inhabitants of the zoo to which we are adjacent, where many rare and not-so-rare animals or their forebears have been gathered from around the world to live instead in Chester, England, with some of the visitor revenues used to fund global conservation efforts. On a visit to the zoo last year I was struck by the biography of a chimpanzee two years older than me: ‘Boris’ was born in Sierra Leone in 1966, captured and taken to New York, sold from a pet shop and raised in a Manhattan apartment and, when keeping him became unmanageable, was then sent to the zoo.26 During the writing of this book, native creatures were being displaced from the field opposite my house in order to make way for a home for a number of animal species from South East Asia in a big extension to the zoo, though protected species such as the Great Crested Newt were carefully captured, confined in an area safe from the construction work, and then released. Following the road from my house in the other direction would have led me past a site where cockfighting is said to have taken place in the late eighteenth century, as an evening entertainment for visitors to the Chester horse races. The practice was banned in the UK in the early nineteenth century, though an animal welfare charity last year discovered two farms in West Sussex where five hundred birds were being raised for fighting.27 Our local convenience shop half a mile away sells meat and dairy products derived from animals raised in a wide range of intensive farming operations from within the UK and imported from overseas. A two-mile walk in the opposite direction would lead me past a friend’s farm where he raises a rare-breed beef herd on a farm with high See Vol. I, 163–6 for a discussion of the meaning of ‘wild’, which could be interpreted as beyond human control. 26  The Manhattan part of Boris’s story is told in H. Mundis, No, He’s Not a Monkey, He’s an Ape and He’s My Son (New York: Crown Publishers Inc., 1976). 27  RSPCA, ‘Press Release: Father and Son Banned for Life after RSPCA Discover Cockfighting “Factory”’ (17 October 2012). 25 

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welfare standards which participates in a wide range of environmental initiatives. Human lives are tightly implicated with any number of other animal lives: the question of how we are to order these relationships is diverse and far-reaching. One ethical response to the complexity of human/non-human animal relationships, motivated by concern about what non-human animals are subjected to at the hands of humans, is to attempt to resolve it through separation. The aim here is to end the human domestication of other animals and to seek to insulate other animals from human contact as far as possible. While such a view is attractive in promising an end to all kinds of contexts in which other animals are treated cruelly by humans, it seems unpromising in several other respects. First, it seems unrealistic, even as a long-term aim: so many other animals are so variously related to the lives of human beings that the project of untangling the cords that bind them and imposing a zone of exclusion between humans and other animals is almost inconceivable. If we add to this consideration the reality that the scope of human impact on the environment through factors such as pollution, anthropogenic climate change and destruction of habitats means there is almost no ecological niche unaffected by human activity, the goal of separating human and non-human lives seems distant indeed, so that human extinction seems the only realistic option for leaving other animals alone.28 Second, even if we were able to surmount such difficulties, it is not clear that we would arrive at a desirable alternative state: would all other animals really be better off without contact with human beings, and what kind of human lives would be led in such a future? It seems that at least some forms of human/non-human animal relationship have been mutually beneficial, as discussed in Chapters 4 and 7, and it is not clear what the unprecedented novelty of human isolation from other animals might mean. Third, human responsibilities for care of other animals seem to be judged as unattainable in this separatist vision, on the basis that humans are incapable of anything but destruction in relation to the lives of other animals. There seems a fundamental conflict here between the prophetic visions of Genesis 2 and Isaiah 11 in which peaceable coexistence between humans and other animals is envisaged, and an alternative vision in which humans are seen as so dangerous to other animals that only isolation from them is possible. Finally, there is a powerful human-exceptionalism operating in the ecologically motivated human-separatist vision, critiqued in Chapter 3 of the previous volume: of all the species on earth humans are judged to be separate and different, outside the natural world, unlike every other kind of creature and not properly part of the ecosystems to which all other creatures belong. For these reasons, Christians should not try to resolve the complexity of human/non-human animal relationships by ending them. Divorce is not a possibility here: we are stuck with each other and need to negotiate rather than end our manifold relationships.

This is the manifesto of the Voluntary Human Extermination Movement; see ‘Breeding to Death’, New Scientist (15 May 1999).

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What Follows The remaining chapters of this book take up the challenge of engaging the complex web of human practice in relation to other animals. Chapter 1 is unique in taking up methodological questions, asking what it means to approach animal ethics from a Christian theological perspective, how this theological perspective compares with other approaches to animal ethics, and addressing four foundational issues – animal suffering and death, the significance of the doctrine of the fall, what it means for animal creatures to flourish, and categories for describing the moral claim of other animals on us. Readers primarily interested in practical ethical issues of human dealings with other animals might choose to turn directly to Chapter 2. Chapters 2–8 each address an area of human practice in relation to other animals. Each chapter begins with a survey describing what humans do to animals in this sphere of activity, before turning to the question of how we should evaluate this practice ethically in a Christian context. Chapter 2 – the longest chapter in the book by some distance – tackles the human use of other animals which far outweighs all other uses by several orders of magnitude: using other animals for food. Chapter 3 assesses the human use of other animal for clothing and textiles; Chapter 4 reviews and evaluates the use of other animals for labour; Chapter 5 addresses research experimentation on non-human animals; Chapter 6 considers the ways in which humans use other animals for sport and entertainment; Chapter 7 treats the keeping of other animals as companions or pets; and Chapter 8 surveys and evaluates the wide scope of human impacts on wild animals. The Conclusion begins with a summary of the arguments developed in each chapter – to which readers may turn for a concise overview of the volume – and assesses what follows from considering the analyses for a Christian ethics of animals. At various points in the book I recount impressions gained from visits I made to places where non-human animals were being used by humans, including farms, broiler-houses, slaughterhouses, laboratories and racing stables. The visits were to sites in the UK, took place in 2013–14, and were between two and five hours in duration. It seemed important to supplement my engagement with academic literature with the opportunity to witness directly the ways humans were treating animals in these contexts. These accounts are not intended as evidence or as representative of wider contexts of practice: I rely throughout on academic literature and those with expertise in quantitative and qualitative research methods for that. The visits informed the ethical reflection of the book, however, and I hope the places where they surface in the text help to illustrate the discussion.

Chapter 1 T OWA R D S A C H R I ST IA N A N I M A L E T H IC S As noted in the Introduction, addressing the ethical question of whether what humans are doing to other animals is justifiable turns out to be complex and contested. This chapter addresses some of the preliminary questions that arise in taking up this question in a Christian context. The Introduction discussed the most obvious of these preliminaries, whether we can afford the time to give moral consideration to other animals, given the range of other issues that demand our attention. The positive answer I gave to that question leads us to a range of methodological questions, which are the subject of this chapter. The first section of the chapter engages ethical perspectives that deny that we have any direct moral duties towards animals, arguing that the theological work of Volume I demonstrates that they are mistaken. The second section considers the relationship between a Christian approach to animal ethics and other ethical views that recognize direct duties towards other animals: animal rights, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, feminist ethics of care, and Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. The next three sections of the chapter address themes that are foundational for the analysis of subsequent chapters: consideration of non-human animal suffering and death, the significance of the Christian doctrine of the fall, and consideration of what it means for animal creatures to flourish. The final section sets out some key categories for thinking ethically about other animals, as fellow covenant partners, neighbours, the poor, the oppressed, and moral exemplars.

Defending Animal Ethics In the Introduction I argued that there is no escape from the complex web of our relationships with other animals, which means we are faced with the challenge of attending to and engaging with this complexity. As we assess the ways of doing so ethically, it is helpful first to indicate a class of ethical approaches that are ruled out by the theology of animals developed in the first volume. If it is the case that God is directly concerned with the lives of all animals in creation, reconciliation and redemption, we can immediately see that a theological ethic must recognize the possibility of direct ethical duties towards them. John Wesley put this succinctly: recalling God’s mercies towards other animals should ‘enlarge our hearts’ towards

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them.1 The flourishing of animals matters to God, and Christians are called to conform their love to God’s love, and to care for those God cares for. The place of all animals in God’s purposes therefore gives Christians reason to avoid actions that unnecessarily block their flourishing, and to take action where possible to promote it. This means at the most basic level that the lives and wellbeing of nonhuman animals have moral relevance in a theological ethics. To save the life of a stranded dolphin, to protect the environment required to support the lives of a group of gorillas, to shoot a dog dead, to keep chickens in confined conditions not conducive to their welfare, are all actions with relevance for theological ethics. This is not to prejudge the question of whether the former actions may always be chosen or the latter actions always avoided, but simply to make the basic point that such actions have moral content in a theological framework. In doing such things, we can act rightly or wrongly by these fellow creatures, and by their God. Tom Regan classifies the range of ethical positions that reject direct moral duties towards other animals as ‘indirect duty views’.2 These are ethical positions maintaining that actions in relation to non-human animals have moral relevance only when they impinge on humans in some way: we can have direct moral duties only to human beings; any duties towards non-human animals are indirect. One key theological proponent of this view is Aquinas. When arguing in the Summa theologia that there is a reasonable cause for the rituals of the religion of ancient Israel, he considers the objection that the law is unreasonable in forbidding the taking of a mother bird with her young (Deut. 22.6), the muzzling of an ox treading corn (Deut. 25.4), and hybrid animal breeding (Lev. 19.19) because Paul states that God does not care for oxen (1 Cor. 9.9). Aquinas responds that, provided one is acting reasonably, it does not matter how one behaves towards other animals, but in respect of the passions, we should recognize that pity for non-human animals may lead to pity for other human beings. God therefore prohibited cruelties towards other animals, he argues, in order to inculcate pity that would operate towards human beings.3 Similarly, when discussing the theological virtue of charity later in the work, Aquinas judges that charitable love can be directed only to God and one’s neighbour. Since other animals have no fellowship with human beings in the rational life and cannot properly possess goods that could be wished for them, they cannot be the direct recipients of charitable love, according to Aquinas, though we can love them indirectly out of charity if we regard them as good things we desire for other humans.4 J. Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions, vol. 5 (New York: Ezekiel Cooper and John Wilson, 1806), 131–2. The sermon is discussed at the beginning of On Animals, Vol. I, ch. 6. 2 T. Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, 2nd edn (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 150–94. 3 T. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Blackfriars, 1963–1975), II-I, qu. 102, a. 6. See discussion of this passage in the Introduction. 4 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, qu. 25, a. 3. Both this and the previous passage of the Summa are cited with approval by John Rickaby in his 1888 critique of animal rights: J. Rickaby, Moral Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green, 1888), 248–51. 1

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Immanuel Kant is another influential proponent of an ethical framework in which there can only be indirect moral duties towards non-human animals. In a passage headed ‘Duties to Animals and Spirits’ in his ethics lectures, he argues that ‘since all animals exist only as a means, and not for their own sakes … it follows that we have no immediate duties to animals’.5 Following this bald claim, he discusses indirect duties towards non-human animals on the basis of analogies between human and non-human animals. A man should reward the lifetime’s service of his dog by caring for her after she is no longer able to serve him, until her death, but this care is a service to humanity, rather than the dog: in shooting the dog instead the man would damage ‘the kindly and humane qualities in himself, which he ought to exercise in virtue of his duties to mankind’.6 Kant considers that a good lesson to children is provided by William Hogarth’s 1751 engravings ‘The Four Stages of Cruelty’, which show a man progress from torturing a dog, to abusing other animals, to murdering his pregnant lover, and after being hanged his corpse is shown in the final plate being dissected before a high court judge and audience, with dogs eating excised organs. Strikingly, Kant also notes with approval at this point the story that Leibniz ‘put the grub he had been observing back on the tree with its leaf, lest he should be guilty of doing any harm to it’, commenting that ‘[i]t upsets a man to destroy such a creature for no reason’.7 The question we should ask here is why it upsets a person to destroy such a creature: Kant seems here to rely uncharacteristically on moral sentiment. Kant’s account of ethics is under tension at this point: his moral system cannot admit direct moral duties to non-human animals, but it is obvious to him that Leibniz’s action is praiseworthy. It does not seem at all plausible to find the praiseworthy moral content in Leibniz’s action in its future impact on his action towards human beings: the care shown to the grub is much more obviously interpreted as kindness or charity towards the grub directly, which neither Aquinas nor Kant can account for in their moral systems. A third type of moral account that finds no place for direct moral duties towards non-human animals bases moral obligation on social contract. David Hume, for example, takes the hypothetical case of a creature that was rational, but had such inferior bodily strength and mental ability that it was unable to resist human beings. While humans ‘should be bound, by the laws of humanity, to give gentle usage to these creatures’ we would not ‘properly speaking, lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them’ because our relationship with them ‘could not be called society, which supposes a degree of equality’.8 This, Hume states, is the position of non-human animals in relation to human beings, though he remains uncommitted on the question of how far they possess reason. On Hume’s account, I. Kant, Lectures on Ethics, ed. P. Heath and J. B. Schneewind, trans. P. Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 212. The passage is cited and discussed by Tom Regan in Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, 177–85. 6 Kant, Lectures on Ethics, 212. 7 Kant, Lectures on Ethics, 212–13. 8 D. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. T. L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 18. 5

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duties of justice arise because they are useful in regulating a society of those that can be judged equals, capable of acting to protect their interests. The power imbalance between humans and other animals makes justice considerations inapplicable. John Rawls’s more recent contractarian account of justice takes a similar line, that strict duties of justice are inapplicable to creatures who do not have a capacity for a sense of justice, but that cruelty towards them is wrong for other reasons.9 Hume’s statement that we can have no society with non-human animals on the grounds of inequality is similar to Aquinas’s statement (drawing on Augustine), that humans have no fellowship with other animals in the rational life.10 The structure of each of these indirect duty theories disallows direct duties to those outside the community of equals, defined either as fellowship of reason (Aquinas), morally autonomous subjects (Kant), bodily and mental power (Hume), or the capacity for a sense of justice (Rawls). Moral theories structured in this way fail to account for direct duties towards those outside the community of equals. The theological location of animal creatures described in the first volume means that moral frameworks such as these, which are structurally incapable of recognizing that we can act rightly or wrongly towards non-human animals, must be judged theologically inadequate on this basis.

Approaches to Animal Ethics Since indirect duty views are ruled out by the theological view of animal creatures outlined in Volume I, we must turn to what Regan terms direct duty views: approaches to ethics that recognize direct duties towards non-human animals. I will survey five ethical frameworks in this category: the preference-utilitarianism developed most fully by Peter Singer, the animal rights theory for which Tom Regan is the leading advocate, the virtue ethics approach taken by Rosalind Hursthouse, the feminist ethic of care approach presented by Carol Adams and Josephine Donovan, and the capabilities approach of Martha Nussbaum. I will argue that each of these approaches to animal ethics contains important insights into how we should think ethically about other animals, but that none is individually sufficient J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). It is interesting to note that Rawls’s conclusion, unlike Hume’s, might require modification in the light of evidence that a sense of justice as fairness is present in non-human primates. One recent review of this area of research is given in S. F. Brosnan, ‘Justice- and Fairness-Related Behaviors in Nonhuman Primates’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110 Suppl 2 (2013), 10416–23. The texts from Hume and Rawls are cited and discussed by R. Hursthouse, Ethics, Humans and Other Animals: An Introduction with Readings (London: Routledge, 2000), 79–81. 10  Peter Carruther’s argument against animal rights is grounded in contractarian moral theory; see P. Carruthers, The Animals Issue: Moral Theory in Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).  9 

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as an ethical expression of the theological approach developed in this work. Instead, a Christian ethical approach to the ethics of the human treatment of other animals will be methodologically pluralistic in relation to these approaches. Singer’s preference-utilitarian approach to animal ethics came to prominence with the 1975 publication of Animal Liberation.11 His fundamental claim is that the principle of equality requires that equal interests of all beings should be treated equally. This means that the suffering of a being should be counted equally with the like suffering of any other being. Species boundaries are therefore irrelevant, Singer argues: ‘sentience … is the only defensible boundary of concern for the interests of others’.12 Ignoring species boundaries generates a radical moral framework in which the inflicting of suffering by humans on other animals could only be justifiable if it avoids similar levels of suffering, or generates compensatory levels of enjoyment, to other beings. Singer identifies research on non-human animals and the factory farming of animals as two examples of contexts where this perspective would lead to radical change: experiments that cause the suffering of non-human animals without being likely to lead to compensatory gains for other beings should be ended (ch. 2) and the suffering caused to other animals raised for food in intensive conditions is not justifiable merely to satisfy human dietary preferences, so such farming practices should be abolished (ch. 3). These arguments are made on the basis of preferences for non-human animals to avoid suffering: Singer acknowledges that the ethics of killing are more complex in a utilitarian context. Assuming a being can be killed without causing suffering, there is no intrinsic objection in a utilitarian ethical framework to killing as such: the ethics of killing depend on the balance of suffering and enjoyment such acts bring about. Jeremy Bentham’s oftenquoted slogan – ‘the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’ – appears in a footnote referencing an unpublished work in which Bentham concludes ‘Killing other animals therefore is nothing: the only harm is tormenting them while they live’.13 Singer’s preference-utilitarian account also ascribes value to the fulfilment of a being’s future preferences: ‘to take the life of a being who has been hoping, planning, working on some future goal is to deprive that being of the fulfilment of all those efforts’.14 He interprets the wrong done in killing a human being, or any other being capable of having future preferences, is that these preferences are frustrated. Such a consideration would not apply, however, to a being without the capacity for such preferences: ‘to take the life of being with the mental capacity below the level needed to grasp that one is being with a future – much less make P. Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: Random, 1976). P. Singer, Animal Liberation, 2nd edn (London: Pimlico, 1995), 8–9. 13  J.  Bentham, ‘Cruelty to Animals’, Jeremy Bentham Manuscripts, University College London Library Special Collections, box 72 item no. 214, 2. The famous footnote, referencing this text, is in J. Bentham, ‘Principles of the Civil Code’, in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 1, ed. J. Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843), 142–3 n. 14  Singer, Animal Liberation, 21. 11 12

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plans for the future – cannot involve this particular kind of loss’.15 If we had evidence that chickens, for example, were incapable of grasping that they were beings with a future, then within Singer’s framework there would be no intrinsic wrongness in killing them, provided it could be done without suffering and other beings capable of similar or higher levels of preference satisfaction were allowed to live in their place. The humane farming of animals without future preferences is therefore prima facie acceptable in Singer’s framework, although he adopts and commends a vegan diet on the basis of wider factors, such as global food supply.16 Tom Regan’s animal rights account operates on a very different basis from Singer’s utilitarian approach. Regan argues that ‘some nonhuman animals resemble humans in morally relevant ways’, possessing, like us, ‘a variety of sensory, cognitive, conative, and volitional capacities’, and like us, able to ‘see and hear, believe and desire, remember and anticipate, plan and intend’. Like us, ‘what happens to them matters to them’. Regan terms animals with these capacities ‘subjects-of-a-life’. He argues that we can be sure that mentally normal mammals of a year or more are subjects-of-a-life in this way, and that we have reason to think that birds and fish may also be.17 Such subjects-of-a-life ‘have a basic moral right to respectful treatment’, Regan argues, because their capacities indicate that they have inherent value.18 It is therefore not an act of kindness to treat them with respect, but an act of justice.19 Regan’s view is concerned not merely with suffering or preference-satisfaction, as in the utilitarian framework, but with respect for the dignity of subjects-of-a-life, and its implications are more radical. Subjects-of-a-life may not be considered to be human property, may not be killed unless it is in their interests, and therefore may not be used to provide human food, used as research subjects for human benefit, or used by humans in any other context that fails to respect their inherent value.20 This ethical agenda leads to a different set of priorities for action than one aimed at reducing the suffering of non-human animals on utilitarian grounds. Regan is not in favour of working to reform practices that treat non-human subjects-ofa-life disrespectfully, such as improving the welfare of domesticated animals, but advocates instead the abolition of such practices: not bigger cages, but empty cages.21 Gary Francione’s account of animal rights has much in common with Regan’s but begins from the claim that any non-human animal that is sentient should receive equal consideration and has the right not to be considered human property. Francione sees his criterion of sentience as a lower threshold than Regan’s subjectSinger, Animal Liberation, 21. D. Gilson, ‘Chew the Right Thing’, Mother Jones (2 May 2006). 17  Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, xvi. By 2003, Regan was convinced that birds were subjects-of-a-life, but was still uncertain about fish; see T. Regan, Empty Cages: Facing the Challenge of Animal Rights (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 60–1. 18  Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, xvii, 243. 19  Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, 280. 20  Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, 348, 330–45, 363–92. 21  Regan, Empty Cages. 15  16 

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of-a-life, including any animal that might possess an experiential life in which life may fare well or ill for them. Francione sees this as certainly including birds and fish, though he is unsure as to whether insects or molluscs would meet his criterion for sentience.22 A third major approach to ethics that recognizes direct duties towards nonhuman animals is the virtue ethics account given by Rosalind Hursthouse. Where a utilitarian account considers the maximization of preference satisfaction, and the animal rights approach considers only rights and duties, Hursthouse describes the virtue ethics approach as telling us ‘that we should act in the way in which the virtuous person would characteristically act in the circumstances: that is, compassionately, or honestly or loyally, etc., and not in the way she would not act, that is, callously or dishonestly or disloyally, etc’.23 She also notes that a virtue ethics account pays attention to the motives operative in an action, so that if someone were taking their cat to the vet because she enjoyed the feeling of helping a sick and dependent creature, rather than to promote the cat’s wellbeing, their action would be recognized as immoral.24 Hursthouse notes the criticisms that it is not clear who decides what the virtues and vices are, that virtue and vice terms are too vague to be useful, and that their application depends on how you see things. She responds that she considers the virtues and vices to which she appeals are hard to disagree with, and that all ethical theories, including utilitarian and animal rights approaches, have to begin with some unargued premises. She recognizes that it is necessary to use practical wisdom to apply virtue ethics to particular cases and, as a result, different people may come to different moral conclusions about particular cases, but this she sees as a basic fact of the moral life.25 Virtue ethics is more complex than other approaches, on Hursthouse’s account, because it accurately reflects the complexity of moral judgements. Rational argument may well not resolve moral disputes, she argues, but virtue ethics is the best available method of assessing and clarifying them.26 Josephine Donovan and Carol Adams note the feminist critique of masculine ethics that constructs morality as fairness, as opposed to the ethic of care tradition originating in Carol Gilligan’s work that emphasizes morality as responsibility.27 G. L. Francione and R. Garner, The Animal Rights Debate (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 15. Francione’s account of animal rights is developed in G. L. Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995); G. L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000); G. L. Francione, Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 23  Hursthouse, Ethics, Humans and Other Animals, 148. 24  Hursthouse, Ethics, Humans and Other Animals, 150–1. 25  Hursthouse, Ethics, Humans and Other Animals, 154–7. 26  Hursthouse, Ethics, Humans and Other Animals, 164. 27  J. Donovan and C. J. Adams, ‘Introduction’, in The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader, ed. J. Donovan and C. J. Adams (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 1–2. 22 

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This approach to ethics is suspicious of abstraction and instead offers an approach that is ‘flexible, situational, and particularized’.28 As it turns to animals, an ethic of care regards them ‘as individuals who do have feelings, who can communicate those feelings, and to whom therefore humans have moral obligations’.29 This means both attending to individual animals, but also attending to the causal systems that have placed them in this situation.30 Donovan and Adams are critical of animal rights approaches that value other animals only insofar as they are similar to human beings, assume a society of autonomous subjects rather than interdependent systems, and which deny or suppress emotions humans feel for other animals, such as love.31 Proponents of more systematic approaches object to this starting point of the affection we feel for other animals and the relationships we have with them. They complain that ethic of care approaches are confused, limited by human capacity to feel sympathy and by the boundaries of existing relationships, and persist in a speciesist bias.32 In response, Donovan and Adams articulate core principles for an ethic of care approach to other animals, such as that ‘it is wrong to harm sentient creatures unless overriding good will result for them’ and ‘it is wrong to kill such animals unless in immediate self-defense or in defense of those for whom one is personally responsible’.33 Donovan recognizes the limits of a theory based on sympathetic reaction and argues for an emphasis within ethics of care on ‘listening to other life-forms regardless of how alien they seem to us and incorporating their communications into our moral reaction to them’.34 While some taking an ethics of care approach defend killing other animals for food,35 Donovan argues that an interpretation of ethics of care that is committed to attending to the voice of nonhuman animals must recognize that killing them for food is unjustifiable, ‘for if we care to take seriously in our ethical decision making the communicated desires of the animal, it is apparent that no animal would opt for the slaughterhouse’.36 Martha Nussbaum’s approach is to consider non-human animals alongside human beings as requiring ten different capacities for a life with dignity: life; bodily health; bodily integrity; sense, imagination and thought; emotions; practical reason; affiliation; other species; play; and control over one’s environment.37 Donovan and Adams, ‘Introduction’, 2. Donovan and Adams, ‘Introduction’, 2–3. 30  Donovan and Adams, ‘Introduction’, 3. 31  Donovan and Adams, ‘Introduction’, 5–6. 32  Daniel Engster provides a representative overview of such criticisms in D. Engster, ‘Care Ethics and Animal Welfare’, Journal of Social Philosophy 37:4 (2006), 1. 33  Donovan and Adams, ‘Introduction’, 4; original emphasis. 34  J. Donovan, ‘Feminism and the Treatment of Animals: From Care to Dialogue’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31:2 (2006), 315. 35  See, for example, K. Rudy, Loving Animals: Toward a New Animal Advocacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 76–87. 36  Donovan, ‘Feminism and the Treatment of Animals’, 310. 37  These are set out in M. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA; London: Belknap Press, 2006), 76–7, and were developed 28  29 

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Nussbaum observes that ‘there seems to be no good reason why existing mechanisms of basic justice, entitlement, and law cannot be extended across the species barrier’, and argues that her capabilities approach is better placed than the Kantian or utilitarian approaches she considers as alternatives because ‘it is capable of recognizing a wide range of types of animal dignity, and of corresponding needs for flourishing, and because it is attentive to the variety of activities and goals that creatures of many types pursue’, which means that it is ‘capable of yielding norms of interspecies justice that are subtle and yet demanding, involving fundamental entitlements for creatures of different types’.38 Nussbaum’s approach begins with an Aristotelian wonder at living beings and ‘a wish for their flourishing’, wanting ‘to see each thing flourish as the sort of thing it is’, and judging that wrong is done ‘when the flourishing of a creature is blocked by the harmful agency of another’.39 In her scheme, moral status is not assigned on the basis of a singular criterion, because there are different things of intrinsic value in a capabilities approach: ‘if a creature has either the capacity for pleasure and pain or the capacity for movement from place to place or the capacity for emotion and affiliation or the capacity for reasoning, and so forth (we might add play, tool use, and others), then that creature has moral standing’.40 Nussbaum judges that ‘there is no respectable way to deny the equal dignity of creatures across species’ but sees such a commitment as an obstacle to establishing an overlapping consensus on respecting the basic capabilities of non-human animals.41 On this basis, and in order to avoid any potential conflict with respect for human capabilities, she favours moderate steps of reform, such as eliminating obvious cruelties and ensuring non-human animals raised for food receive good treatment and a painless death.42 While each of these approaches to the ethics of human relationships with other animals contains important insights, none is sufficient to capture the breadth and depth of the theological account of the place of animals set out in the previous volume. The theology of animals developed in Volume I of this work provides grounds for rejecting accounts of morality that are unable to recognize direct moral duties towards non-human animals. The place of animal creatures in God’s gracious acts of creation, reconciliation and redemption, and the vocation of Christians to live lives that respond to this divine initiative, provide prima facie reasons to avoid causing harm to fellow animal creatures and to promote their flourishing. These are direct duties towards other animals on the basis of the value they are recognized to possess in a theological perspective. Each of the current options for accounts of ethics in relation in earlier works such as M. Nussbaum and J. Glover (eds), Women, Culture, and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) and M. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 38  Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 326–7. 39  Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 349. 40  Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 362. 41  Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 383. 42  Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 402.

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to non-human animals that do allow for direct duties towards them have strengths, but none is adequate in isolation to serve as the basis of a theological account. A utilitarian approach is correct in recognizing that the capacity of non-human animals to experience suffering or enjoy satisfaction, and their related preferences, are of moral significance, and give us moral reasons to act. Other things being equal, where we can choose to reduce the suffering we inflict on other animal creatures, or where we have the opportunity to enhance their wellbeing, we should do so. The theological interpretation of this positive aspect of utilitarianism is to say that, contrary to Aquinas’s position discussed above, we do have duties of charity towards non-human creatures on the basis of their standing before God and we have a responsibility to give careful consideration to how we may fulfil these duties. Andrew Linzey cites Isaac the Syrian to illustrate the Christian roots of a charitable heart. In response to the question ‘What is a charitable heart?’, Isaac answers that it is a heart which is burning with charity for the whole of creation, for men, for the birds, for the beasts, for the demons – for all creatures. He who has such a heart cannot see or call to mind a creature without his eyes becoming filled with tears by reason of the immense compassion which seizes his heart; a heart which is softened and can no longer bear to see or learn from others of any suffering, even the smallest pain, being inflicted upon a creature.43

Utilitarianism shares this concern with Christianity, but fails to recognize that our duties towards other animals – and humans – are not exhausted in our responsibility to act benevolently towards them. Non-human animals can be wronged in ways that are not possible to recognize in a utilitarian framework. One example of this is the killing of an animal that falls short of Peter Singer’s criterion of sentience. If it is the case that a young chicken does not possess a sense of itself as a being with a future, then on a utilitarian analysis no wrong is done in killing her and replacing her with another being equally capable of preference satisfaction. In a theological perspective, however, a grave harm has been done to that chicken. This non-substitutability of one creature for another is most aptly expressed in the lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins quoted in Chapter 3 of Volume I: each mortal thing Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came.44 Quoted in V. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, trans. members of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius (Cambridge; London: James Clarke & Co., 1973), 111, which is quoted by A. Linzey, Animal Theology (London: SCM Press, 1994), 56. Lossky cites Isaac of Nineveh, Mystical Treatises, trans. A. J. Wensinck (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1923), 341, as his source, but uses a different translation of the passage. 44  ‘As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame’, lines 7–8, from G. M. Hopkins, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. Mackenzie, 4th edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 90, quoted in Vol. I, 60. 43 

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A theological commitment to the ‘thisness’ or haecceity of particular creatures means that each is non-substitutable. This is not to prejudge the question of whether it could ever be right to kill a chicken, but it is important to recognize, as utilitarianism cannot, that harm done even to individual animals considered not to have future preferences should be judged morally relevant in a theological context. An animal rights approach, such as that of Tom Regan, is right to recognize that something is due, morally, to non-human animals that have a sense of themselves as subjects of their own life. Where utilitarianism affirms the appropriateness of duties of charity towards other animals, an animal rights approach affirms the appropriateness of duties relating to justice. It is more than unkind or uncharitable to be cruel towards a non-human animal: it is unjust in failing to recognize their moral status. To say that such animals have rights is to say that we recognize them as moral subjects that can never be treated merely as means to the ends of others, on the basis of morally relevant capacities that they share in common with us. It is this element of recognition of respect due to a particular animal creature that is missing in a utilitarian ethical analysis, but finds support in a theological account informed by an affirmation of the particularity of each creaturely life before God. Regan’s approach, however, suffers from a similar structural weakness to Singer’s utilitarianism, in setting a threshold level animals need to meet in order to be entitled to moral regard. He judged initially that mammals over a year old are subjects-of-a-life and therefore rights-bearers, and later added birds and debated about fish, but there will be a stage in the development of a young animal before it reaches his criterion. Let us say that a puppy at a week old fails to meet the subject-of-a-life criterion. That means that while he may have claim to our charity, on Regan’s account, he does not have inherent value that requires our respect in comparison to an older puppy. This seems very strongly counter-intuitive: apart from the rationale of Regan’s categorization of rights-bearers, it is hard to explain why a slightly older puppy should be entitled to an entirely different category of moral respect than a slightly younger one. Francione’s proposal of sentience as criterion reproduces this problem at a different threshold point. While one may sympathize with the concern of Regan and Francione to establish a clear boundary beyond which all animals are entitled to the same moral respect, justification of the position of the line seems difficult: threshold criteria inevitably establish a precipice beyond which creatures receive qualitatively different moral regard.45 Andrew Linzey’s pioneering work in articulating theological grounds for considering non-human animals takes a similar approach to that of Regan, Animal Rights: A Christian Assessment of Man’s Treatment of Animals (London: SCM Press, 1976). He argued for sentience as the basis for ascribing rights to other animals, but in Animal Theology (20–25), Linzey narrates the rethinking of his position in response to criticism of that position by R. Griffiths, The Human Use of Animals, Grove Ethics, vol. 46 (Bramcote: Grove Books, 1982). Linzey’s new position, most clearly articulated in chapter 5 of A. Linzey, Christianity and the Rights of Animals (London: SPCK, 1987), was to ascribe ‘theos-rights’ to ‘Spirit-filled, breathing creatures, composed of flesh and blood’ on the basis of the rights

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It is notable that virtue ethics is distinct from the previous two direct duty approaches, utilitarian and animal rights, in not depending on judgements of commonality between human and non-human animals. Singer’s utilitarianism depends on a judgement of the moral equivalence of frustration or satisfaction of preferences, albeit in two different categories depending on whether the being in question is sentient; Regan’s animal rights theory depends on recognizing that all subjects-of-a-life are entitled to a basic moral regard. In focusing on the moral agent, in contrast, virtue ethics does not base its evaluation on any judgement of interspecies similarity. Instead, it shifts moral focus from the object of moral concern to the moral subject. This shift is similar to the way Jesus turned the tables on the lawyer in relation to the question of the neighbour, discussed in the Introduction, focusing on the neighbourliness of the agent, rather than whether or not a particular moral patient passes the threshold for neighbourhood. On a virtue ethics account, it is good to provide warmth and food for a starving kitten we find outside in the winter, not because of some judgement of equivalence, similarity or commonality between ourselves and the kitten, but because it is obviously what a compassionate person would do. The combination of the urgency of the need of the kitten and our ability to help generates the obligation to act in the context of virtue ethics. We might say that compassion is literally to feel with its object, so that our recognition of the kitten’s need depends on our ability to empathize with her plight and recognize relevant similarities between her experience and that of a human being in similar circumstances. Significantly, however, this empathetic response does not require any judgement of equivalence or comparison. It also clearly belongs to the virtue of compassion for Leibniz to replace the grub on the leaf from which he had taken the grub, to go back to the discussion of Kant, above, or for us to take spiders out of the bath and release them outside, rather than killing them by washing them down the plug hole. Neither of these actions depends on any precondition about similarities of experience between humans, grubs and spiders. Neither action seems likely to be judged obligatory in the context of a utilitarian or animal rights approach: the preferences satisfied may be minimal in relation to any competing human preference – such as aversion to spiders – and we are well below Regan’s application of his subject-of-a-life criterion. Virtue ethics seems, therefore, to allow a different kind of moral thinking about God has over them as their Creator (69). Linzey debates the merits of an inclusive view, which would ascribe such theos-rights to ‘all classes of animal, over and above insects’ (83, emphasis in original), and an exclusive view, which would restrict theos-rights only to mammals and birds. Linzey opts for the latter, on the grounds that ‘those species most clearly related to us also share something of the spiritual life of which we are capable’ (85). Structurally, therefore, as he notes (82–3), the moral framework he proposes is similar to Regan’s and shares the same structural problem of setting a threshold criterion. In fact, Linzey’s position seems more arbitrary than Regan’s in setting a boundary at kinds of animals (mammals and birds, but not reptiles, for example), rather than Regan’s subject-of-a-life criterion. Linzey acknowledges that moral language beyond rights is useful (95), but it is clear that his is primarily a rightsbased account with its corresponding merits and demerits.

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animals, which depends on the ability of a moral agent to recognize and respond to the perceived need of other animals compassionately. Here it is the capacities of the moral agent that are most significant, rather than judgements about the capacities of the objects of their action. The advantage accruing to virtue ethics from making the starting point of moral consideration the moral agent is balanced, however, with a corresponding disadvantage. Particular animals seem to be at the mercy of how a particular moral agent deliberates about the requirements of virtue, and stand in danger of receiving insufficient moral regard. Consider the question of whether it would be permissible to breed dogs as experimental subjects to test the toxicity of novel chemicals that could be useful in cleaning products and other applications. Those seeking approval for the research might argue that the new products would bring significant new human benefits, and that it was virtuous to seek to advance human knowledge, make environments safer, and make cleaning more convenient. Hursthouse might counter that no virtuous person could weigh benefits of this order against the suffering and death of the dogs, but it is not clear that virtue ethics could provide guidance that would enable the disagreement to be concluded in her favour. Both Singer’s preference-utilitarianism and Regan’s animal rights approaches deliver much clearer analyses, on the basis for Singer that the human preferences satisfied are insignificant in comparison to the very great frustration of preferences for the dogs concerned and, for Regan, that subjects-of-a-life have the right not to be used as mere means to the ends of others. Utilitarianism and animal rights theories seem right in recognizing that there is something about the interests of the dogs that should not be overlooked in the complexity of other potential moral considerations. In particular, Regan seems right in recognizing that a wrong is done to dogs used in this way. In its focus on the moral agent, a virtue ethics approach seems in danger of missing the trumping value of treating moral patients inappropriately in particular ways. The feminist ethic of care approach as presented by Carol Adams and Josephine Donovan is attractive in emphasizing the engaged particularity of our moral concern for other animals and the importance of attending to their voices in relation to our treatment of them. In emphasizing relational and particular contexts to remedy the rational abstractions of utilitarian and animal rights approaches, however, ethics of care seem uncomfortably dependent on particular interpretations of what it means to be caring in a given context. An ethic of care approach rightly directs us to attend to the particular needs of the other creature who is before us, but like virtue ethics, seems vulnerable to what a particular moral agent recognizes to be their responsibility towards particular non-human animals. Charismatic furry animals, such as giant pandas, seem more likely to be able to attract our sympathy and care than tarantula spiders or snakes, which explains World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)’s choice of a global logo. Josephine Donovan provides a helpful response to this criticism in her development of an ethics of care account focused on listening to the voice of non-human animals as part of a dialogic process, but the uncertain outcome of such a dialogue is reflected in her criticism of Val Plumwood’s ‘dialogical interspecies ethic’ for its judgement that the human killing of non-human animals

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for food is permissible.46 It may be true that many fellow animal creatures will always be at the mercy of whether or not we feel motivated to act well towards them, or how we should attend to their express preferences, but the hope of other ethical approaches to establish a secure moral framework that aspires to something more than this vulnerable state do not seem unworthy, and the reparative moves that seem necessary to address the weaknesses of this approach seem to point towards a compromise with the universal judgements the theory begins by rejecting. Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, rooted in an Aristotelian recognition of the particular mode of flourishing of every creature, is closest to being able to respond to the broad and complex account of creaturely life which belongs to a theological understanding of animal life. She is attentive, as I am, to the merits and contributions of other ethical approaches. The difficulty with her capabilities approach is the rapid way she discounts the interests of non-human animals in flourishing where human and non-human interests are divergent, on the grounds of a commitment to identifying where an overlapping moral consensus may be found. It is hard to understand how the killing of non-human animals for human food where plantbased foods are substitutable can be reconciled with a respect for life as a basic capability, yet Nussbaum seems content merely to propose ‘moving gradually toward a consensus against killing at least the more complexly sentient animals for food’.47 At this point it is hard to be optimistic that the capabilities approach will be successful in encouraging significant moral change in relation to the human treatment of animals. Evaluating the utilitarian, animal rights, virtue ethics, feminist ethic of care, and capabilities approaches to animal ethics in the context of my theological approach indicates that each recognizes a morally significant element relating to our moral regard for non-human animals, but each is by itself insufficient. Proponents of these approaches need to argue for a singular ethical approach because the approach taken is the basis of the justification for ethical regard for other animals: their capacity for preference satisfaction (Singer), their rights (Regan), the virtue of the moral agent (Hursthouse), our response to the voice of other animals (ethic of care), or their capabilities (Nussbaum). A theological approach to animal ethics, in contrast, can afford to be methodologically pluralistic, because the source of the ethical demand is the status of animal creatures in God’s creative, reconciling and redeeming purposes. The suffering of animal creatures, recognized in utilitarianism, matters and calls for a charitable response where we have the power to ameliorate it, but charity does not exhaust our responsibility for other animals; the justice considerations introduced in an animal rights framework helpfully emphasize that something is due to other animals, but its threshold criteria leave some animal creatures on the wrong side of a moral divide. The focus introduced in virtue ethics on the virtues of the agent, the emphasis on particular and embodied human relationships with other animals introduced by the feminist ethic of care approach, and attention to the capabilities non-human animals require for lives with dignity in Nussbaum’s capabilities Donovan, ‘Feminism and the Treatment of Animals’, 321, quoting V. Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2002), 157. 47  Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 393. 46 

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approach are all helpful in moving discussion beyond mere characteristics of other animals, but each is incomplete in failing to give an account of the value of other animal creatures independent of our recognition of responsibility towards them. To return to the example of Leibniz’s grub, it is obviously the case that he was right to place the grub back on the leaf, whatever we might speculate concerning the grub’s own experience of the event, the grub’s ability to meet cognitive criteria, the agent’s definition of the boundaries of the virtue of compassion, the extent to which he could discern the voice of the grub, or a moral consensus concerning how the grub’s capabilities should be respected. In the theological account I have defended, the value of the grub and therefore of assisting the grub is based in the grub’s place in God’s project of creation and redemption. Christians have good reason to be sympathetic to the attention to animal suffering evident in a utilitarian ethical framework, to the prioritizing of the dignity of other creatures present in an animal rights account, to the need to develop habits of care emphasized in the context of virtue ethics, to the particularity of our embodied relationships with other animals, as emphasized in a feminist ethic of care, and to Nussbaum’s call to be attentive to the capabilities of non-human animals. Christians have common ground and should therefore make common cause with many of the initiatives that proponents informed by these other ethical approaches champion. None of these approaches to animal ethics, however, gives full expression to a theological account that pays attention to the ways our relationships with other animals are informed by recognizing them as our fellow beneficiaries of God’s grace in creation, God’s reconciliation with creation in Jesus Christ, and God’s redemption of creation that is already and not yet. My identification of what I see as the comparative merits of a theological approach to the ethics of human practice in relation to other animals does not imply, of course, that there are not many reasons other than Christian ones for believing that human beings should ascribe moral value to the lives of other animals and shape their ethics accordingly. Discussing the range of ways in which ethicists have sought to make a place for other animals in their ethical schemes makes clear that one can recognize human moral responsibilities towards other animals from a variety of starting points. While this is a work of theological ethics, then, and situates ethical questions in relation to other animals in the context of Christian theological traditions, I hope that the pluralist ethical approach I adopt may make the discussion of particular ethical issues in the chapters that follow of interest to some who do not share my theological starting points. On many of the issues discussed, in many current political contexts, only the development of a broad public consensus well beyond the walls of Christian churches will enable the change in our practice which I argue is required, though I hope that Christians can again be at the forefront of those campaigning for such change, as they were in campaigns for the first legislation against cruelty to non-human animals.48 The role played by Christians in the early nineteenth century in the campaign to bring in a law prohibiting cruelty towards other animals is discussed in Chapter 2, and the Christian role in campaigning against vivisection in the late nineteenth century is surveyed in Chapter 5.

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Suffering and Killing For many of the particular topics discussed later in this book, it is important to consider where this theological account of animals stands in relation to the independent questions of the ethics of causing animal suffering and killing animals. In the first place, the theological account I am proposing would share the consensus of utilitarian and animal rights approaches that causing animal suffering is a prima facie moral concern. Once we have recognized other animals as fellow creatures that glorify God in their flourishing, fellow beneficiaries of God’s work of reconciling all things in Jesus Christ, and fellow participants in the new creation, we cannot be complacent about causing them to suffer. It may be justifiable to cause suffering to a non-human animal – for example, to give an injection that benefits the animal – but it must be justifiable to do so, i.e. there must be some justifying reason: What might count as a justifying reason will clearly be a key point of dispute in different contexts, but it is significant to state that there must be such a reason: that causing suffering to other animals is of moral concern. We turn next to the question of the ethics of killing animals in a theological context. The key point to note here is that Christian moral concern about the ending of animal life is not reducible to a concern about suffering. That is, the killing of an animal is a prima facie concern in a theological context, whether or not it causes suffering to the animal killed. The first reason for recognizing this is the biblical visions of peaceful harmony between creatures at the beginning and end of time. In Genesis 1 and 2, death seems to have no part in God’s purposes for creation, let alone the deliberate causing of death by one creature to another. Only after the disobedience narrated in Genesis 3, leading to the expulsion from Eden, does death enter into the story. God dresses the newly ashamed humans in the skins of dead animals, enmity begins between humans and other creatures as God delivers judgement on the snake, and at the opening of Genesis 4 Abel becomes a keeper of sheep, bringing an offering to God of the best parts of his animals that provokes Cain’s jealous and fratricidal rage. Two chapters later, it is the violence that has filled the earth, in which all creatures seem implicated, that persuades God to bring about a great flood (Gen. 6.11). When God grants permission for killing after the flood, seemingly as concession to human sinfulness, the careful conditions for meat-eating make clear its problematic character: humans must avoid consuming the lifeblood that is common to humans and other animals (Gen. 9.4), and Israel develops elaborate rituals around the killing of animals that clearly separate these acts from all other killing (e.g. Lev. 1). Prophetic visions look forward to a time in which the creaturely harmony of Eden will be restored. In Isaiah, the rule of the one from the stump of Jesse will be marked by peace between wolf and lamb; leopard and kid; calf and fatling; cow and bear; infant and asp; and when the earth is full of the knowledge of the Lord, nothing will be hurt or destroyed on God’s holy mountain (Isa. 11.6-9; 65.25-6). In this new creation, killing non-human animals for sacrifice will no longer be acceptable: ‘Whoever slaughters an ox is like one who kills a human being; whoever sacrifices a lamb, like one who breaks a dog’s neck’ (Isa. 66.3). In Romans, Paul pictures a time

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when the whole of creation will be liberated from bondage to decay (Rom. 8.21) and Revelation pictures hybrid creatures surrounding the Lamb in worship, every creature in heaven, on the earth and under the earth singing praises to the Lamb (Rev. 4.6-11; 5.11-14), and the time when God will dwell with mortals, when God will wipe every tear from their eyes, when death, mourning, crying and pain will be no more (Rev. 21.3-4). These biblical images of creaturely life in accordance with God’s will make clear that our present conditions in which creatures inflict death on one another must be recognized as a problematic and regrettable aspect of a fallen creation that God will overcome as the reign of God is fully established. Alongside the recognition of this powerful biblical vision of original and final peace between creatures, we must also recognize that the problematic character of the human killing of other animals has often been dismissed in the Christian theological tradition. In his City of God, Augustine treats the topic in the context of arguments against suicide. He defends his judgement that the Decalogue command ‘You shall not kill’ (Exod. 20.13; Deut. 5.17) applies to self-murder by noting that the command has no limitation of any kind. He then observes that some have argued that the command should be extended ‘even unto beasts and cattle, and would have it unlawful to kill any of them’.49 Augustine’s argument against this is a reductio ad absurdam: if it is unlawful to kill animals, why not plants as well, since they are living and may also therefore be killed? To take this position, Augustine notes, ‘involves ourselves in the foul error of the Manichees’.50 Instead, we should recognize that ‘You shall not kill’ does not refer to plants because they are not sensitive, and does not refer to ‘unreasonable creatures’ because ‘they have no society with us in reason’. By God’s ‘just ordinance’, the ‘deaths and lives’ of other animals are ‘most serviceable and useful to us’, so ‘You shall not kill’ applies only to human beings.51 Within the context of Augustine’s argument, he needs to explain why the prohibition of killing does not apply to cases other than the human. He is seeking to identify an exceptionless moral absolute that will undergird the prohibition of suicide he is seeking to establish. Failing to make clear why this would not prohibit the killing of non-human animals as well would make his argument implausible. He also has a particular concern to refute the Manichean position that involvement with the material world results inevitably in sin. Ruling out concern for non-human animals along with plants enables him to meet both goals. It is not clear, however, that apart from these two concerns, Augustine’s argument demonstrates that the killing of non-human animals should not be a moral concern for Christians. Augustine’s reductio ad absurdam is not convincing: if he considers rationality to constitute an appropriate boundary between humans and other animals, it is not clear why the differences he recognizes between plants and animals could not be grounds for a similar boundary establishing the difference between killing plants Augustine, The City of God, ed. R. V. G. Tasker, trans. J. Healey (London: Dent & Sons, 1945), I.19. 50  Augustine, City of God, 1.19. 51  Augustine, City of God, 1.19. 49 

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and animals. Finally, Augustine’s appeal to the lack of rationality in non-human animals is implausible, both because rationality can no longer be recognized as a unified characteristic separating humans from all other animals,52 and because the great biblical visions of creaturely harmony we have just recalled make no distinction between rational and irrational creatures. As Stephen Clark has noted, Augustine’s arguments here seem strongly informed by Stoic traditions concerning human distinctiveness;53 certainly this seems a more direct influence than a biblical understanding of human/non-human difference.54 Augustine cites God’s ‘just ordinance’ that the lives of other animals may be used for human ends, presumably with the Genesis 9 permission to kill other animals for food in mind (v. 3), but as we have noted, this permission does not show that the killing of other animals can be understood as unproblematic or part of God’s original or final will for creaturely relationships. Augustine is right that the Decalogue does not directly prohibit the killing of non-human animals, therefore, but does not make a convincing argument that such killing is not problematic for other reasons. Thomas Aquinas cites this text from Augustine as authoritative support for his own position when considering whether it is unlawful to kill any living thing in the Summa theologia. In addition to endorsing Augustine’s reasoning concerning human lack of fellowship with other animals, he also cites Aristotle’s view in the Politics that plants are created for the sake of animals and non-human animals for the sake of human beings.55 Aquinas argues that the most necessary use of non-human animals must be as food for human beings. He cites Gen. 1.29-30 in combination with Gen. 9.3 as evidence of God’s intentions regarding diet for humans and other animals. In answer to the objection that it is a sin to deprive a creature of life, Aquinas makes an allusion to a further application of the principle of one group of creatures being ordered for the use of another by Aristotle in the same passage. Aristotle argues that where humans ‘intended by nature for slavery’ are unwilling to submit to it, it is just to go to war to enslave them.56 Aquinas uses this in the context of other animals: non-human animals and plants are devoid of the life of reason and are moved instead by a natural impulse and can be seen as naturally enslaved for the use of others.57 The key arguments Aquinas uses to defend the killing of non-human animals are therefore that they have no fellowship with humans in reason, they are intended by God for our use, and their lack of reason is associated with being recognized See Vol. I, 69–70. S. R. L. Clark, The Moral Status of Animals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 15. 54  See Vol. I, 64–76 and 100–2 for discussions of this topic. 55  Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, 64.1, citing Aristotle, Politics, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), I.8, 1256b. Aquinas makes the same argument without reference to Aristotle in T. Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne Ltd., 1923), vol. III, pt 2, ch. 112. 56  Aristotle, Politics, I.8, 1256b. 57  Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II–II, 64.1. 52  53 

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as naturally enslaved to human use. It is instructive that each of these arguments depends on theological positions that were seen to be inadequate in the first volume of this work. Chapter 1 argued that it is a theological error to suppose that nonhuman creation has only an instrumental value in relation to human beings, that God delights in the goodness of each creature, and that the end of creation is therefore best understood as the glory of God and participation in the triune life. This means Christians should reject Aristotle’s assertion of a natural hierarchy in which some animals – human and non-human – are naturally enslaved to others, and should also reject Aquinas’s use of Aristotle to argue that other animals are naturally enslaved to humans. Chapter 3 subjected the similar hierarchy posited by theories of the Great Chain of Being to theological critique, as well as questioning the plausibility of rationality as a characteristic uniquely distinguishing between human and nonhuman creatures. Once we recognize the theological difficulties in depending on arguments based either on natural hierarchy or unique human rationality, we can see that Aquinas’s justification of human killing of other animals in this article does not withstand critical scrutiny of its theological starting points. This is not to say that other justifications of such killing could not be provided, but it is instructive that this key theological defence of human killing of other animals is problematically dependent on implausible theological positions concerning the status of non-human animals.58 The early English commentary on the Ten Commandments, Dives and Pauper, composed between 1405 and 1410, probably by an English Franciscan monk, extends the discussion of Augustine and Aquinas on the ethics of killing other animals in a striking way. The text is a dialogue between the two eponymous characters, and in relation to the fifth commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’, Dives comments that it seems to many people that God forbade killing ‘both of man

It is notable that in Luther’s Small and Large Catechisms, the question of whether the Decalogue prohibition on killing includes non-human animals is not considered: the Small Catechism interprets ‘You shall not kill’ as not harming the life of the neighbour. See Th. G. Tappert (ed.), The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959), 343. The Large Catechism extends this to positive duties of charity towards the neighbour, but again makes no reference to killing of non-human animals (Tappert, Book of Concord, 389–92). In Calvin’s discussion of this commandment in the Institutes, again there is no consideration of killing beyond the human realm. Calvin states there is a two-fold justification for the commandment: that humans bear the image of God and share our own flesh. To murder would therefore both violate God’s image and divest ourselves of our humanity. While the extension of the command beyond the human is not considered by Calvin, he follows Luther in extending the import of the commandment to positive duties promoting the peace of the neighbour, and also notes its application to thoughts as well as words. J. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. H. Beveridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), bk. II, ch. 8, §§ 39–40. Calvin makes similar points in his commentary on the text: J. Calvin, Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses, Arranged in the Form of a Harmony, trans. C. W. Bingham (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1854), vol. 3, 20–1.

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and beast’, because the commandment is expressed generally. Pauper responds that the proper English translation of the Latin term ‘occides’ is ‘manslaughter’, so the commandment translates as ‘You shall kill no man’. Dives points out that the commandments against lechery and theft are not limited to the human realm, to which Pauper replies that Genesis 9 gives explicit permission to kill other animals, whereas no such permission is given for lechery or theft. Dives then turns to cite the story of Balaam’s ass (Num. 22.20-33), noting that if Balaam was to blame for beating the ass, then how much more would he have been blamed if he had killed the ass. Pauper then delivers the conclusion to the dispute, stating that God’s words to Noah in Genesis 9 (v. 3), and the permission for meat-eating in Deuteronomy 12 (v. 15), show that ‘It is granted to man to slaughter beasts when it is profitable to him for meat or for clothing or to avoid the nuisance of the beasts that are noixious to man’. Pauper goes on, however, to interpret the Genesis 9 prohibition on eating meat with its blood (v. 4) as forbidding the killing of ‘beasts cruelly or from a desire for wickedness’ and reads verse 5 as God promising vengeance for cruel treatment of animals: ‘For God that made all has care of all, and he shall take vengeance on all that misuse his creatures’. He quotes the prophecy of Wis. 5.17 in support of this claim, where God ‘will arm all creation to repel his enemies’: a striking image of God warring with an army of creatures against human cruelty towards other animals. Pauper’s final word is ‘And therefore men should have compassion on beast and bird and not harm them without cause and have regard for the fact that they are God’s creatures’, and that those who torment beasts or birds for cruelty or vanity sin very grievously.59 Killing other animals for meat or clothing is permissible where they are not treated cruelly or for vanity, then, but not otherwise, and all non-human animals must always be treated with respect for their status as creatures of God. Unlike the accounts of Augustine and Aquinas, the human killing of other animals is very clearly of moral account, and justifiable only in limited circumstances on the basis of an explicit divine permission, with the expectation of God’s vengeance on those who sin by treating God’s creatures cruelly outside the limits of this permission. The ritual regulation of the killing of non-human animals under Israelite law is often cited as evidence for the permissibility of killing animals in other contexts, but it is important to recognize the strict regulation stipulated for the practice. When permission is given for meat-eating for the first time in Genesis 9, the consumption of blood, understood as the ‘life’ of flesh, common to human and non-human animals, remains prohibited (Gen. 9.3-4). Voluminous instructions are given for how bulls, sheep, goats and birds are to be killed for sacrifice on different occasions (Lev. 1, 3–5, 6–9, 14–16, 22–3; Num. 6–8, 15, 18–19, 28–9), and it is forbidden to kill an ox, lamb or goat without offering it as a sacrifice (Lev. 17.1-9). The provisions for sacrificial killing of non-human animals, therefore, permitted only the killing of particular animals, for particular reasons, in a particular way, in a particular place, by particular persons. It also depended on

P. H. Barnum (ed.), Dives and Pauper (Oxford: Early English Text Society/Oxford University Press, 1976–), vol. 1, pt 2, ch. 15, 33–6, English modernized.

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beliefs about the particular suitability of non-human animals to function effectively in these rituals, and therefore the significance of animal death to God.60 This is as far as can be conceived from a general permission for humans to kill non-human animals and the voluminous regulation makes clear that, independent of any considerations of animal suffering, the killing of animals is a morally relevant act. It is also instructive that prophetic visions look forward to a time when even this regulated killing would be unacceptable: as noted above, in Isaiah’s vision of the new creation God states ‘Whoever slaughters an ox is like one who kills a human being; whoever sacrifices a lamb, like one who breaks a dog’s neck’ (Isa. 66.3). The killing of other animals is therefore a temporary and regulated practice that will be abolished when God’s will is enacted fully and completely.61 The arguments presented by Augustine and Aquinas that the killing of nonhuman animals is of no moral account can therefore be seen to be problematically dependent on premises concerning the difference between human and nonhuman animals that are implausible. Given the biblical visions surveyed above of peace between human and non-human animal creatures and God’s interest in caring for and defending God’s animal creatures made explicit in Dives and Pauper, the killing of animal creatures remains a troubling ethical issue, and the Israelite sacrificial system reinforces the recognition that killing is a significant issue in itself. Where practices concerning the killing of non-human animals are considered later in this book, therefore, a theological framework must recognize that the killing of non-human animals in itself stands in need of justification independent of concern for any suffering they experience.

Animal Ethics in a Fallen Creation Alongside remembering the divine works of grace towards creatures, a theological account of the ethics of human/non-human animal relationships will also be Kimberley Patton argues that sacrifice of animals in Israelite and other religious contexts cannot be interpreted merely as killing as part of some social strategy, but are altogether more complex concerning beliefs about the animal sacrificed and its relationship with the deity; see K. C. Patton, ‘Animal Sacrifice: Metaphysics of the Sublimated Victim’, in A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, ed. P. Waldau and K. C. Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Jon Morgan notes that the animals chosen for sacrifice were recognized members of the community of Israel, high-status, and holy, and ritually effective only on this basis; see J. Morgan, ‘Sacrifice in Leviticus: Eco-Friendly Ritual or Unholy Waste?’, in Ecological Hermeneutics: Biblical, Historical and Theological Perspectives, ed. D. Horrell et al. (London: T&T Clark, 2010). 61  Michael Gilmour suggests that the biblical ambivalence about animal sacrifice can be explained by seeing it as a human practice permitted by God as a legitimate expression of religious faith in a particular period of the religion of Israel. See M. J. Gilmour, Eden’s Other Residents: The Bible and Animals (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), 93. 60 

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affected by a recognition of the ways creaturely life has been fractured by the fallen departure of creation from the patterns of divine ordering. As discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 of Volume I, a theological understanding of non-human animals recognizes that we cannot read off divine intentions for the lives of animals from the world as we find it, any more than we can read off divine intentions for human animals merely by attending to how humans behave. The key ethical import of the Christian doctrine of the fall is to provide critical space between the world as we find it and the world as it will be when redeemed by God. This is the space of Christian ethics: impatient with the groaning of creation (Rom. 8.22), longing for its redemption, and seeking in the meantime to find ways of witnessing to the in-breaking reign of God. The recognition that theological ethics engages a fallen creation means that theological ethics in relation to other animals cannot aim to return us to Eden, a perfect state of harmony between creatures. Humans do not have that power. Instead, the human hope is to discern and enact modes of living that witness to God’s redeeming of the world in ways that, in advance of the full inauguration of God’s reign, will always be provisional and partial. The Christian ethical task is informed by a Christian vision of God’s original and final will for peace between creatures, but begins in the middle of a world that is violent and seeks to find appropriate ways to live responsibly in its midst. The recognition that our ethical reflection takes place in a fallen creation impacts on many areas of discussion of our relationships with animals in the chapters that follow. It means that a Christian ethics of animals will never be motivated by seeking a position of moral purity in our dealings with animal creatures. In a theological context it is a matter of regret, but not embarrassment, to acknowledge that whatever we do we will be left compromised and complicit in treatment of other animals that is far from what we believe to be ideal. As discussed here in Chapter 2, even vegan gardeners must protect their crops from the animals that would otherwise consume them and, even if they succeed in finding non-lethal means to do so, monopolize land for human use that would otherwise support other animals. The coherence of veganism is often challenged on the basis that current methods of producing arable crops involves the killing of animals both in relation to pest control and accidentally during harvesting. A Christian ethics of animals laments such destruction, and would seek to find ways to reduce it, but would not consider an inability to eliminate such destruction of life a defeat to the coherence of a position. An appreciation that moral perfection is unattainable in the context of a fallen creation is not, however, an excuse for moral complacency. In a human context, we recognize that humans are vulnerable to attack from one another so that it may not be possible to reduce the incidence of murder to zero, but this is obviously not a good reason to be less concerned about seeking to protect those who are vulnerable and prevent murders wherever possible. Similarly, recognizing that the suffering and death of non-human animals is inevitable is not a reason to be unconcerned about it, and does not provide a licence for humans to cause harm deliberately to other animals. A Christian ethics of animals in the context of a fallen creation is both realistic about the world as we find it, and energetically committed to challenging and reforming human practice that impedes the flourishing of animal creatures wherever possible.

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Animal Flourishing In the Introduction, I stated that a key reference point for the ethics of this volume is to recognize other animals as fellow creatures that glorify God in their flourishing. In my argument in support of direct moral duties towards animals I stated that the flourishing of animals matters to God and that this means that Christians have reason to avoid actions that block their flourishing, and where possible promote it. Each of the following chapters makes reference to the concept of the flourishing of animals in order to evaluate different aspects of human treatment of them. It is therefore important at the beginning of this work to be clear about what I mean by the concept. The roots of the concept of flourishing are in Aristotelian thought that we should understand the good of each creature in relation to its particular capacities.62 Alasdair MacIntyre summarizes the import of this as ‘What a plant or an animal needs is what it needs to flourish qua member of its particular species. And what it needs to flourish is to develop the distinctive powers that it possesses qua member of that species’.63 MacIntyre argues that the concept of flourishing is univocal, rather than analogical across human and non-human species, and relates to the fundamental concept of good: to flourish is to enjoy a good life. As noted earlier in this chapter, Martha Nussbaum also draws on this Aristotelian tradition in order to develop a concept of flourishing relevant to non-human animals, emphasizing that there are a wide range of needs for flourishing among different animals, and therefore that a respect for particular animals means attending to their particular needs so that each can flourish in their own particular mode of life.64 The key commonality between the Aristotelian accounts of MacIntyre and Nussbaum and the theological framework for ethics I am proposing is a shared teleological view of animal creatures combined with a commitment to attend to the particularity of what constitutes the good for each creature. This combination of teleology and particularity means engaging ethically with the question of what a creature is for and the particular pattern of life in which that creature will flourish. This is a requirement derived from recognition of the ‘thisness’ or haecceity of every creature discussed in Chapter 3 of Volume I and referenced earlier in this chapter: we need to be sufficiently attentive to each creature to understand what it means for the creature to cry ‘What I do is me: for that I came’.65 This is closely related to the affirmation in the Psalms that every creature praises and glorifies God through its particular mode of existence, as noted in Chapter 2 of Volume I. On this basis, if Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics, Oxford World’s Classics, ed. L. Brown, trans. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), bk. I. 63  A. MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 64. 64  Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 327, 349. 65  ‘As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame’, lines 7–8, from Hopkins, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 90, quoted in Vol. I, 60. 62 

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we encounter a newly hatched chick, we will not understand what it means to treat the chick ethically merely by assessing its current capacities. Instead, we need to know what a chicken is for, the kind of life a chicken is meant to have, what it means for a chicken to flourish as a chicken, which means we need to discover what a good life means for chickens. The ethical evaluation of the practice of killing newly hatched chicks – as is the routine practice for the male chicks of breeds of laying hens in all commercial egg production, as discussed in Chapter 2 – cannot be decided merely on the basis of whether they experience pain in the process, or whether they understand themselves to be subjects of their own lives. A teleological perspective recognizes this killing as problematic because this destruction of life is the most blatant possible blocking of the flourishing of these chicks, preventing them from enjoying the good life which would begin by growth to maturity. While the culling of male chicks is an obvious case of disregarding what it means for non-human animals to enjoy a good life, more detailed questions about what constitutes a good life for particular animals requires careful investigation and research. Animal welfare science has developed a range of ways of assessing preferences of animals, which means that investigation of what constitutes flourishing for a particular animal can incorporate elements of the animal’s own perspective.66 One notable example of such research in relation to farmed animals is discussed here in Chapter 2, where pigs were taken from an intensive farm and given access to a large area of parkland. The complex mode of life adopted by the pigs was similar in many respects to the behaviour of wild boar, and provides good evidence of the arrangements the pigs preferred for their lives, and the mode of life most conducive to their flourishing. In appealing to the flourishing of creatures in an ethical context there is a danger of being misunderstood as taking an over-romantic view of nature that fails to acknowledge that very many animal creatures fail to flourish for reasons entirely unrelated to human activity. When a group of lionesses succeed in separating a young gazelle from his mother and pounce and kill they very obviously prevent his flourishing. When a parasitic wasp lays eggs in the body of a caterpillar so that the wasp grubs will consume the caterpillar from the inside – to take the example that gave Charles Darwin cause to doubt God’s benevolence – the flourishing of the caterpillar is similarly denied.67 As noted in the section above on animal ethics in a fallen creation, a Christian ethics of animals is not romantic in this sense, and recognizes and laments that the flourishing of all creatures is compromised, in some cases such as to give them no opportunity to flourish at all. The recognition that this is the case, however, does not mean that seeking the goal of the See, for example, C. E. Sumpter, M. T. Foster and W. Temple, ‘Assessing Animals’ Preferences: Concurrent Schedules of Reinforcement’, International Journal of Comparative Psychology 15:2 (2002), 107–26. 67  C. Darwin, F. Burkhardt and S. Smith (eds), The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), vol. 8, 224, quoted in M. Ruse, Charles Darwin (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 261. 66 

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flourishing of every creature is misguided, any more than the recognition that many human beings do not live flourishing lives is reason to think we should not encourage human flourishing wherever possible. It is because creaturely lives are so obviously vulnerable to mutilation and destruction and because creaturely flourishing can be compromised in so many different ways that we need to be attentive to how we can avoid blocking the flourishing of other creatures and where possible promote it. A Christian animal ethics is not dewy-eyed about the lives and deaths that non-human animals experience, but is especially concerned to address ways in which human actions contribute to preventing other animals from flourishing. Making use of a teleological account of creaturely flourishing also raises a boundary question. Since non-animal creatures, such as oak trees, or even rivers and mountains, may flourish or fail to flourish, we seem to be at risk of plunging back into Augustine’s reductio ad absurdam discussed above, where he uses our supposed inability to distinguish between killing animals and killing plants to argue that killing animals is morally legitimate. We are not forced into this uncomfortable position, however, because while the capacity to flourish as such is morally relevant in our relations with other creatures, we have other reasons to be particularly concerned with the flourishing of animal creatures. I noted in Volume I that there is no reliable boundary between animal and nonanimal forms of life – slime moulds are a good case in point – which means that it would be a mistake to stake a claim for a categorical ethical difference at the animal/non-animal boundary.68 I argued, however, that this does not mean we should rush from an exclusively anthropocentric ethical perspective to one that indiscriminately includes all creatures, because that would miss the particular features of those living creatures that are most like us.69 We should be attentive to our responsibilities in relation to all creatures, but there is nonetheless good reason to pause, theologically and ethically, with animals. The second chapter of Volume I explored the characteristics of animals in a theological context, providing a constellation of characteristics that are relevant to a decision that they merit our moral attention. The third chapter discussed diversity and difference between animal creatures, and the need to pay particular attention to their modes of life, rather than thinking that by categorizing chimpanzees and slugs under the heading ‘non-human animal’ we have gained sufficient knowledge of either. This work focuses on the broad category of animals not because other creatures are irrelevant for theology and ethics, nor because animals are all the same, but because creatures of this kind merit our ethical attention. We should be morally attentive to the flourishing of animal creatures not simply because they have the capacity to flourish but because they claim our moral attention in a wide variety of ways. In the Introduction to this volume I noted that they are brought close to us as neighbours, and the following section considers this description alongside other ways of interpreting their moral claim on us. Vol. I, xx–xxi, 34–5. Vol. I, xxi–xxiii.

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Theological Categories for Considering Animals One way of indicating the plurality and complexity of a theological ordering of human relationships with other animals is to consider the various ways in which we might describe them. Following from the engagement with utilitarianism, animal rights theory, and virtue ethics, above, I have argued that a theological approach can be pluralistic in its choice of modes of ethical thinking about animals: recognizing the moral relevance of being charitable and compassionate to creatures able to suffer or to flourish, and being just in respecting the integrity of the lives of other animal creatures. The justification for giving moral regard to other animals in these ways is our recognition of being with them common subjects of God’s great works of creation, reconciliation and redemption. These categories do not exhaust a theological vocabulary for thinking morally about other animals, however, and we might also recognize them under other biblical categories with obvious moral content: as fellow covenant partners, as neighbours, as the poor, as the oppressed, and as moral exemplars. To recognize other animals as fellow covenant partners is to recall that the Noahide covenant in Genesis 9 is repeatedly insistent that God covenants not only with Noah and his family but with ‘every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark’, a covenant with all flesh, with the earth, for all generations (Gen. 9.10, 12, 15, 16, 17). The inclusion of non-human creatures in the covenant is repeated no fewer than six times in this passage. The covenant identifies human and nonhuman animals as common recipients of God’s grace, but goes further than that: as well as benefiting from the covenant, all flesh has responsibilities under it as well. God declares that a reckoning will be required for the taking of human life, ‘from every animal’ and from human beings (Gen. 9.5). This provokes the question addressed in the previous volume of the plausibility of attributing moral responsibility to other animals,70 but suggests it is unavoidable to see humans as already bound up with other animals as participants in a moral community. This active participation of non-human animals in covenant is even clearer in Hosea 2, where God promises on behalf of human beings to make a covenant ‘with the wild animals, the birds of the air, and the creeping things on the ground’ (v. 18). The covenant will ensure that harmful non-human animals will no longer be a threat to the people of Israel. As Robert Murray notes, this recalls the passage in Job 5 where Eliphaz pictures the happy state of those blessed by God, living at peace with the wild animals (vv. 22-3) and these images imply God’s care for the other animals, too, who will need to be provided for within these peaceable relations.71 In their discussion of the significance of covenant for the human/non-human animal relationships, Kris Hiuser and Matthew Barton cite Murray’s judgement that the covenant must mean that human and non-human animals are ‘covenantally Vol. I, ch. 5. R. Murray, The Cosmic Covenant: Biblical Themes of Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation (London: Sheed & Ward, 1992), 102.

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bound’, together with Jürgen Moltmann’s claim that these covenants mean that violence against any member of the covenant, human or non-human animal, is an injury against God.72 This indicates that appreciating that other animal creatures are fellow covenant partners has moral relevance: humans are bound in solidarity with other animal creatures through these relationships, enacted by God.73 As discussed in the Introduction, to think of other animals as neighbours is to appreciate that we are brought close to them in different ways and often encounter other animals as those in need of our help. While the Good Samaritan was praised by Jesus for recognizing that duties of neighbourliness went beyond racial and religious categories (Lk. 10.29-37), considering non-human animal neighbours requires us to recognize that care for the neighbour may go beyond species boundaries as well. Daniel Miller has explored this theme in depth, and notes that the Good Samaritan was not following a sense of moral obligation in going to help the wounded man, but was moved by compassion (Lk. 10.33b).74 It is very clear that compassion operates in a similar way in relation to non-human animals: a dog wounded by the side of the road would also engage the concern of any virtuous passer-by. There are several examples of such compassion in texts discussed in the Introduction, such as the compassion shown towards a horse caught in barbed wire in no man’s land, from Morpurgo’s War Horse, or Jesus’ reasoning on the basis of the obvious truth that one would help a child or ox that had fallen into a well (Lk. 14.5). In providing care for other animals in such circumstances, we are recognizing the moral demand of different dimensions of proximity: our perception of the need of this other and our power to help, in combination with our nearness, makes our responsibility clear. The neighbourly relationship between humans and other animals, in which we feel with those nearest to us and are called to respond to their need, seems to go both ways. There are stories from ancient Greece of dolphins rescuing humans from the sea: Herodotus tells of Arion being rescued by a dolphin after being thrown overboard by the Corinthians,75 and myths tell of similar rescues of Taras and Phalanthos by dolphins.76 The plausibility of such stories is supported by regular newspaper reports of dolphins acting to help humans and other species. In a parallel to the Apion story, in 1999 three stowaways discovered on a cargo Murray, Cosmic Covenant, 102; J. Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation, trans. M. Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1999), 133–4; both cited in K. Hiuser and M. Barton, ‘A Promise is a Promise: God’s Covenantal Relationship with Animals’, Scottish Journal of Theology 67:3 (2014), 349. 73  This recognition of the covenantal identity we share with other animals coheres with my argument in Chapter 4 of the previous volume, where I argued that Karl Barth’s concept of covenant needed expansion to include all creatures, following the model of these covenants (Vol. I, ch. 4). 74  D. Miller, Animal Ethics and Theology: The Lens of the Good Samaritan (New York: Routledge, 2012), 46. 75  Herodotus, The Histories, trans. T. Holland (New York: Penguin, 2013), I.24, 12. 76  I. Malkin, Religion and Colonization in Ancient Greece (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 219. 72 

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ship from Columbia to the United States reported that the crew had tossed a coin to decide their fate. They had been thrown overboard and quickly surrounded by sharks, but dolphins protected them until two of them could be rescued by fishermen.77 In 1996, a British tourist swimming in the Red Sea reported being bitten by a shark and surviving until he could be rescued by friends only because dolphins encircled him and flapped their tails to scare the shark away;78 in 2004, a New Zealand lifeguard swimming with two teenage daughters reported being protected by dolphins from a Great White Shark.79 In 2014 the marine biologist Maddalena Bearzi reported that bottlenose dolphins had led her and her research team to a girl who was drowning three miles offshore.80 Dolphins do not only show such care to humans: in 2013, a Canadian film crew recorded bottlenose dolphins coming to the aid of a seal pup that was exhausted and drifting dangerously close to the shore.81 Interspecies care is not restricted to dolphins. Newfoundland dogs have been widely used to rescue people from water and often act spontaneously, without being instructed to do so.82 In 2008 it was widely reported that La China, a dog, had found an abandoned baby in a field near a shanty town outside Buenos Aires, Argentina. La China carried the baby 50 metres to place him alongside her own puppies, leading many to link the story with the founding myth of Rome, Romulus and Remus, rescued and raised by a wolf.83 Koko, a gorilla who was taught sign language by Francine Patterson, developed a strong friendship with a kitten, All Ball, and grieved when the kitten was run over by a car.84 Frans de Waal reports the story of Kuni, a bonobo at Twycross Zoo who caught a starling. The human helper was concerned for the bird and urged her to let the bird go. Kuni climbed to the top of the highest tree, spread out the bird’s wings carefully, and threw the bird into the air.85 In doing so, she demonstrated not only sympathy to want to help the bird, but also sufficient empathy to recognize that the bird needed help that would have been injurious to a bonobo. ‘Dolphins Save the Stowaways’, Daily Mail, 20 February 1999. A. Fresco, ‘Dolphins Save Swimmer after Shark Attack’, The Times, 25 July 1996. 79    A. Thomson, ‘Dolphins Saved Us from Shark, Lifeguards Say’, The New Zealand Herald, 24 November 2004. 80  M. Bearzi, ‘Dolphins Guide Scientists to Rescue Suicidal Girl’, National Geographic, 29 May 2014. 81  K. Bevan, ‘Lending a Helping Fin: Heartwarming Video Shows Kind Dolphins Rescuing a Stranded Seal Pup as It Struggles to Stay Afloat’, MailOnline, 5 February 2013. 82  M. Mott, ‘Guard Dogs: Newfoundlands’ Lifesaving Past, Present National Geographic,’, 7 February 2003. 83  D. Schweimler, ‘Argentine Dog Saves Abandoned Baby’, BBC News (23 August 2008). 84  F. Patterson and W. Gordon, ‘The Case for the Personhood of Gorillas’, in The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity, ed. P. Cavalieri and P. Singer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 62. 85  F. De Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 30. 77  78 

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Karl Barth observes that the lawyer’s response to Jesus’ question about who was the neighbour to the Good Samaritan was the one who showed mercy to him (Lk. 10.36-7), and concludes that we must understand our neighbour as the one who is the bearer of divine compassion.86 It is clear from these stories, and the many more that could be adduced, that non-human animals not only demand human neighbourly care, but also provide care to others they recognize as in need of help. Not only do we feel compassion for our non-human animal neighbours, but we must recognize that other animals act as neighbours to those beyond their kind. A primary category of those to whom compassion must be shown in the Bible is that of the poor, and non-human animals can also be seen in this way. Pharaoh tells Joseph that the second group of cows he saw were ‘poor [dallôt], ugly and thin’ (Gen. 41.1), the same word used elsewhere to refer to poor humans.87 Domestic animals are named alongside children, slaves and aliens in being protected from an obligation to work on the Sabbath (Exod. 20.10), and wild animals are seen alongside the poor in the Sabbath for the land: in the Sabbath year the land is to lie fallow ‘so that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the wild animals may eat’ (Exod. 23.11). In the story Nathan tells David, the poor man raises his one ewe lamb like a daughter, ‘it used to eat of his meagre fare, and drink from his cup, and lie in his bosom’ (2 Sam. 12.3). We are to feel sorrow for the poor lamb, as well as the poor man, when the rich man takes and slaughters her for his guests. Similarly, Job sees as examples of injustice that the wicked seize flocks, drive away the donkey of the orphan, and take the widow’s ox (Job 24.2-3). When Job is brought low, it is to the state of being a brother to jackals and a companion of ostriches (Job 30.29). The people of Israel are frequently pictured as vulnerable sheep or doves, in need of care (e.g. Ps. 74.1, 19). Jeremiah sees domestic and wild animals sharing in the consequences of judgement with Israel: being struck down by God (Jer. 7.20), being swept away from the withering land (12.4), and dying of pestilence (21.6). A doe forsakes her newborn fawns because there is no grass, and wild asses pant for air like jackals because they have no vegetation to eat (14.56). This suffering of non-human animals is recognized by several other prophets: Ezekiel warns of judgement that will come to Israel and its domestic animals (Ezek. 14.13-21); Hosea sees humans, wild animals, birds and fish languishing together because there is no faithfulness, loyalty or knowledge of God in the land (Hos. 4.1). Joel speaks of the groaning of cattle and sheep without pasture and the wild animals without water (1.18, 20); Jonah is told that God is concerned about the many animals in Nineveh (Jon. 4.11); Zephaniah tells of God’s determination to sweep humans, other animals, and birds from the earth (Zeph. 1.2-3); Haggai prophesies a drought on land, hills, humans, and other animals (Hag. 1.11).88

K. Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. I/2, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. T. Thomson and H. Knight (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 416–20. 87  E.g. Exod. 23.3, 30.15; Lev. 14.21, 19.15, among many others. 88  See Vol. I, 37–8. 86 

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Ecclesiastes uses the predicament of non-human animals as images for the plight of humans: ‘Like fish taken in a cruel net, and like birds caught in a snare, so mortals are snared at a time of calamity’ (Eccl. 11.12), and Isaiah uses the image of an antelope caught in a net for the children of Jerusalem (Isa. 51.20). Jesus observes that sparrows are considered so insignificant that two are sold for a penny (Mt. 10.29). This biblical recognition of the poverty of non-human animals is reflected in modern usage: ‘poor’ is one of the first adjectives that might come to mind to describe the plight of a non-human animal in need: ‘poor thing!’ or in French ‘pauvre petit!’ is used frequently in relation to children and non-human animals. Dictionary definitions of ‘poor’ include elements of obvious applicability to other animals, such as ‘lacking the means to procure the comforts or necessities of life’.89 We do not need to look far to find examples of other poor animals without the resources they need to sustain themselves: in an episode reminiscent of some of the biblical texts cited above, a UN video from 2014 shows Pakistanis from North Waziristan forced to leave their homes, with their animals, many of which they report dying en route to safety.90 The plight of polar bears in the context of retreating sea ice is another example of non-human animal poverty: the bears are heavily dependent on ice for access to their prey, and those in the increasing number of areas where the ice melts completely in the summer are deprived of food and reliant on fat reserves built up in the previous year. Projections of ice melt suggest there will be no bears left in many areas by the mid-twenty-first century.91 Clearly, such fellow animal creatures belong among those we should understand as poor.92 In Aesop’s Fables, among the oldest of stories, non-human animals play the role of moral exemplars,93 and this pattern is also found in biblical texts. The most striking such example is Balaam’s donkey, who repeatedly tries to warn him of the angel in his way, receives only blows for its trouble, and is finally given speech by God in order to complain of its bad treatment. The angel endorses the donkey’s complaint and contrasts the donkey’s perception with Balaam’s perversity (Num. 22.20-33, recalled in 2 Pet. 2.15-16). Other animals are also held up as examples for human imitation. Proverbs encourages lazy children to learn wisdom from the ant, preparing their food in summer to sustain them in winter without any ruler (Prov. 6.6-8). Those who are righteous are ‘as bold as a lion’ (Prov. 28.1). Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Poor, Adj. and N.’, OED Online (2015). Pakistan United Nations Information Centre, ‘Pakistan / Displaced Animals’, (2014). 91  C. M. Hunter et al., ‘Climate Change Threatens Polar Bear Populations: A Stochastic Demographic Analysis’, Ecology 91:10 (2010), 2883–97. 92  Michael Northcott’s argument that we should recognize dolphins as exemplars of the moral priority of the weak is a closely related insight. See M. Northcott, ‘Do Dolphins Carry the Cross? Biological Moral Realism and Theological Ethics’, New Blackfriars 84:994 (2003), 551. 93  Aesop, Aesop – the Complete Fables (London: Penguin, 1998). 89  90 

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Later, the book lists things that are too wonderful to understand, including ‘the way of an eagle in the sky’ and ‘the way of a snake on a rock’ (Prov. 30.18-19). Later follow other lists: four things that are small but ‘exceedingly wise’: the ants who prepare food in the summer, the badgers who make homes in the rocks, the locusts who march in rank, and the lizards that can be grasped in the hand yet are found in kings’ palaces (Prov. 30.24-28); and things that are stately in their gait: the lion who is mightiest of wild animals, the strutting rooster, the he-goat, and a king (Prov. 30.29-31). Job refers his interlocutors to the animals, the birds of the air, the plants of the earth, and the fish of the sea (Job 12.7-10). Sirach advises against vanity using the example of the bee that is small but produces ‘the best of sweet things’ (Sir. 11.2-4). Jesus uses a similar comparison in the Sermon on the Mount to commend trust in the God who provides for the birds of the air and clothes the lilies of the field (Mt. 6.26, 28). The Physiologus, which gave moral readings of non-human animals, exemplifying virtues and vices, continued this tradition.94 Volume I argued that the value of animal creatures is grounded in their place in God’s purposes of creation, reconciliation and redemption. The biblical categories of fellow covenant partners, neighbours, the poor, and moral exemplars provide additional resources for considering the moral claim of other animals. To think well about the ethics of our practice in relation to other animals requires recognizing the many dimensions of what it means to attend morally to fellow animal creatures.

Conclusion This chapter has provided an orientation concerning how the ethics of human practice in relation to other animals should be approached in a theological context, building on the doctrinal framework developed in Volume I. This theological context does not deliver a clear and simple formula for delivering an ethical verdict on particular cases, but it does provide a framework for considering such cases. The ethical approach I take in the remainder of this volume is radical in challenging the costly instrumentalization of non-human animal life to human ends because, in contrast to anthropocentric accounts of ethics in which the human exploitation of all non-human creatures is unchallengeable, a theocentric account of ethics can and must subject the use of one creature by another to critical scrutiny. For example, humans have no alternative but to consume cabbages, or alternative vegetable sources of nutrition, which means in the context of needing to feed a large human population that we need to grow them in a way that prevents fellow animal creatures from consuming them in our place. While we should think carefully about the way we go about arable farming in order to avoid unnecessary costs to ecosystems on which fellow creatures depend, the legitimacy See R. M. Grant, Early Christians and Animals (London: Routledge, 1999), 44–72.

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of the practice as such, including some costs to animal creatures, withstands such critical scrutiny. The killing of other animals merely for human entertainment, however, in trophy game hunting or, in the UK, the rearing of pheasants to be frightened into the air and be shot by paying customers, clearly cannot withstand scrutiny from the theological perspective outlined here, because such practice sees non-human animal life merely as means to satisfying trivial and unedifying human desires.95 Some very widespread current human practice concerning other animals will quickly be seen as similarly reprehensible in the chapters that follow; other cases will fall between the poles I have identified of arable farming and game hunting and will require more careful discussion and more nuanced conclusions. I expect that Christians will continue to disagree with each other about the implications of their faith for the treatment of animals, and I hope that this book will help readers to shape their own judgements on the various issues I address. I also hope, however, to convince readers about the territory within which such disagreements should take place for Christians. The example of disagreement about whether participation in war is permissible for Christians is instructive here. Pacifist Christians contend that faithful discipleship to Christ rules out participating in violent conflict; those standing in the just war tradition argue that duties of neighbour love and justice at times require the use of violent means. Both sides agree, however, that selfish aims, such as the desire of nations to gain additional territory or economic power, are not legitimate aims in warfare. They also agree that there are limits to the means that can legitimately be used to promote justice and the wellbeing of neighbours: for example, that it is forbidden deliberately to target those not participating in war. Christians can properly disagree on the question of the permissibility of war in some circumstances by some means, therefore, but it is unchristian to believe that nations should be free to advance their interests with whatever violent means are available to them. This book argues that the faith Christians share means we need to recognize similar common ground in relation to ethical questions concerning non-human animals. We may not in our practice seek to advance narrow human self-interest by using other animals in ways that fail to recognize their status as fellow creatures of God. This means it is morally illegitimate for Christians to approve of human projects that promote human ends at significant cost to other animals without regard for their wellbeing. Christians will continue to disagree, as in the debate between pacifism and the just war tradition, about how far we can afford to realize the peaceable reign of God envisaged in the Bible given our current conditions of life. As in the dispute about war, however, Christians should be able quickly to reach agreement on aims and means that would be unchristian in relation to other animals. Given Christian recognition of other animals as fellow creatures of God, fellow beneficiaries of God’s works of reconciliation and redemption, and fellow covenant participants, who make claims on us as neighbours and as those who are As discussed in Chapter 6, this is not a novel theological judgement, but represents a long tradition of Christian critique of sport hunting.

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poor, and from whom we can learn of the moral life – given this theological view of the lives of other animals – Christians can agree on the illegitimacy of Christian participation in practices that pursue narrowly human ends at great cost to other animals with little or no regard for the value of those animals. As we shall see, there is unfortunately no shortage of such practice, so even broad agreement of this kind would lead to radical changes in the way Christians think and act in relation to other animals.

Chapter 2 U SI N G O T H E R A N I M A L S F O R F O O D Among the many ways in which humans make use of other animals, the use of non-human animals for food has a priority claim on our attention. While human activity on the earth has a very broad impact on wild animals, as discussed in Chapter 8, the vast numbers of animals now used for food, the direct control we exercise over their lives, and the broader impacts of this activity on wild animals, together suggest that it is in this sphere that human practice most significantly impacts on the lives of non-human animals. One obvious foundational question here is whether it is permissible for humans to kill other animals for food at all. I will postpone discussion of this question to the end of the chapter, however, as the most pressing ethical challenge in this area concerns not some ideal case of raising and killing other animals, but the ethical acceptability of what is actually the case: how we currently raise and slaughter non-human animals to produce meat, fish, dairy and eggs. I will therefore begin with a survey account of current practice, before turning to a discussion of its compatibility with the theological approach to animal ethics sketched out in the previous chapter. Finally, I will turn to the issue of under what constraints, if any, it could be permissible for Christians to kill other animals for food.

How Humans Use Other Animals for Food Overview There is a widespread lack of knowledge about the shape of the lives and deaths of non-human animals that are demanded by our current consumption of animal products, arising from a combination of an intentional hiddenness of the animal food industry, concerned that informed consumers would not approve of its practice, and the sometimes wilful ignorance of those consumers. An essential first step to a theological analysis of the ethics of our practice in this area is, therefore, to provide a survey account of what we are doing in consuming animals in the early twenty-first century. That is what I attempt in the following pages. Obviously, this is a snapshot of a rapidly evolving, complex and diverse set of global practices, and much detail lies beyond what can be included in this kind of survey account. I hope that the footnoted links to Food and Agriculture Organization of the United

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Nations (FAO) reports and data, together with information from other sources, will enable others in due course to update the picture presented here, and to provide more detail in relation to specific topics. According to FAO estimates, in 2016, 83 billion non-human land animals were used globally to produce meat, eggs and dairy products.1 The FAO does not publish data on the numbers of fish used globally but on the basis of the 167 million tonnes of fish caught or raised for food in 2014, we could estimate that between 2.2 and 5.7 trillion fish were killed for food, with up to a third more caught as non-target species (by-catch), caught for bait, unreported, or wasted in processing. This leads to a rough estimate that globally 2.9–7.8 trillion fish were killed for purposes related to providing food for humans in 2014. These figures represent a 14 per cent increase on those reported for fish just two years previously, in 2012.2 The vast majority of the terrestrial farmed animals are chickens raised for meat – 65.8 billion, with a further 7.8 billion poultry used for egg production – and 4.4 billion other birds killed for meat, making a total of 78.1 billion birds. The remaining 4.7 billion land animals are mammals. Pig meat is most consumed (33 per cent), which required the killing of 1.5 billion pigs in 2016, followed by rabbits (981 million), sheep (551 million), goats (460 million), cattle and buffalo (328 million), rodents raised for meat, such as guinea pigs (70 million), and horses, mules, asses and camels (11 million in total). A further 273 million cows were used for milk, together with 250 million sheep, 203 million goats, 65 million buffalo, and 7 million camels.3 Most of these figures are on an upward trend: between 1980 and 2005 per capita meat consumption rose from 30 to 41 kilograms per year; milk from 76 to 82 kilograms; and eggs from 6 to 9 kilograms.4 Poultry consumption has increased at three times the rate of population

This figure is taken from 2016 data downloaded from FAO Statistics Division, ‘FAOSTAT’ (2016), URL: http://www.fao.org/faostat, using the ‘Production’ domain and ‘Livestock Primary’ category. 2 The FAO estimate that in 2014 global capture of fish was 93.4 million tonnes and aquaculture production of fish was 73.8 million tonnes (FAO, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2016 (Rome: FAO, 2016), 4–5), giving a total of 167.2 million tonnes. Using average tonnage of wild-caught fish from 1999–2007 of 77 million tonnes, A. Mood and P. Brooke estimated that this represented between 1 and 2.7 trillion fish (A. Mood and P. Brooke, ‘Estimating the Number of Fish Caught in Global Fishing Each Year’ (2010), URL: http://www.fishcount.org.uk/published/standard/fishcountfullrptSR. pdf, 9). I have obtained my rough estimate of the total number of fish killed for purposes related to providing food for humans in 2014 by increasing Mood and Brooke’s estimate range by the 117 per cent that the total 2014 tonnage exceeds their average wild-caught figure (to 2.2–5.9 trillion), and by adding a third representing by-catch, fish wasted in processing, unreported, or used for bait (to 2.9–7.8 trillion). The total of wild fish capture and aquaculture production in 2012 was 146.5 million tonnes (FAO, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2014 (Rome: FAO, 2014), 10, 18). 3 Figures from 2016 data downloaded from FAO, ‘FAOSTAT’. 4 FAO, The State of Food and Agriculture (Rome: FAO, 2009), Table 1, 11. 1

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growth in each of the past five decades.5 Increases in developing countries were significant within these figures: the FAO report that in the period between the early 1960s and 2005: ‘consumption of milk in the developing countries has almost doubled, meat consumption more than tripled, and egg consumption increased by a factor of five’.6 In China, meat consumption went from 29 kcal per capita per day in the 1960s to 450 in 2014 – an astonishing 1,450 per cent rise.7 Globally, between 1992 and 2014 meat has gone from providing 7 per cent of food calories to 17 per cent, fish from 1 per cent to 1.7 per cent, and milk from 4.4 per cent to 7.3 per cent.8 Global demand for meat is expected to rise by 73 per cent between 2010 and 2050; with growth in demand for milk rising 58 per cent in the same period.9 The numbers of non-human animals being used to provide for consumption at current and projected levels are hard to comprehend. Fish Numerically, the largest numbers of non-human animals used for food are fish: the 2.9–7.8 trillion fish killed per year estimated above numerically represents 98–99 per cent of non-human animals killed for human food, though by weight this is only approximately one-third of the total global production of meat and fish.10 Around half of fish are now farmed in aquaculture systems, rather than wild-caught. This proportion is on a steep upward trend, and farmed fish is the fastest-growing sector of animal-based food production, focused in Asia, with China producing 62 per cent of the world’s farmed fish and Asia as a whole 89 per cent.11 Between 1950 and 2012, world food fish production expanded almost 800 per cent.12 Industrial trawling has resulted in depletion of wild fish populations by 90 per cent since 1900.13 Thirty-one per cent of fish stocks in 2013 were estimated by the FAO to be fished at a biologically unsustainable level, up from 10 per cent in 1976.14 In 2006, only 64 per cent of wild-caught fish were used for human consumption; the remaining 36 per cent were used to produce animal feeds, with intensive fish FAO, FAO Statistical Yearbook 2010 (Rome: FAO, 2010), 198. FAO, The State of Food and Agriculture, 9.  7  FAO, Food and Nutrition in Numbers (Rome: FAO, 2014), 30.  8  FAO, Food and Nutrition in Numbers, 56.  9  FAO, Tackling Climate Change through Livestock: A Global Assessment of Emissions and Mitigation Opportunities (Rome: FAO, 2013), 1. 10  Based on 2009 figures reported by FAO for total global production of meat of 293 million tonnes and fisheries and aquaculture of 145 million tonnes (FAO, FAO Statistical Yearbook 2012: World Food and Agriculture (Rome: FAO, 2012), 198, 202). 11  FAO, Statistical Yearbook 2012, 204–6; FAO, State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2016, 27. 12  FAO, State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2014, 3. 13  H. K. Lotze and B. Worm, ‘Historical Baselines for Large Marine Animals’, Trends in Ecology and Evolution 24:5 (2009), 257. 14  FAO, State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2016, 5–6.  5   6 

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farming consuming the vast majority (71 per cent).15 This use of wild-caught fish is expanding rapidly: in 1988 the fish farming industry consumed only 10 per cent of fish meal; in 2000 only 33 per cent.16 Intensively farmed fish consume on average 1.9 kilograms of wild-caught fish for every 1 kilogram produced, though for some carnivorous species this figure rises to 5 kilograms consumed for every 1 kilogram produced.17 Fish have not generally been significant objects of human concern with relation to their welfare, perhaps because the very different environment in which they live makes their lives distant from us, or because their lack of facial expressions or vocalization inhibits our empathetic response. This lack of concern is supported by misconceptions about their cognitive ability, such as the often-repeated claim that goldfish only have a three-second memory and so forget one side of a small tank before they get back to it, popularized in the absent-minded Dory character in the film Finding Nemo,18 despite evidence for much longer memory spans in scientific papers from at least 1916.19 More seriously, recreational fishing with hooks has been justified on the basis that fish do not feel pain, as recently as 2013.20 Recent research provides strong evidence of a range of sophisticated cognitive capacities in fish, such as good long-term memory, complex traditions within social groups, so-called Machiavellian intelligence, including cooperation and reconciliation, tool use, learning skills, the ability to count, social recognition of individuals of their own and other species, social and emotional learning, and spatial cognition.21 As noted in Volume I of this work, Augustine observed fish anticipating being fed by humans in a fountain in Bulla Regia, and concluded, against the view of Basil of Caesarea, that they must possess memory.22 More recent experiments have

A. G. J. Tacon and M. Metian, ‘Fishing for Aquaculture: Non-Food Use of Small Pelagic Forage Fish: A Global Perspective’, Reviews in Fisheries Science 17:3 (2009), 305–17. 16  R. L. Naylor et al., ‘Effect of Aquaculture on World Fish Supplies’, Nature 405:6790 (2000), 1019. 17  Naylor et al., ‘Effect of Aquaculture on World Fish Supplies’, 1019. 18  A. Stanton and L. Unkrich, dirs., Finding Nemo (Pixar, 2003). 19  E. P. Churchill, ‘The Learning of a Maze by Goldfish’, Journal of Animal Behavior 6:3 (1916), 247–55. 20  V. Elliott, ‘Anglers Finally off the Hook as Scientists Settle Age-Old Debate over Whether Fish Feel Pain’, The Daily Mail, 12 January 2013. The article was based on a research paper in the industry journal Fish and Fisheries (J. D. Rose et al., ‘Can Fish Really Feel Pain?’, Fish and Fisheries 15:1 (2014)), which attempted to discount a wide range of studies providing evidence that fish experience pain. These studies are reviewed in L. U. Sneddon, ‘Pain in Aquatic Animals’, Journal of Experimental Biology 218 (2015), 967–76. 21  C. Brown, ‘Fish Intelligence, Sentience and Ethics’, Animal Cognition 18:1 (2015), 1–17. These capacities are delineated and discussed in C. Brown, K. Laland and J. Krause (eds), Fish Cognition and Behavior (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). 22   Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Ancient Christian Writers, trans. J. H. Taylor, SJ (New York; Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1982), 3.8, discussed in Vol. I, 55–6, n. 34. 15 

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demonstrated that fish can recognize a particular human individual who feeds them, even after a six-month absence, and if fed at one end of their tank in the morning, and the other end of the tank in the evening, for example, can learn to be in the right place in advance of being fed more quickly than some rats given a similar task.23 Gobies, small fish that live in rock pools, have been shown to have a mental map of the relative positions of their home pool and other pools based on information gained at high tide that allows them to jump from one pool to another at low tide to escape predators, and this information is retained even after being taken away from their home pool for forty days.24 Fish migrations over long distances to particular locations demonstrate mental maps on a much larger scale.25 Cleaner wrasses, which offer cleaning services to fish of other species, are able to recognize regular users of its services individually, reconcile with fish they are cleaning if they accidentally bite them, prioritize transient fish who are likely otherwise to go elsewhere, and ‘cheat’ by deliberately nipping the skin of the fish they are cleaning much more frequently with non-predatory fish.26 Alongside demonstrations of these cognitive abilities, there is now very good evidence that fish are capable of experiencing pain. Researchers have demonstrated both that fish possess the neural apparatus to perceive and respond to harmful stimuli, and that their behaviour shows that they respond to pain by altering their behaviour.27 Fish subjected to damaging stimuli seek out analgesia, even when this can be accessed only in an environment that is otherwise unattractive to them, stop feeding, and show other anomalous behaviours.28 The evidence of the cognitive capacities of fish, and their capacity to experience pain, must be placed alongside an understanding of the ways both wild capture and being raised in a farmed environment impact on them. The main methods of wild capture are gill nets, which are very long walls of net (up to 100 kilometres) into which fish swim and become trapped by their gills until the net is winched out with the trapped fish; trawling, where a large net is pulled over several hours either through the midwater or along the sea bed; purse seines, where nets up to 1.5 kilometres long are deployed around fish and then gradually contracted to confine the fish tightly before landing; long lining, where lines of baited hooks up to 100 kilometres are deployed to capture larger species; and pole and line. Live bait fish are often thrown into the sea to attract other species, or are used as live Brown, ‘Fish Intelligence, Sentience and Ethics’, 8. Brown, ‘Fish Intelligence, Sentience and Ethics’, 9. 25  For example, one study demonstrated that Nassau Grouper fish travel up to 200 kilometres to join spawning aggregations. See C. P. Dahlgren et al., ‘Multiyear Tracking of Nassau Grouper Spawning Migrations’, Marine and Coastal Fisheries 8:1 (2016), 522–35. 26  Brown, ‘Fish Intelligence, Sentience and Ethics’, 11. 27  In a recent article, Lynne Sneddon reviewed 87 scientific papers relating to pain in fish, concluding that the evidence is clear that fish experience pain, and crustaceans and molluscs also show evidence of responding to painful stimuli (Sneddon, ‘Pain in Aquatic Animals’). 28  Sneddon, ‘Pain in Aquatic Animals’. 23  24 

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bait impaled on hooks through the body or eye.29 Many of these methods create substantial by-catch of species that are not the intended targets, including other fish alongside sharks, turtles, dolphins, seals and birds: one estimate suggests 160,000 seabirds are killed annually in longlining.30 Discarded by-catch has been estimated at 22–35 per cent of the total capture;31 stress and injury to discarded fish means that mortality rates can be up to 100 per cent.32 It is clear that wild capture causes a great deal of suffering to fish: in addition to the particular stresses of each mode of capture listed above, it is notable that for the most part fish are not slaughtered or stunned: instead they are left to suffocate in a process that in some species takes two hours or more, retarded by the cold temperatures often used to preserve freshness, or otherwise gutted live.33 Industrial seabed trawling destroys habitat, and results in reductions of seabed biomass of up to 56 per cent.34 Discarded fishing gear continues to kill fish and other species in the phenomenon known as ‘ghost fishing’. Estimates suggest over 600,000 tonnes of fishing gear may be deposited in the seas each year, which may remain active for years, causing mortality rates in fish of up to 30 per cent of landed catches.35

L. U. Sneddon and D. C. C. Wolfenden, ‘How are Fish Affected by Large Scale Fisheries? Pain Perception in Fish’, in Sea the Truth: Essays on Overfishing, Pollution and Climate Change, ed. K. Soeters (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Nicolaas G. Pierson Foundation, 2012). 30  Sneddon and Wolfenden, ‘How are Fish Affected by Large Scale Fisheries?’, 87. 31  Naylor et al., ‘Effect of Aquaculture on World Fish Supplies’, 1019; D. L. Alverson, S. A. Murawski and J. G. Pope, A Global Assessment of Fisheries Bycatch and Discards (Rome: FAO, 1994), ‘Estimates of Global and Regional Bycatch Levels’. 32  Alverson, Murawski and Pope, Global Assessment, Table 13; Sneddon and Wolfenden, ‘How are Fish Affected by Large Scale Fisheries?’, 87. 33  E. Lambooij et al., ‘Effects of on-Board Storage and Electrical Stunning of Wild Cod (Gadus Morhua) and Haddock (Melanogrammus Aeglefinus) on Brain and Heart Activity’, Fisheries Research (2012), 127–8; J. D. Metcalfe, ‘Welfare in Wild-Capture Marine Fisheries’, Journal of Fish Biology 75:10 (2009), 2856; S. C. Kestin, S. B. Wotton and N. G. Gregory, ‘Effect of Slaughter by Removal from Water on Visual Evoked Activity in the Brain and Reflex Movement of Rainbow Trout (Oncorhynchus Mykiss)’, Veterinary Record 128:19 (5 November 1991), 443–6, 443–6. Asphyxia and physical exhaustion have been judged inhumane methods of killing fish by the European Scientific Panel for Animal Health and Welfare (Scientific Panel on Animal Health and Welfare, ‘Opinion of the Scientific Panel on Animal Health and Welfare on a Request from the Commission Related to Welfare Aspects of the Main Systems of Stunning and Killing the Main Commercial Species of Animals’, EFSA Journal 45 (2004), 23). 34  J. G. Hiddink et al., ‘Cumulative Impacts of Seabed Trawl Disturbance on Benthic Biomass, Production, and Species Richness in Different Habitats’, Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 63:4 (2006), 721–36. 35  E. Gilman et al., Abandoned, Lost or Otherwise Discarded Gillnets and Trammel Nets, FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Technical Paper (FAO) Eng No. 600 (Rome: FAO, 2016), 1–2. 29 

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Farmed fish are, in general, killed more quickly than wild-caught fish, but are stressed in advance of slaughter by being crowded into small areas, and suffer from other welfare issues during their captive lives, such as being kept in monotonous environments, being unable to perform normal parts of their behaviour, being subject to high stocking densities that can result in high disease transmission, and undergoing stressful disturbances for vaccination, size grading, tank cleaning, and movement between tanks.36 Farming of fish also has a negative impact on other species: in addition to the substantial share of wild-caught fish required to feed farmed fish noted above, many farming systems reduce wild fish numbers by modifying their habitats, capturing immature wild fish to stock ponds, introducing non-indigenous microorganisms, and discharging aquaculture effluent into the sea.37 In Scotland, between 500 and 5,000 seals are killed by salmon farmers each year to protect their stocks and wild salmon numbers have dropped significantly as a result of salmon farming.38 Birds After fish, chickens are by some distance the most commonly used animal to provide food for humans, both for meat and for their eggs: as noted above, 65.8 billion chickens are killed annually for meat, a further 7.8 billion used to provide eggs, and per capita consumption of chicken meat and eggs is rising rapidly.39 The vast majority of these birds are raised in intensive conditions: 70 per cent globally in 2005.40 Historically, hens were reared for eggs and then slaughtered for meat at the end of their laying life, but highly selective breeding to maximize productivity from the mid-twentieth century onwards has led to breeds specialized either to provide meat or eggs.41 Domesticated chickens are descended from red junglefowl which can still be found wild in India, China, Java, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.42 In the wild they lay clutches of 5–6 eggs and then incubate them for 18–21 days, laying a total of 10–15 eggs each year; intensive selective breeding programmes have

L. U. Sneddon, ‘Cognition and Welfare’, in Fish Cognition and Behavior, ed. C. Brown, K. Laland and J. Krause (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 421–5. 37  Naylor et al., ‘Effect of Aquaculture on World Fish Supplies’. 38  A. Cramb, ‘Scottish Fish Farmers “Conducting Secret Seal Slaughter”’, The Daily Telegraph, 5 April 2009; K. McKenna, ‘Fish Farms are Destroying Wild Scottish Salmon, Says Leading Environmentalist’, The Observer, 16 February 2014. 39  Figures from 2016 data downloaded from FAO Statistics Division, ‘FAOSTAT’. 40  FAO, Global Livestock Production Systems (Rome: FAO, 2011), 57. 41  C. Hall and V. Sandilands, ‘Public Attitudes to the Welfare of Broiler Chickens’, Animal Welfare 16 (2007), 49. 42  A. Al-Nasser et al., ‘Overview of Chicken Taxonomy and Domestication’, World’s Poultry Science Journal 63:2 (2007), 286, 287. 36 

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increased this to more than 300 eggs per year in current laying hens.43 Since 1953, selective breeding has almost doubled the live weight of hens at slaughter on 50 per cent less feed.44 The growth rates of broiler chickens have increased by 300 per cent in the past 50 years, from 25 grams per day to 100 grams per day, so that they reach slaughter weight in as little as 35 days.45 Broiler hens are born in hatcheries, undergo beak-trimming to reduce injuries from pecking each other in the crowded conditions, and are then delivered as day-old chicks to the floors of large windowless warehouses where they live on unchanged litter until they reach slaughter weight. Their rapid weight gain causes significant welfare problems: a 2008 study showed over a quarter of birds to have locomotion problems at slaughter weight, with 3 per cent almost unable to walk.46 Inflammatory conditions caused by these leg problems are painful, and the hens also suffer acute pain and sensory loss from beak-trimming, and from lesions on their feet arising from damp litter.47 When they reach slaughter weight, they are usually packed into crates by their legs, before being transported to the slaughter house, where they are usually shackled to hang upside down by their legs to join an automated production line where they are first subjected to an electrical water bath, intended to stun them, before having their throats cut, being plucked and dismembered. The process of shackling is painful and distressing in itself, with many hens flapping their wings in panic, and the electrical stunning uncertain in efficacy, so that some birds suffer pre-stun electrical shocks and many hens are not insensible before having their throats cut. The European Scientific Panel on Animal Health and Welfare concludes that since this process ‘causes very poor welfare in the birds’, the systems ‘should be replaced as soon as possible by a system causing less stress and pain’.48 Commercial free-range systems for broiler hens are often not dissimilar to the intensive conditions, with less than 15 per cent of the flock using space outside the housed area, mostly close to the entrance.49 The separate breeding of hens for meat and eggs creates a problem for the breeding of laying hens: surplus male chicks from strains selected for egg production. Globally, around 4.2 billion newly hatched male chicks are killed for

Al-Nasser et al., ‘Overview of Chicken Taxonomy’, 287, 290. A. K. Thiruvenkadan, R. Prabakaran and S. Panneerselvam, ‘Broiler Breeding Strategies over the Decades: An Overview’, World’s Poultry Science Journal 67:2 (2011), 310. 45  T. G. Knowles et al., ‘Leg Disorders in Broiler Chickens: Prevalence, Risk Factors and Prevention’, PLoS ONE 3:2 (2 June 2008), 1. 46  Knowles et al., ‘Leg Disorders in Broiler Chickens’. 47  M. J. Gentle, ‘Pain Issues in Poultry’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science 135:3 (2011), 254–5. 48  Scientific Panel on Animal Health and Welfare, ‘Opinion of the Scientific Panel on Animal Health and Welfare’, 19. 49  T. Jones et al., ‘Welfare and Environmental Benefits of Integrating Commercially Viable Free-Range Broiler Chickens into Newly Planted Woodland: A UK Case Study’, Agricultural Systems 94:2 (2007), 178. 43  44 

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this reason each year, mainly by maceration, gassing, or electrocution.50 In the European Union (EU), only maceration or gassing is permitted. Maceration – being cut into pieces by fast moving blades – is judged the method that inflicts least suffering, on the basis that the machinery is simple and the time to death very short; gassing is likely to cause more fear and pain,51 though the idea of dropping live chicks into a mincer is hard to stomach. The female chicks are reared for around four months until they are ready to lay, and then the majority globally are transferred to battery cages, in which four or five birds share a cage around 50 centimetres (18 inches) square, with up to 120,000 birds in a shed. Artificial light is used to control periods of light and darkness and thereby maximize egg production. When the productivity of the hens declines, at about eighteen months, they are caught by the legs, transferred to crates, transported often some distance, and slaughtered in a similar way to the broiler hens just described.52 Battery cages were prohibited in the EU in 2012, replaced by enriched cages that allow more space per bird and access to perching and scratching space.53 This represents a clear welfare improvement, but the caged conditions still prevent expression of many of the behaviours hens exhibit in non-caged conditions, such as dustbathing and nest-building.54 Free-range eggs accounted for 43 per cent of UK egg sales in 2014,55 though in many commercial free-range systems hens make little use of the outdoor space available, because of poorly designed access points and outdoor environments, and behaviour affected by large flock size.56 Similarly to the case of fish, chickens, together with other birds, have often been placed outside the range of human empathetic moral concern, again associated with a low popular estimation of their cognitive abilities summed up in the use of ‘bird brain’ as a term of abuse. Again, we need to be attentive to current scientific understandings of their cognition. In relation to birds in general, we can exemplify the new appreciation of the sophistication of their mental lives with the findings that New Caledonian Crows are able to fashion their own innovative hooked S. Aerts et al., ‘Culling of Day-Old Chicks: Opening the Debates of Moria?’, in Ethical Futures: Bioscience and Food Horizons, ed. K. Millar, P. Hobson West and B. Nerlich (Wageningen: Wageningen Academic Publishers, 2009), 117. 51  Aerts et al., ‘Culling of Day-Old Chicks’, 118–19. 52  G. Scott, ‘Laying Hens’, in Management and Welfare of Farm Animals: The UFAW Farm Handbook, ed. J. Webster (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). 53  Scott, ‘Laying Hens’, 311. 54  Scott, ‘Laying Hens’, 312. 55  DEFRA, ‘UK Egg Statistics Notice’ (2014), URL: https://www.gov.uk/government/ statistics/egg-statistics, 3. 56  S. G. Gebhardt-Henrich, M. J. Toscano and E. K. F. Fröhlich, ‘Use of Outdoor Ranges by Laying Hens in Different Sized Flocks’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science 155 (2014), 80. C. J. Nicol et al., Farmed Bird Welfare Science Review (Melbourne: Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources, 2017), 49. The latter review provides a thorough overview of farmed bird welfare issues. 50 

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tools in order to solve puzzles,57 that magpies are capable of self-recognition in a mirror,58 and that song birds share with humans, but not with other primates or rodents, the FOXP2 gene and possibly mechanisms for vocal learning and memory.59 Recent research has made discoveries about the cognitive capacities of chickens in particular. Even very young chicks are able to make decisions based on comparison of number or the relative proportions of two shaded colours on a screen, and can locate a hidden object by moving towards the area it was last observed, suggesting they have a concept of object permanence.60 Older chickens are able to use both local and global cues – such as the position of the sun – for orienting themselves spatially, to estimate time, to show self-control by forgoing a small reward in order to obtain a larger reward later, to draw relevant inferences from the behaviour of other hens, and to engage in social learning.61 In the conditions in which most broiler and laying hens are kept, few of these cognitive abilities have the chance to be developed or exercised. I visited a large UK broiler facility. After being taken through careful precautions to prevent infection, I was guided into a large, dim, warehouse-sized shed, with hens on the floor almost as far as I could see, walking around, or sitting still, on a floor of litter. Awed by the size of the building and the number of birds, I asked if I could hold one. The lights were dimmed to make the hens more docile, and a scraggly hen, which was just beginning to grow its adult feathers, was put into my hands. The hen sat quiet in my arms and I could feel bare skin where new feathers had not yet grown, and a fast heart beat. I was told by the owner of the site that this hen was sixteen days old, just like all the other hens in the shed which, I was told, numbered about 26,000. On the same site there were another eleven similar sheds, and on a nearby site another twelve sheds. All had been delivered to the sheds as day-old chicks fifteen days ago: a delivery of over 600,000 chicks. As I held the bird, I was told that the hens spent as little as thirty-five days growing in these sheds, before reaching slaughter weight, and I realized that this chicken was halfway through her brief life. I put her down and watched as she rushed back to be closer to her fellows. In a little over two weeks, I learned, she would be caught by A. A. S. Weir, J. Chappell and A. Kacelnik, ‘Shaping of Hooks in New Caledonian Crows’, Science 297:5583 (2002), 981. 58  H. Prior, A. Schwarz and O. Gunturkun, ‘Mirror-Induced Behavior in the Magpie (Pica Pica): Evidence of Self-Recognition’, PLoS Biology 6:8 (2008), 1642–60. 59  I. Teramitsu et al., ‘Parallel FoxP1 and FoxP2 Expression in Songbird and Human Brain Predicts Functional Interaction’, Journal of Neuroscience 24:13 (2004), 3152–63. 60  R. Rugani, G. Vallortigara and L. Regolin, ‘From Small to Large: Numerical Discrimination by Young Domestic Chicks (Gallus Gallus)’, Journal of Comparative Psychology 128:2 (2014), 163–71; R. Rugani, G. Vallortigara and L. Regolin, ‘The Use of Proportion by Young Domestic Chicks (Gallus Gallus)’, Animal Cognition 18:3 (2015), 605–16; Christine J. Nicol, ‘Chicken Cognition’, in Welfare of the Laying Hen, Poultry Science Symposium Series, vol. 27, ed. G. C. Perry (Wallingford, Oxfordshire: CABI Publishing, 2004), 178. 61  Nicol, ‘Chicken Cognition’, 177–84. 57 

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her legs, wings flapping, pushed into a crate with thirty or so others, loaded onto a lorry, driven with 600,000 fellow birds for two hours down a motorway to the abattoir, and then subjected to the uncertain, stressful and painful death described above. I had a strong sense of the chickens being treated as a crop rather than as animal creatures, grown and ‘harvested’. Perhaps that is unsurprising given that the profit margin for broiler facilities on each bird is as low as 1 UK penny. The global figure of over 66 billion chickens killed annually means over 2,000 are being killed per second. It is hard to hold on to any sense of the individual lives of each of these birds in the context of these unimaginably large statistics, but it helps me to recall that one bird I encountered on my visit. Numbers of other birds raised for meat and eggs are small in relation to chickens, but still very large: the next most numerous after the 73 billion chickens are ducks, with over 3 billion killed for food each year, which means after fish and chickens, more ducks are killed for food than any other animal. The 1 billion other poultry are largely turkeys, geese, and game birds such as guinea fowl, quail and pheasants.62 Most of these birds are raised in similar intensive conditions to those developed for chickens, though geese benefit from access to fresh grass and therefore are sometimes permitted to graze.63 Mechanical force-feeding via large metal pipes is still used to produce birds with enormous livers for foie gras: over 90 per cent of the birds used for this purpose are now ducks, usually housed in small individual cages for ease of handling; 19,860 tonnes of foie gras were produced in 2001, with over 80 per cent of this produced in France,64 requiring in France the force-feeding of 35 million ducks.65 The practice is banned in Israel, Australia, the UK, and many other EU countries, and a 1999 Council of Europe recommendation restricts it to areas where it is already in use.66 Pigs As noted above, meat from pigs provides one-third of global meat consumption. Pigs are the most numerous farmed mammal globally, and the most intensively farmed, with 57 per cent of the 1.5 billion pigs killed for human consumption raised intensively.67 Domesticated pigs are not far distant from their wild forebears in preferred modes of life. A study in Edinburgh in the 1980s by Alex Stolba and 2016 data downloaded from FAO Statistics Division, ‘FAOSTAT’. G. C. Mead (ed.), Poultry Meat Processing and Quality (Cambridge: Woodhead Publishing Company, 2004), 215–17. 64  Mead, Poultry Meat Processing and Quality, 217–19. 65  D. Guémené and G. Guy, ‘The Past, Present and Future of Force-Feeding and “Foie Gras” Production’, World’s Poultry Science Journal 60:2 (2004), 210. 66  Guémené and Guy, ‘Past, Present and Future of Force-Feeding’, 210; M. DeSoucey, Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food, Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), xiii. 67  Percentage of pigs raised intensively from FAO, Global Livestock Production Systems; total figure from 2016 data downloaded from FAO Statistics Division, ‘FAOSTAT’. 62  63 

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D. G. M. Wood-Gush provided a varied environment such as wild boar might encounter, and populated it with a boar, four adult females, and younger pigs. The researchers studied the use the pigs made of the space over three years. Bernard E. Rollin summarized the results: It was found that pigs built a series of communal nests in a cooperative way. These nests displayed certain common features, including walls to protect the animals against prevailing winds and a wide view that allowed the pigs to see what was approaching. These nests were far from the feeding sites. Before retiring to the nest, the animals brought additional nesting material for the walls and rearranged the nest. On arising in the morning, the animals walked at least 7 meters before urinating and defecating. Defecation occurred on paths so that excreta ran between bushes. Pigs learned to mark trees in allelomimetic68 fashion. The pigs formed complex social bonds between certain animals, and new animals introduced to the area took a long time to be assimilated. Some formed special relationships – for example, a pair of sows would join together for several days after farrowing, and forage and sleep together. Members of a litter of the same sex tended to stay together and pay attention to one another’s exploratory behavior. Young males also attended to the behavior of older males. Juveniles of both sexes exhibited manipulative play. In autumn, 51 percent of the day was devoted to rooting. Pregnant sows would choose a nest site several hours before giving birth, a significant distance from the communal nest (6 kilometers in one case). Nests were built, sometimes even with log walls. The sow would not allow other pigs to intrude for several days but might eventually allow another sow with a litter, with which she had previously established a bond, to share the nest, though no cross-suckling was ever noted. Piglets began exploring the environment at about 5 days of age and weaned themselves at somewhere between 12 and 15 weeks. Sows came into estrus and conceived while lactating.69

Rollin cites Wood-Gush making the striking observation that despite the fact that the pigs had been raised in an intensive system, in an appropriate environment their behaviour ‘resembled that of the European wild boar’.70 It is clear from this research that domesticated pigs retain preferences for their environment and a mode of life within it that are similar to their wild forebears. Research into the cognition of pigs indicates that pigs can distinguish between individuals, even between very similar litter mates not previously known to For the uninitiated, ‘allelomimetic’ means that pigs exhibited social learning: the capacity to learn behaviour from others in the group. 69  B. E. Rollin, Farm Animal Welfare: Social, Bioethical, and Research Issues (Ames, IA: Iowa State Press, 1995), 74–5. 70  D. G. M. Wood-Gush, Elements of Ethology (London: Chapman and Hall, 1983), 197, quoted in Rollin, Farm Animal Welfare, 75. 68 

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them, and remember individuals over time. As foragers, they have good spatial awareness, allowing them either to return to sites where food has been provided, or to avoid previously visited areas in order to search efficiently for food. They exhibit social learning, enabling them, for example, to discern that another pig has knowledge of food sources and to follow them. They are also able to deceive others selectively: pigs with knowledge of a food source but accompanied by another pig who will monopolize the food choose to look elsewhere until the other pig cannot see them, whereas when accompanied by a pig who shares food, they are content to go together to the food source. Pigs are able to move away from a reflection of a food bowl rather than looking behind the mirror, as they would do if they had not understood they were looking at a reflection. Other research has suggested that at least some pigs are able to understand the mental states of others, recognizing that the position of another pig means that they must possess knowledge of a food source, that pigs may possess episodic memory, remembering where and in what context they have encountered specific objects,71 that pigs are able to make decisions based on perception of time, that pigs engage in play, that they can share the emotions of other pigs, and that there are differences between the behaviour of individuals that could be recognized as personality traits.72 The environment the vast majority of pigs experience in an intensive environment is very far from the conditions of the Edinburgh research project, or those that would allow the expression of the cognitive abilities that research is revealing. As a result their mode of life in intensive systems is very far from the diverse and socially complex one that would reflect their preferences and their pre-domesticated history. Most pigs have their tails docked and teeth clipped off or ground down soon after birth without anaesthesia to avoid problems with tail biting and facial injuries in confined environments without other outlets for chewing behaviour.73 Most male pigs are castrated, in order to control breeding, make them more manageable, or from a concern about the taste of the meat of uncastrated boars. Castration is a painful procedure usually performed without anaesthetic or analgesics.74 Most pigs are reared indoors in sheds with uncomfortable slatted flooring, so that faeces and urine fall efficiently through to a collection pit with

M. Mendl, S. Held and R. W. Byrne, ‘Pig Cognition’, Current Biology 20:18 (2010), R797– 798. 72  L. Marino and C. M. Colvin, ‘Thinking Pigs: A Comparative Review of Cognition, Emotion, and Personality in Sus Domesticus’, International Journal of Comparative Psychology 28:1 (2015), 1–22. 73  S. Edwards, ‘Pigs’, in Management and Welfare of Farm Animals: The UFAW Farm Handbook, ed. J. Webster (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 279; A. Prunier, A. M. Mounier and M. Hay, ‘Effects of Castration, Tooth Resection, or Tail Docking on Plasma Metabolites and Stress Hormones in Young Pigs 1’, Journal of Animal Science 83:1 (2005), 216–22. 74  J.-L. Rault, D. C. Lay and J. N. Marchant-Forde, ‘Castration Induced Pain in Pigs and Other Livestock’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science 135:3 (2011), 214–25. 71 

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minimal human labour. These are highly monotonous environments with very few opportunities for the expression of preferred behaviours, such as the rooting for food that the Edinburgh pigs spent half of their time doing in the autumn. Pigs commonly move from areas devoted to littering, growth and ‘finishing’, reaching slaughter weight at five to six months of age. Globally, pregnant sows and sows with litters are usually confined in stalls too narrow to allow them to turn around, or tethered, though both practices were prohibited in the EU in 2012.75 Sows have been bred to produce increasing litter sizes, which cause additional welfare issues.76 Pigs exhibit aversive responses to the vibration caused by transportation, to which they are routinely subjected for sale at markets and for slaughter.77 Pigs were being slaughtered on the day I visited one abattoir. I watched a group of eight pigs waiting peaceably in a pen, lounging close to or on top of their fellows. Then they were herded through to the stunning enclosure, an area of about four metres square, with a ceiling track through a door-sized opening to the slaughter area. I am no kind of expert on pigs, but it was clear that the group was alarmed. They stood up, and jostled uneasily. The worker who was to stun them took the electric tongs from the wall, selected one of the pigs, and quickly caught him between his knees. He positioned the tongs on either side of the pig’s head to administer the shock. The pig stiffened, shook, and fell on his side, convulsing, at which point the worker fixed a chain to one of the pig’s rear legs and hoisted him up to the ceiling, still shaking, before pushing it through to the slaughter area, where his throat was cut and he was left to bleed out into a shallow bath. The sight and smell made the fate of this first pig very clear, and the reaction of the other pigs was panic. They began running around the pen to escape becoming the next victim, squealing loudly in chorus. The sound of terror, protest and appeal was almost unbearable. One by one they were stunned, hoisted and slaughtered. As their numbers decreased, the pen was less crowded, which gave them more room to evade the tongs. The last pig ran screaming around the pen three times before the worker succeeded in catching and stunning him. Then there was quiet, and I was left with the task of making sense of my reaction to what I had seen. It was clear to me that the last moments of these pigs had been terrifying. I felt that I had witnessed an atrocity, yet when I questioned the vet doing the paperwork in her office, her response was that what I had seen was routine. My thoughts strayed to accounts and video footage of human killings, and I felt that, seeing and hearing the response of terror, futile attempts at escape, and screaming protests of these pigs, I had been brought closer to the naked violence of human killing than I had ever been before.78 Edwards, ‘Pigs’, 266. E. M. Baxter et al., ‘The Welfare Implications of Large Litter Size in the Domestic Pig II: Management Factors’, Animal Welfare 22:2 (2013), 219–38. 77  Edwards, ‘Pigs’, 290. 78  Lest I be misunderstood, let me be clear: in this report of my reaction to the slaughter of the pigs I am not making a claim for moral equivalence between the killing of humans and the killing of pigs. I am, however, reporting my strong sense that in our response to the threat and act of killing, there is some continuity between how the pigs responded and how humans respond that is not merely anthropomorphic, and which, I believe, should affect our moral response to the killing of pigs and other animals. 75  76 

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Rabbits It was a surprise to me in researching this chapter to discover that the next most numerous farmed animal after pigs, is rabbits, with 980 million killed each year for human consumption.79 The raising of rabbits for meat dates back at least to the Romans, and medieval monks kept rabbits in cages and enclosures. The intensive farming of rabbits began in the middle of the twentieth century, with the introduction to Europe from the United States of the New Zealand White rabbit, reared in cages and fed a commercial integrated feed.80 Modern farming of rabbits is operated as a production chain, with separation of genetic centres, breeding farms, farms where rabbit kits are grown and fattened, then abattoirs and meat processing plants.81 Rabbits are social animals, living in the wild in small colonies of one or two males and six to twelve females, but the growing farms commonly keep them in small individual cages, often with bases made of wire, where there is insufficient room for rabbits to run, hop or rise up, let alone engage in preferred behaviours such as burrowing and gnawing.82 There are additional stresses on rabbits as they are transported in crates to slaughter, kept without food or water from when they are caught at the farm and slaughtered at the abattoir,83 and subject to stressful and erratic electrical stunning as they are hung by the legs. Standards for the farming of rabbits are under-developed: for example, while the UK and other EU countries have standards at national level, there is no speciesspecific European standard for the rearing of rabbits. Sheep and Goats After rabbits, sheep and goats are the next most numerous animal killed to provide human food, with 550 million sheep and 460 million goats slaughtered in 2016, and a further 452 million being used to produce milk.84 The vast majority of these animals are extensively reared, meaning that, in strong contrast to the conditions for most chickens and pigs, most sheep and goats spend most of their lives outdoors and are permitted to range over large outdoor areas, though they may be kept indoors at night or in seasons where there is little available to graze.85 They commonly occupy land that would be hard to use for producing other kinds of food. In some regions, interacting with humans is only occasional, at particular times of year. In areas such as the Mediterranean, where sheep produce a significant Figure from 2016 data downloaded from FAO Statistics Division, ‘FAOSTAT’. M. Verga et al., ‘Welfare Aspects in Rabbit Rearing and Transport’, Italian Journal of Animal Science 8:1s (2009), 192, citing J. C. Sanford, The Domestic Rabbit, 5th edn (Oxford: Blackwell Science, 1996). 81  Verga et al., ‘Welfare Aspects in Rabbit Rearing and Transport’, 192. 82  Verga et al., ‘Welfare Aspects in Rabbit Rearing and Transport’, 192–3. 83  Verga et al., ‘Welfare Aspects in Rabbit Rearing and Transport’, 199–9. 84  Figure from 2016 data downloaded from FAO Statistics Division, ‘FAOSTAT’. 85  A. Sevi et al., ‘Factors of Welfare Reduction in Dairy Sheep and Goats’, Italian Journal of Animal Science 8:1s (2009), 85. 79  80 

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proportion of total milk production, intensive rearing is rapidly becoming more common, in which sheep are housed indoors for all their life and fed on commercial feeds.86 In these contexts there is obviously much less freedom for the sheep to express preferred behaviours, such as the grazing that would otherwise occupy a significant proportion of their time. There are some welfare issues even in extensive systems, however: sheep raised for meat are routinely subjected to castration and tail-docking, without anaesthetic, and find their handling and transport between farms, or to slaughter, stressful. In some areas, including the hill-farming of sheep in the UK, there is a trend to larger flocks and fewer stockpeople to look after them.87 Like chickens and pigs, most sheep are slaughtered very young: suckling lambs from dairy ewes in Greece may be slaughtered at four weeks of age;88 in New Zealand lambs are slaughtered at three to four months old;89 in the UK, lambs are usually slaughtered between two and five months of age. Live export is a particular additional welfare issue for sheep: Australia exported 2 million sheep in 2013–14, with 97 per cent sent to the Middle East.90 The journey by ship takes three weeks and sheep, sometimes numbering over 60,000 on a single vessel and kept in open-deck pens, can be exposed to temperatures of 25°C for several days and peaks of 30°C or higher, with actual temperatures in the crowded pens of up to 50°C (122°F).91 Cattle are also exported from Australia by sea, and when a 2011 Australian documentary showed pictures of Australian cattle being slaughtered in Indonesia in a manner very far below Australian animal welfare standards, a campaign succeeded in getting a temporary ban on exports to Indonesia, lifted after four weeks with the introduction of a new licensing system.92 The EU exports 3.4 million animals to non-EU countries each year via long road and sea journeys, of which nearly 2 million are sheep, and 6 million animals, including 1.5 million lambs and sheep, are transported within Europe, with many journeys taking thirty hours and some up to seventy hours.93 These very long Sevi et al., ‘Factors of Welfare Reduction in Dairy Sheep and Goats’, 82–3. C. M. Dwyer, ‘Welfare of Sheep: Providing for Welfare in an Extensive Environment’, Small Ruminant Research 86:1-3 (2009), 17–19. 88  J. P. Boutonnet, ‘Perspectives of the Sheep Meat World Market on Future Production Systems and Trends’, Small Ruminant Research 34:3 (1999), 194. 89  D. Moot et al., ‘Country Pasture/forage Resource Profiles: New Zealand’ (2009). 90  Meat & Livestock Australia, ‘Prices & Markets: Sheepmeat and Lamb – Live Exports’, (2015). 91  M. K. Pines and C. J. C. Phillips, ‘Microclimatic Conditions and Their Effects on Sheep Behavior during a Live Export Shipment from Australia to the Middle East’, Journal of Animal Science 91:9 (2013), 4406–16; M. P. Caulfield et al., ‘Heat Stress: A Major Contributor to Poor Animal Welfare Associated with Long-Haul Live Export Voyages’, Veterinary Journal 199:2 (2014), 223–5. 92  L. Munro, ‘The Live Animal Export Controversy in Australia: A Moral Crusade Made for the Mass Media’, Social Movement Studies 14:2 (2014), 214–29. 93  Compassion in World Farming, ‘Export of Live Animals From European Union to NonEU Countries’ (2013); P. Stevenson and J. Formosinho, Long Distance Animal Transport 86  87 

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journeys to slaughter clearly represent a substantial additional and unnecessary stress on sheep at the end of their lives. I visited an English hill farm where a retired husband and wife team were raising a small flock of sheep. The context seemed to me close to the ideal case of sheep-rearing: they were very clearly attentive to the wellbeing of the animals in their care, working long hours, especially during lambing, and bottle-feeding lambs without a ewe with no regard for economic return. The small flock were able to range freely across the fields for grazing. I was given the task of counting young lambs spending their first days gambolling around the spring fields and quickly realized I was incapable of keeping track of them because of their playful skipping and jumping. Clearly these sheep were enjoying their environment, but I was left with questions even here. Male lambs were castrated without anaesthetic by having a tight rubber band placed over their genitals, which has been shown to cause them acute pain for up to six weeks.94 Of even more concern to me was the lack of concern shown by the couple for what happened to the lambs they sent to market at five or six months of age: they showed no interest in how far they would have to travel for slaughter, to which abattoirs they would be taken, or whether they might have to endure even longer journeys as part of the live export trade. I held a day-old lamb there, feeling his warm muscled softness and rapid heart beat, his face stretching up against my neck, sharing warmth, peaceful and trusting of my intentions. I was aware that we would leave the farm on very different terms: me in an hour or so, returning to my family and my work, the lamb in four months, if he fattened up as expected, having his infancy abruptly curtailed by being pushed into the back of a fearful and crowded lorry, and being taken from place to place, to no place. Cattle and Buffalo Cattle and buffalo are the final major category of non-human animals raised for human food, with 328 million killed for meat each year, and 339 million kept for milk.95 Similarly to sheep and goats, most cattle and buffalo are raised extensively, though there are strong current trends towards intensive dairy production, and more intensive beef cattle production. In extensive patterns of cattle farming there are the same considerable advantages as for sheep and goats in terms of the ability of animals to exhibit a wide behavioural repertoire with very infrequent interactions with stockpeople, though infrequent handling reduces the potential for problems with individual animals to be noticed and dealt with, and makes the

in Europe: A Cruel and Unnecessary Trade (Godalming, Surrey: Compassion in World Farming, 2008). 94  J. E. Kent, V. Molony and M. J. Graham, ‘Comparison of Methods for the Reduction of Acute Pain Produced by Rubber Ring Castration or Tail Docking of Week-Old Lambs’, The Veterinary Journal 155:1 (1998), 39. 95  Figure from 2016 data downloaded from FAO Statistics Division, ‘FAOSTAT’.

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occasions when handling is necessary more stressful.96 The three major practices that compromise welfare in these extensive contexts are branding, castration and dehorning.97 Branding is most commonly done with a hot iron, a procedure that is very clearly painful and stressful for the animal, and castration, by whatever method, is also a significant cause of pain and suffering. Dehorning is routinely done to prevent injury to other cattle and stockpeople, either by application of a caustic chemical to the head of calves, by applying a hot iron to a calf ’s horn button, or by gouging out the horn from the skull. While the first seems preferable in terms of the distress caused to the animal, the chemicals are a significant irritant, and all methods have a demonstrable impact on the subsequent growth of the animal.98 Beyond the stress associated with these three practices, there is the additional stress for many cattle of a long journey to the place where they will be slaughtered. For cattle in the USA, this is often a long journey from the ranch where they were born and ranged over to graze freely, to the feedlots where they are fattened on commercial corn-based feeds before slaughter. The introduction of feedlots represents an intensification of the farming of cattle for beef, though, as Rollin notes, by no means as intensive as those experienced by chickens or pigs.99 Australian cattle may face a journey of hundreds or thousands of kilometres by road, and then a sea journey of days or weeks, to be slaughtered in Asia or the Middle East. Research evidence demonstrates that travel by road or sea is a significant stressor for cattle, and therefore slaughter nearer where they are raised would be a substantial welfare benefit.100 When cattle eventually reach the abattoir, arrangements regarding the lairage pens in which they are kept, the route they follow from there to slaughter, and the mode of slaughter, all have an impact on the degree of stress at the end of their life. As Rollin notes, the work of Temple Grandin has been significant in the USA in reducing the stress cattle appear to experience at slaughter.101 Selective breeding to separate cattle raised for beef and dairy and maximize the milk production of dairy herds has been remarkably successful in terms of productivity: the milk yield per cow more than doubled between 1955 and 2005 in many countries, and the highest yielding farms can now produce over 10,000 litres

J. C. Petherick, ‘Animal Welfare Issues Associated with Extensive Livestock Production: The Northern Australian Beef Cattle Industry’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science 92:3 (2005), 229.  97  See Rollin, Farm Animal Welfare, 56–65 for a discussion of these practices in a US context, and Petherick, ‘Animal Welfare Issues Associated with Extensive Livestock Production’, 223–5, for an account of the issues in north Australia.  98  Rollin, Farm Animal Welfare, 64–5.  99  Rollin, Farm Animal Welfare, 67–9. 100  Petherick, ‘Animal Welfare Issues Associated with Extensive Livestock Production’, 225–8. 101  Rollin, Farm Animal Welfare, 69–71.  96 

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of milk per cow per year.102 Achieving this yield requires keeping dairy cattle inside all year around, so they can be efficiently milked frequently: many dairy herds are now milked three times each day. The required milk yields could not be achieved on a diet of grazing grass, so cows are instead fed a ‘Total Mixed Ration’ that includes concentrated sources of nutrients that can be quickly absorbed to maximize milk production.103 The mere ingestion of food and production of milk at these levels subject cows to significant metabolic stress.104 Computerized management systems use an identity tag on the cow to track individual milk production during automated mechanical milking, tailor the food mix that is delivered to her, and direct her to alternate pens if there are indicators of ill-health in her milk. Calves are often taken away from mothers immediately after birth, so the colostrum and milk they drink can be carefully monitored, and separating mother cows and calves at this point or later causes a range of stress and grief responses.105 There is a parallel problem with male dairy calves as with that noted above of surplus male chicks when breeding laying hens: since breeds selected for beef and dairy production are strongly divergent, farmers have often seen it as economically unattractive to raise male dairy calves, so that it has been routine to shoot them at birth. Recently, in the UK, efforts have been made to find a market for these calves as ‘rose veal’: not using the small veal crates that are now banned in the UK and Continental Europe, but raising the calves for slaughter at six to eight months.106 While selective breeding has been successful in increasing milk yields, it has also led to an increased prevalence of infertility, mastitis and lameness in dairy cattle. The incidence of lameness has risen from around 4 per cent of the herd in the late 1950s, to reported figures between 20 per cent and 50 per cent in the 1990s, which may even underestimate the problem.107 Infertility is measured in terms of the percentage success when cows are impregnated; in the USA this figure decreased on average by 1 per cent per year between 1975 and 1982 and 1995 to 1998.108 Mastitis is very painful for the cows and its incidence correlates

P. A. Oltenacu and B. Algers, ‘Selection for Increased Production and the Welfare of Dairy Cows: Are New Breeding Goals Needed’, AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment 34:4 (2005), 311. 103  A. J. F. Webster and S. W. Peterson, ‘Sustaining Fitness and Welfare in the Dairy Cow’, Proceedings of the New Zealand Society of Animal Production 60 (2000), 208. 104  Webster and Peterson, ‘Sustaining Fitness and Welfare in the Dairy Cow’, 208–10. 105  F. C. Flower and D.M. Weary, ‘The Effects of Early Separation on the Dairy Cow and Calf ’, Animal Welfare 12:3 (2003), 339–48; D. M. Weary, J. Jasper and M. J. Hötzel, ‘Understanding Weaning Distress’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science 110:1-2 (2008), 24–41. 106  X. Clay, ‘A Better Deal for Veal’, Daily Telegraph, 19 April 2014. 107  H. Pickett, ‘The Impact of Selection for High Milk Yield on the Health and Welfare of Dairy Cattle’, 2. 108  Oltenacu and Algers, ‘Selection for Increased Production’, 311. 102 

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strongly with breeding for high milk production.109 These are the major reasons for culling dairy cattle, with 80 per cent of culling in the USA and UK being triggered ‘involuntarily’ in response to cows having become unfit, as opposed to voluntary culling decisions based on declining milk yield. On average, cows in intensive facilities are culled between their third and fourth lactations.110 The carcasses from culled dairy cattle are sold for beef, and in different parts of the world this can account for anything from the 20 per cent share of beef in the USA up to the majority of beef production in some European countries.111 The dairy and beef industries are therefore closely intertwined. I visited one intensive dairy facility with a herd of Holstein cows that were producing an average of 11,000 litres of milk per year, compared with an average thirty years ago of 3,000 litres and a current UK average of 7,500 litres. It was clear from the body of the cows that milk production was the priority: shoulder and rib bones stood out clearly on their scrawny backs, below which were suspended huge udders, requiring milking three times per day. An aerial photo of the farm in former days showed cows grazing grass from green fields; the farmer talked enthusiastically about how he had replaced this model that he had inherited from his father with a new more efficient system in which the cows were housed in a new central building all year round and the fields were harvested mechanically to provide a part of their feed. He considered that their welfare inside the building was better than if they were outdoors. As a sign of the contentment of his herd, he told me that when a gate leading to a field was left open by accident one day, only one or two cows wandered through it, and did not object to being herded back into their shed. This lack of appreciation of the cows for an outdoor environment seemed to me, however, more a source of concern for what the cows had become habituated to, than an indication of their positive evaluation of their environment. Impacts on Humans, Wild Animals, and the Environment At the end of this survey of current farming practice, having discussed the impact of the intensification of animal farming is having on the animals, it is important to note in addition the impact of current practice on human beings and the environment shared by humans and other animals. We can group these considerations under the following four headings: the effect on workers, the implications for global food and water security, the wider impact on the environment and wild animals, and the effects on human health. The most immediate and direct human effects of the intensive farming of animals are on those who work in the industry. Work in slaughterhouses and meat processing plants is usually unskilled, low paid, low status and unpleasant, with

Pickett, ‘Impact of Selection for High Milk Yield’, 1–2. Webster and Peterson, ‘Sustaining Fitness and Welfare in the Dairy Cow’, 207. 111  W. J. Miller, Dairy Cattle Feeding and Nutrition (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 341. 109  110 

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high staff turnover and high injury rates. Farm work often shares many of these features. As a result, the industry often recruits the poorest workers, who in many contexts are migrants.112 The intersection between intensively farmed animals, meat products, race, immigration, and exploitation of workers is vividly portrayed in Eric Schlosser’s 2001 book Fast Food Nation, and Richard Linklater’s 2006 film of the same name.113 As part of his ethnography of poultry plant workers, Steve Striffler describes his orientation tour of a large Tyson poultry processing plant in Arkansas as part of a group of ten new workers, eight of whom are from Latin America. After putting on our smocks, aprons, earplugs, hairnets, beard nets (men), and boots, we begin the tour of the plant. No one is unaccustomed to hard work, and most have killed chickens on farms in Latin America, but nobody is prepared for the overwhelming combination of sounds, sights, and smells that await us. It does not help that the tour begins in ‘live hanging’ (pollo vivo). Carmen says what we all are thinking: ‘My God! [Dios Mio!] How can one work here?’ The answer, it turns out, is quite simple. Live hanging pays a bit more and there is actually a waiting list to spend the day attaching live chickens to the production line. Chickens are flooding into a completely dark and uncomfortably warm room at about 200 a minute. The smell is indescribable, suffocating, and absolutely unforgettable. Five or six workers grab the flailing chickens, hooking them upside down by their feet to an overhead rail system that transports the birds throughout the plant. Blood, shit, and feathers are flying everywhere.114

The meat processing plants in the US report some of the highest injury rates of any industry, with 6.4 injuries per hundred workers in poultry plants and 13.2 for plants processing pigs in 2007. A significant cause of injury is the fixed production line speeds forcing workers to complete tasks in a very limited time, in a context of mechanized knives and saws. Workers are also exposed to pathogens from the animals, which cause disease and infect wounds. Skin infections are also common.115 The drive for companies to supply meat at ever cheaper prices creates W. Kandel and E. A. Parrado, ‘Restructuring of the US Meat Processing Industry and New Hispanic Migrant Destinations’, Population and Development Review 31:3 (2005), 447–71; D. D. Stull, M. J. Broadway and D. Griffith (eds), Any Way You Cut it: Meat Processing and Small-Town America (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1995); S. Striffler, ‘Inside a Poultry Processing Plant: An Ethnographic Portrait’, Labor History 43:3 (2002), 305–13. A further valuable source for understanding the conditions inside a slaughterhouse is T. Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). 113  E. Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2001). 114  Striffler, ‘Inside a Poultry Processing Plant’, 306. 115  E. K. Amoah et al., ‘Laceration Injuries and Infections among Workers in the Poultry Processing and Pork Meatpacking Industries’, American Journal of Industrial Medicine 57:6 (2014), 669–82. 112 

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working conditions that are intolerable, as is made clear by annual employee turnover rates of 60–140 per cent, or even higher.116 The work also inflicts demonstrable psychological harm on workers, including forms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and sociological research has shown that the areas nearby slaughterhouses have higher arrest rates for violent crimes, rape and sex offences.117 The intersectionality of the exploitation of human workers in relation to poverty, migrant status, race and gender alongside the exploitation of non-human animals is striking: Carol Adams notes that almost all the workers in North American meatprocessing plants are women with a high-school education or less who are black, Hispanic, or from French-speaking ethic minorities, and are frequently subjected to sexual harassment as well as dirty and dangerous working conditions.118 The intensive farming of non-human animals and large-scale production of products deriving from them seems to be inevitably accompanied by exploitative conditions for the most vulnerable human workers. The second notable human impact of farming animals for meat concerns the effect it has on global food and water supplies. Much of the available resources of our planet are currently devoted to the production of animal food products. Grazing land for domesticated animals occupies one quarter of the land area of the earth, a 600 per cent increase since 1800, and the novel practice of feeding grain to livestock, dating only from the 1950s, now requires an additional one-third of global crop land.119 The FAO projects that 2,475 million tonnes of cereals will be used in the year 2014–15. Of this total, 1,108 million tonnes will be consumed by humans, and 877 million tonnes will be used as feed for domesticated animals.120 This means that humans consume only 45 per cent of the cereal crops we grow, and we now feed 35 per cent to non-human animals. Raising livestock now requires 78 per cent of all available agricultural land, 30 per cent of the earth’s surface.121 It is not straightforward to calculate how much human food supplies would increase if a large-scale shift were implemented towards using more plants and fewer animals as sources for human food. As noted above, in some areas where sheep and goats graze, there may be little or no opportunity for growing arable Kandel and Parrado, ‘Restructuring of the US Meat Processing Industry’, 458. J. Dillard, ‘A Slaughterhouse Nightmare: Psychological Harm Suffered by Slaughterhouse Employees and the Possibility of Redress through Legal Reform’, Georgetown Journal on Poverty, Law & Policy 15 (2008), 391–408; A. J. Fitzgerald, L. Kalof and Th. Dietz, ‘Slaughterhouses and Increased Crime Rates: An Empirical Analysis of the Spillover from “the Jungle” into the Surrounding Community’, Organization & Environment 22:2 (2009), 158–84. 118  C. J. Adams, Neither Man Nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 62. 119  FAO, Global Livestock Production Systems, 44, 32. 120  FAO Trade and Markets Division, Crop Prospects and Food Situation (Rome: FAO, 2015), 9. Most of the remaining 470 million tonnes is devoted to the production of biofuels. 121  FAO, Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options (Rome: FAO, 2006), 74. 116  117 

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food crops. It is clear, however, that the intensive systems in which cereals are used for feed for farmed animals are very inefficient ways of feeding human beings. Estimates of the efficiency of converting grains to meat in the farming of animals vary and are context dependent, but the general parameters are clear. On average, less than 10% of feed calories or protein used to feed farmed animals ultimately becomes consumed meat, dairy, or egg calories.122 Of the forty-one food crops analysed in one study, 36 per cent of calories go to animal feed, of which 89 per cent is wasted, and a further 9 per cent are used for industry or biofuels. Using these crops directly for human consumption could increase global calorie availability by 70 per cent.123 Another study found that changing crop allocation to feed humans directly in the United States, China, Western Europe, and Brazil would provide additional calories to feed 2.4 billion people.124 If human food security were the only priority, therefore, raising farmed animals in extensive systems on land that would be comparatively unproductive for arable use would continue, but all other agricultural land would be used for arable crops for direct human consumption, with very substantial benefits for increased global human food supplies. Current estimates by the FAO suggest the opposite trend, with demand for farmed animal products, including farmed fish, increasing the share of cereals devoted to producing animal feeds.125 The impact of raising livestock on water available for human use is an additional factor. Globally, raising livestock consumes over 8 per cent of global human water usage, almost all of which is used to produce feed crops, and is responsible for 15 per cent of the global depletion of water supplies.126 Global figures for contribution to pollution are not available, but the FAO reported in 2006 that ‘in the United States, with the world’s fourth largest land area, livestock are responsible for an estimated 55% of erosion and sediment, 37% of pesticide use, 50% of antibiotic use, and a third of the loads of nitrogen and phosphorous into freshwater resources’.127 The third major impact of raising livestock beyond the impact on the animals themselves is the impact it has on the global and local environment, with severe impacts on wild animals. FAO figures on the contribution of livestock to global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) have been disputed: their 2006 estimate was 18 per cent of all GHG emissions, which they subsequently revised down to 14.5 per cent,128 but critics have argued the figure should be as low as 8 per cent or as high as 51 per A. Shepon et al., ‘Energy and Protein Feed-to-Food Conversion Efficiencies in the US and Potential Food Security Gains from Dietary Changes’, Environmental Research Letters 11:10 (2016), 105002. 123  E. S. Cassidy et al., ‘Redefining Agricultural Yields: From Tonnes to People Nourished Per Hectare’, Environmental Research Letters 8:3 (2013), 034015. 124  P. C. West et al., ‘Leverage Points for Improving Global Food Security and the Environment’, Science 345:6194 (18 July 2014), 325–28. 125  FAO, Livestock’s Long Shadow, 49. 126  FAO, Livestock’s Long Shadow, 167. 127  FAO, Livestock’s Long Shadow, xxii. 128  FAO, Livestock’s Long Shadow, xxi; FAO, Tackling Climate Change through Livestock, 15. 122 

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cent.129 Whatever the correct figure in this range, it is clear that the expansion of farming of animals for food is a significant part of the cause of anthropogenic climate change. A 2014 report for the Royal Institute of International Affairs estimates that per unit of protein, greenhouse gas emissions from beef production are 150 times that of soy products, ‘and even the least emissions-intensive meat products – pork and chicken – produce 20–25 times more’.130 Farming of animals also has a significant direct impact on global biodiversity: the FAO estimates that ‘70% of previous forested land in the Amazon is occupied by pastures, and feedcrops cover a large part of the remainder’.131 In 1900 the biomass of domesticated animals exceeded that of all wild mammals by three times; by 2000 a four-fold increase in domesticated animals and a halving of the numbers of wild animals meant that the biomass of domesticated animals was 24 times that of wild mammals.132 Deforestation, the degrading and fragmentation of habitats, desertification, the introduction of alien species with associated diseases, and pollution are all causes of reductions of biodiversity and contribute to the extinction of wild animals.133 Animal farming also has significant local impacts, especially where it is intensive. Concentrations of manure release ammonia, and discharge from manure lagoons created by pig farms and feedlots can escape into water supplies causing pollution and bacterial poisoning.134 Alongside the impact of farming animals on global food and water supplies, and wider impacts on wild animals and the environment, we should note, fourthly, the impact of increasing meat production and consumption directly on human health. First, the intensive farming of animals is related to new human disease threats. Avian flu (or ‘bird flu’) has been a significant public health concern in recent years after a significant outbreak in 2003, and considerable resources have been invested in reactive measures such as vaccines. It is very likely that the origin of the disease was intensive farming of chickens or ducks in Asia, and may have been spread through the feeding of intensively reared pigs with chicken products, and the fertilization of aquaculture with manure from intensive avian farming.135 M. Herrero et al., ‘Livestock and Greenhouse Gas Emissions: The Importance of Getting the Numbers Right’, Animal Feed Science and Technology 166 (2011), 779–82. Timothy Gorringe comments on this debate in T. Gorringe, ‘Rise Peter! Kill and Eat: A Response to John Barclay’, The Expository Times 123:2 (2011), 63–9. 130  R. Bailey, Antony Froggatt and Laura Wellesley, Livestock – Climate Change’s Forgotten Sector: Global Public Opinion on Meat and Dairy Consumption (London: The Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2014), 6. 131  FAO, Livestock’s Long Shadow, xxi. 132  V.  Smil, ‘Harvesting the Biosphere: The Human Impact’, Population and Development Review 37:4 (2011), 619. 133  FAO, Livestock’s Long Shadow, 187–215. 134  D. Nierenberg, Happier Meals: Rethinking the Global Meat Industry, Worldwatch Papers (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute, 2005), 27–32. 135  Nierenberg, Happier Meals, 35–40; M. Y. Wani et al., ‘Avian/Bird Flu Virus: Poultry Pathogen Having Zoonotic and Pandemic Threats: A Review’, Journal of Medical Sciences 13:5 (2013), 301–15; Rob Brierley, ‘Are Aquaculture Techniques Helping to Spread Avian Flu?’, The Lancet Infectious Diseases 6:2 (2006), 76. 129 

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Avian flu is not the only disease to originate in intensive farming practices: bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), spread by feeding infected meat to other farmed animals, including cows, has also caused widespread concerns for human health, and the Nipah virus, spread from wild fruit bats to intensively reared pigs, has killed up to 75 per cent of humans contracting it in outbreaks in Malaysia and Bangladesh.136 Other human illnesses are caused by poor hygiene in the pressured environments of meat processing plants: most E. coli infections originate from allowing animal excrement to come into contact with meat; campylobacter, listeria, salmonella, and parasites are also transmitted via farmed animal products.137 To attempt to prevent these infections within the crowded environments of intensive farming, and to achieve higher animal growth rates, antibiotics are routinely fed to many farmed animals: one estimate suggests that 84 per cent of antibiotics produced in the USA are fed to farmed animals, and 80 per cent of this use is non-therapeutic, i.e. used to prevent disease and enhance growth, rather than treat infections.138 This is creating a major problem with antibiotic resistance, creating salmonella strains and other microbes that infect humans and are then resistant to antibiotics used to treat them. In addition to these health risks that accompany meat-eating, there is also growing evidence that the current high levels of meat consumption in many developed nations in itself increases risks of coronary heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, and stroke, with consumption of high levels of red meat and processed meat of especial concern.139 Summary It is clear from this survey that the vast majority of terrestrial and aquatic farmed animals raised for food are raised in intensive ways that subject them to monotonous modes of life, provide very little opportunity for their preferred behaviours, cause significant suffering to them, and usually make their lives very short. Wild-caught fish suffer significantly in the capture process, and the methods used to catch them causes substantial damage to non-target species and has resulted in a 90 per cent drop in fish populations. The alternative of raising fish in aquaculture contexts both requires large quantities of wild-caught fish for food, and imposes crowded and uniform environments on the fish, with significant stress as they are handled and killed. Extensively reared sheep, goats and cattle enjoy significant freedom, but undergo painful procedures such as castration,

Nierenberg, Happier Meals, 40–4. Nierenberg, Happier Meals, 44–6. 138  M. Mellon, C. Benbrook and K. L. Benbrook, Hogging it: Estimates of Antibiotic Abuse in Livestock (Cambridge, MA: Union of Concerned Scientists, 2001), xiii. 139  C. T. McEvoy, N. Temple and J. V. Woodside, ‘Vegetarian Diets, Low-Meat Diets and Health: A Review’, Public Health Nutrition 15:12 (December 2012), 2287–94; S. C. Larsson, J. Virtamo and A. Wolk, ‘Red Meat Consumption and Risk of Stroke in Swedish Women’, Stroke: A Journal of Cerebral Circulation 42:2 (2011), 324–9. 136  137 

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branding, dehorning and tail-docking, are often transported long distances, are often confined in feedlots for fattening and, in the case of sheep and goats, are often slaughtered at a very young age. Dairy cattle have been reshaped by selective breeding to produce unprecedented volumes of milk, but suffer from lameness, mastitis and infertility as a consequence, resulting in suffering and short lives before being culled for beef. Pigs, rabbits and poultry are the most intensively raised, usually confined in vast sheds, with no access to the outdoors, or often even sunlight, the end products of selective breeding programmes that have made them ever more efficient in gaining weight rapidly, or as laying hens producing eggs at rapid rates with the accompanying necessity of culling all male chicks. Using other animals for production at the current unprecedented levels requires a third of global cereal output and a significant proportion of global water resources, is a major cause of greenhouse gas emissions and pollution, and presents significant risks to human health. Looking squarely at what we are doing to other animals, as well as our wider environment, and ourselves, in order to use non-human animals for food is sobering and salutary. While I have tried to present as broad and accurate a survey as I can, the account I have presented is inevitably value-laden; the task of moral evaluation begins in the description of practice. My hope is that the approach I have taken to surveying current practice is informed by the theological lens for thinking about animal life developed in the previous volume. My survey has focused on the systems in which the majority (often the vast majority) of farmed animals are raised, which is where I judge our moral attention should first be focused, and I consider systems that aim at higher animal welfare below. In the following section, I turn explicitly to the task of assessing ethically in a theological context the uses we are currently making of animals for food in these intensive systems.

A Christian Ethical Assessment of the Intensive Farming of Other Animals In assessing the practice surveyed in the first part of this chapter, it is important to note that in the claims I develop in what follows for the mismatch between Christian doctrine in relation to other animals and current practice in relation to farmed animals, I am not attempting to characterize moral intent. I have visited farms where the farmers had a clear and genuine respect and affection for the animals in their care, who went to great lengths to provide for their needs, who were saddened by the necessity of sending animals for slaughter, and who appreciated and took satisfaction from the responsibility of caring for their land in a way that promoted the wellbeing of plants and animals well beyond those that were of economic value to them. There is no doubt that many of those raising animals are well-motivated farmers who work hard to look after animals in their care. For the most part, the disregard for the lives of animals caught up in the intensive systems of farming production has not been a deliberate choice. Those directly responsible for the care of these animals – the farmers and livestock producers – have often been under

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strong governmental or market pressure to implement systems of production that meet expectations in relation to productivity and cost, requiring innovations in practice compared to those of the previous generation. Livestock producers that resisted this innovation, or failed to change quickly enough, often found themselves without a market for their animals, and so were eliminated in competition with others able to select the animals they raised and the ways they raised them to increase efficiency. In its own terms, as the survey above demonstrates, the intensification of agriculture has been a conspicuous success, raising productivity and reducing costs so that meat, fish, dairy and eggs can be provided to a mass market at lower retail prices than ever before – though with the very great associated costs reviewed in the previous section of this chapter. Consumers in countries where these intensive systems have been implemented have valued the opportunity to consume animal products in much greater quantities and at lower cost than their parents and grandparents, making regular access to meat affordable for less affluent consumers for the first time. The aim of this change has not been to inflict cruel conditions on farmed animals, but to increase production and reduce costs. What has led to the current systems of farmed animal production, therefore, is the concerted pursuit of productivity and economic efficiency in the absence of any substantial consideration of the consequences of this pursuit for the wellbeing of those animals caught up in it. Neither farmers and other producers, retailers, policy-makers, nor consumers, have recognized that incremental steps towards enhancing productivity and efficiency have led to a state in which it is abundantly clear that lives of farmed animals in intensive systems are as fully instrumentalized as is currently technologically feasible, to their very great cost, without recognition of any appropriate limit arising from a respectful regard for the lives of these animals. It seems to me to be insufficient to follow the account I have given of our current practice in using other animals for food and the abundant evidence of the systematic abuse of non-human animals in the service of human ends with a calm and measured ethical analysis. Instead, I begin the task of a theological assessment of how we are using other animals for food by considering what kind of theological scheme might legitimate our current practice. Justifying the radical instrumentalization of non-human animals evident in intensive patterns of farming would require belief in a conveniently anthropocentric god, who brought the non-human creation into being merely to provide for human needs. Such a god would give Christians permission to exploit other animals without restraint for any reason whatever. This is the theological account that would be required to legitimize the broiler sheds, the culling of day-old chicks, the caging of laying hens, the mass slow and stressful deaths inflicted on fish pulled out of the sea in hundred-mile-long nets, the reshaping of the dairy cow being integrated ever more fully with the computerized mechanism that extracts her milk, the confining of pigs in monotonous environments, and the castrating, dehorning, tail-docking and branding of animals without anaesthetic – though even in such a theological scheme, the unnecessary cruelty and suffering visited upon other animals in these ways might give one pause. This, I submit, is the anti-theological account that is

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operative in and readable from our current practices towards other animals in our use of them for food. We should note that there are versions of atheistic humanism that privilege human interests and exclude the interests of non-humans in similar ways. Chapter 1 of this volume provided an overview of the very different place of non-human animals in the theological framework developed in Volume I. Viewing other animals as fellow beneficiaries of God’s grace in creation, reconciliation and redemption is incompatible with the patterns of using them for food surveyed in the first part of this chapter, which reveal a wholesale failure to see non-human animals as morally considerable in any sense. The disregard of the lives of animals caught up in these processes is shocking. Instead of imaging such a creator’s tender care for creatures, we model instead the despotic rule of a tyrant, interested in others only as they serve our greedy ends. We are co-worshippers in a ritual denial that there is a good creator who made and sustains these fellow animal creatures. In sum, we are treating other animals as if they were not the good creatures of the God Christians worship. Appeals to necessity are a common way of justifying the human use of other animals, but most such appeals are to conditional necessity: a particular human use of other animals is necessary, not absolutely as such, but in order to achieve a particular human goal.140 When claims of necessity are made, therefore, we should ask ‘Necessary for what?’ Appeals to necessity are frequently used in the justification of using other animals for food, and sometimes such appeals have merit. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and in Siberia, where the climate and soil are not suitable for growing food crops, some human populations are heavily dependent on pastoralism (grazing herds of domesticated animals).141 Where no alternative sources of food are available, members of such populations have a valid claim that their use of other animals is necessary for their survival. This may well be the case for other human communities; historically, it was the case for many more. Indeed, it seems likely that the expansion in brain size characterizing the development of the species Homo sapiens required concentrated sources of protein that were only available by consuming other animals. Consuming other animals at particular points in human history, therefore, may well have been necessary in order for humans to become the creatures that they are. Very frequently, however, meat-eating has been an obstacle to, rather than a necessity for, the good of human society. Tristram Stuart notes that Plato, and St Jerome following him, observed that demand for meat increased the land required for

Aristotle makes the distinction between absolute and conditional necessity in Aristotle, Parts of Animals, Loeb Classical Library, trans. A. L. Peck (London; Cambridge, MA: Heinemann; Harvard University Press, 1937), I, 1 639 b25. 141  A. B. Smith, Pastoralism in Africa: Origins and Development Ecology (London: Hurst, 1992); I. Krupnik, Arctic Adaptations: Native Whalers and Reindeer Herders of Northern Eurasia, trans. M. Levenson (Hanover, NH; London: University Press of New England, 2002). 140 

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a population and therefore led to war, and that these arguments were reiterated by John Evelyn and Thomas Tryon in the seventeenth century.142 In the eighteenth century, Stuart notes William Paley’s observation that ‘a piece of ground capable of supplying animal food sufficient for the subsistence of ten persons would sustain, at least, double that number with grain, roots, and milk’, Adam Smith’s judgement in the Wealth of Nations that a cornfield produces a much greater quantity of food for humans than the best pasture, and Erasmus Darwin’s claim that ‘perhaps tenfold the numbers of mankind can be supported by the corn produced on an hundred acres of land, than on the animal food which can be raised on it’.143 Stuart notes that the enclosures in England and Highland clearances in Scotland converted arable land growing human food to more profitable pasture and fodder crops for animals raised for wool and meat, with the large-scale raising of animals exclusively for meat beginning only in the second half of the eighteenth century,144 and quotes Percy Bysshe Shelley’s argument in 1813 that feeding fodder to farmed animals was stealing from the poor: The quantity of nutritious vegetable matter, consumed in fattening the carcase of an ox, would afford ten times the sustenance, undepraving indeed, and incapable of generating disease, if gathered immediately from the bosom of the earth. The most fertile districts of the habitable globe are now actually cultivated by men for animals, at a delay and waste of aliment absolutely incapable of calculation.145

The history Stuart surveys demonstrates that the raising of farmed animals for meat has long been recognized as problematic for human societies, intersects with the taking away of land from the poor in Great Britain, has been practised on a large scale only since the mid-eighteenth century, and far from being necessary, has been widely recognized as an obstacle to feeding human populations effectively. While historically and currently, there are particular times and places in which killing other animals for food has been necessary for survival, this has not generally been the case, and is not the case for the vast majority of the human population today. In very many countries humans have access to all the nutrition they need from vegetable sources, either from local agriculture or from imported foods. Globally, even following the recent huge expansion of intensive agriculture, farmed animal products account for less than 20 per cent of calories consumed by humans, and only 33 per cent of protein.146 In most cases it is now not the case that it is T. Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times (New York; London: W. W. Norton and Co., 2006), 402, citing Plato’s Republic, 373d, and Jerome, Against Jovianus, bk. II, ch. 11. 143  Stuart, Bloodless Revolution, 401, citing Paley’s chapter ‘Of Population and Provision’ in Elements of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, bk. I, ch. 11, §15, and Darwin’s Phytologia; or the Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening (1800). 144  Stuart, Bloodless Revolution, 403. 145  Stuart, Bloodless Revolution, 405–6, quoting Shelley’s A Vindication of Natural Diet. 146  P. Havlík et al., ‘Climate Change Mitigation through Livestock System Transitions’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A. 111:10 (11 March 2014), 3709, 3712. 142 

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necessary for human survival to kill other animals for food. Since intensive patterns of farmed animal production are not features of those few remaining places where there are no alternatives to animal products to feed the human population, it is hard to imagine that, with due attention to transitional planning, there are any contexts in which intensive farming of animals is necessary for human survival. Clearly, we could advance other claims of conditional necessity in an attempt to justify human killing of other animals for food. The farmer who keeps caged hens to produce eggs a couple of miles from my home would tell me that it was necessary for breeders to kill male chicks from these laying breeds, for him to keep chickens confined in stacked cages inside sheds, and to slaughter the laying flock when their productivity declines at around eighteen months of age, because otherwise he would not be able to produce eggs at a competitive price. There is no doubt that he and other farmers experience a real necessity in relation to market pressures of this kind, but where the conditional necessity being offered is no longer human survival, but cost-efficient production, the appeal to potential justifying reasons is clearly of a very different order. Humans do not need to produce or consume chicken eggs in order to survive, much less produce them at a particular cost. Here we must hold in the balance against the cost to the animals not human survival, but the consumer’s interest in access to cheap eggs and the farmer’s interest in making a living in this way. For most humans, the human use of animals is not necessary for human survival at all, so the use made of other animals for food must be on the basis of human preference for eating animals rather than just plants, and not on any kind of need. If we factor in the wider considerations at the end of the survey presented in the first part of this chapter, we can recognize that not only is intensive farming of non-human animals not necessary for human survival, but that at least a substantial reduction in the raising of farmed animals is necessary in order to protect human food and water security, reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, reduce environmental pollution, and improve human health. It is true that not all of these indicators always point in the same direction – raising ruminants, for example, is far more costly in relation to emissions of greenhouse gases than raising chickens, and intensive systems of raising chickens results in slightly lower greenhouse gas emissions than raising similar numbers in extensive systems147 – but overall it is clear that reducing substantially the numbers of farmed animals and raising the remainder in extensive systems would be preferable in relation to these wider spheres of ethical concern as well as avoiding the very great cost to the animals caught up in these systems of production. Many of the animals used for human food are closer relatives to us than fellow animal creatures: they are fellow mammals, which mean we can recognize commonalities of experience that we do not share with other animals. Rachel Muers has observed that feminist attention to the ethics of the human treatment of other mammals should be informed by the particular further sense of commonality D. Nijdam, T. Rood and H. Westhoek, ‘The Price of Protein: Review of Land Use and Carbon Footprints from Life Cycle Assessments of Animal Food Products and Their Substitutes’, Food Policy 37:6 (2012), 764.

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in being a female mammal who suckles offspring, quoting Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Morning Song’, in which Plath reports stumbling from bed ‘cow-heavy’ to her baby whose ‘mouth opens clean as a cat’s’.148 Muers argues that this shared feature of mammalian life means that it is not ‘fancifully anthropocentric’ to say that she knows ‘how the cow feels when her calf is taken away’. Instead ‘it’s a matter-offact recognition of a shared feature of mammalian life, one that is fairly central to mammalian survival’.149 Recognizing the ethical relevance of this shared feature of life is not to claim moral superiority for mammals, ‘but rather to name the basis for a sense of kinship that is emotional and embodied without being irrational’.150 This insight is of obvious and immediate relevance to the ethics of separating mothers and their young, often immediately after birth in intensive dairy systems. Part of a theological understanding of a good life for farmed mammals must recognize the significance of the maternal-infant bond and the impact on both mother and young of separation. Anyone who has lived near a dairy herd when calves are separated from their mothers and has heard the desperate cries on both sides cannot remain unconvinced of the significance of this act. The capacity for farmed animals to exercise maternal care would seem to be important for the question of whether they can be considered as able to flourish. To fail to allow mothers to care for their young, and to fail to allow young to be cared for by their mothers both seem to be significant curtailments of their flourishing. Both mammal and bird parents pass on skills and knowledge to their young, which suggests that preventing parents from rearing their offspring deprives both parties of important species-typical behaviours.151 A mother hen gathering her chicks under her wings is used as an image of love in Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem (Mt. 23.37). In his commentary on the passage, Luther expands on the maternal care he has observed in hens: Let us observe how a natural mother-hen acts. There is hardly an animal that takes care of its offspring so meticulously. It changes its natural voice turning it into a lamenting, mourning one; it searches, scratches for food and lures the chick to eat. When the mother-hen finds something, she does not eat it, but leaves it for the chicks; she fights seriously and calls her chicks away from the hawk; she spreads out her wings willingly and lets the chicks climb under her and all over her, for she is truly fond of them – it is, indeed, an excellent, lovely symbol.152 S. Plath, Collected Poems (Cutchogue, NY: Buccaneer Books, 1998), 157, quoted in R. Muers, ‘The Female Mammal: Feminist-Theological Reflections on Women, Animals, and Embodiment’, paper presented at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, 2010, 4. 149  Muers, ‘Female Mammal’, 4–5. 150  Muers, ‘Female Mammal’, 6. 151    V. Hayssen and T. J. Orr, Reproduction in Mammals: The Female Perspective (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017); T. H. Clutton-Brock, The Evolution of Parental Care (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 152    M. Luther, Luther’s Works, ed. H. T. Lehmann and J. Pelikan (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1958–67), vol. 52, 97–8. 148 

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It is therefore striking that there is no commercial system of raising poultry at any welfare standard that allows mothers to care for their chicks, and hard to doubt that such a deprivation is problematic for their flourishing. To take calves or piglets from their mothers at birth or shortly afterwards is similarly problematic for what constitutes the flourishing of mammals. One further issue specific to the exploitation of female animals is their forcible insemination. The intersectionality between the abuse of women and farmed animals is made shockingly obvious in the industry use of the term ‘rape rack’ to describe the apparatus used to hold female cows immobile so that they can be artificially inseminated. Kathryn Gillespie describes the process: ‘the farmer inserts his/her left hand into the cow’s rectum in order to manipulate the reproductive tract. Meanwhile, the right hand is inserted into the cow’s vagina and an insemination gun is used to reach the cervix. Once the gun has been maneuvered through the cervix, the semen is deposited into the uterine body. ’153 Similar procedures are used to impregnate sows, though sometimes the rack is used to hold sows in position for boars to mount and inseminate them.154 The term ‘rape rack’ was coined by Henry Harlow to describe the apparatus he used to restrain female monkeys for artificial insemination in the course of his infamous experiments on maternal deprivation.155 The wide currency the term has gained places in plain sight the interconnections between the male control of women’s bodies and the monopolization of the bodies of female farmed animals in modern farming systems, highlighting feminist reasons for concern about farmed animals.156 Current practices of raising farmed animals, therefore, both inflict a wide range of suffering and stress on the animals farmed and – far from being necessary for human survival – threaten human food and water security, are responsible for substantial greenhouse gas emissions, cause local and global environmental problems from pollution, and pose substantial risks to human health. A Christian

K. Gillespie, ‘Sexualized Violence and the Gendered Commodification of the Animal Body in Pacific Northwest UU Dairy Production’, Gender, Place & Culture 21:10 (2014), 1326, cited in A. Bancroft, ‘A Christian Feminist Assessment of the Ethics of Dairy Production’, BA Hons thesis, University of Chester, 2017, 30–1. 154  C. J. Adams, The Pornography of Meat (New York; London: Continuum, 2003), 160. 155  D. Haraway, ‘Primate Experiments: Harry Harlow and the Technology of Love’, in The Book of Touch, ed. C. Classen (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2005). 156  For additional reading at this intersection, see C. J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); V. Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993); C. J. Adams and J. Donovan (eds), Animals and Women: Feminist Theological Explorations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); J. Donovan and C. J. Adams, Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals (London: Continuum, 1997); J. D. and C. J. Adams (eds), The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Adams, Neither Man Nor Beast. 153 

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recognition of other animals as fellow creatures of God, recipients of the reconciling peace between all things effected in Jesus Christ, and participants in the new creation in which all creatures will enjoy the freedom of the children of God, is incompatible with the intensive farming of animals. Therefore, Christians have strong faithbased reasons to avoid cooperating with the systems that treat other animals in these ways.157 Those Christians who are farmers raising animals in these systems, or who are employed by them, should either move to ways of raising animals that are more respectful of them, or look for other ways to earn a living. The much greater number of Christians who currently consume the meat, fish, dairy and eggs produced in these systems should stop doing so, in order to avoid cooperating with and financing practices that fail to respect other animals as fellow creatures, and those who are involved in their retail should consider how they could reduce or eliminate their support. The raising of farmed animals is highly sensitive to market demand, so not purchasing the animal products of intensive farming has a direct impact on the numbers of animals being subjected to these conditions, and change in consumer demand is likely to be the quickest route to reducing the size of the industry of intensive animal farming.158 With the recognition of the incompatibility Matthew Halteman summarizes the case for Christians to transition away from a standard diet reliant on animal products in M. C. Halteman, ‘Knowing the Standard American Diet by Its Fruits: Is Unrestrained Omnivorism Spiritually Beneficial?’, Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 67:4 (2013), 383–95. 158  Philosophers have recently debated the ‘causal inefficacy’ argument, which applied to the consumption of animals suggests that the impact of an individual choice to purchase animal products is very unlikely to impact sufficiently on demand so as to affect the numbers of animals raised and killed. Mark Budolfson makes this case in M. B. Budolfson, ‘Is it Wrong to Eat Meat From Factory Farms? If So, Why?’, in The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat, ed. B. Bramble and B. Fischer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). I find the argument unconvincing if interpreted as weakening the case against Christians buying animal products from systems where animals have been treated unacceptably, because I judge that the supply chains are more sensitive to demand than is allowed by Budolfson, that an individual’s practice is influential on the practice of others, and because there are other reasons for Christians to refuse to cooperate with evil apart from questions of efficacy. Matthew Halteman and Stephen Mullen give a carefully reasoned response to the causal inefficacy argument in M. C. Halteman and S. Mullen, ‘Against Inefficacy Objections: The Real Economic Impact of Individual Consumer Choices on Animal Agriculture’ (journal article under review). John Berkman makes the case that eating intensively farmed animals is formal cooperation with evil within the terms of Roman Catholic moral theology (J. Berkman, ‘Are We Addicted to the Suffering of Animals? Animal Cruelty and the Christian Tradition’, in A Faith Embracing All Creatures: Addressing Commonly Asked Questions about Christian Care for Animals, ed. T. York and A. Alexis-Baker (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2012)); Julie Rubio judges that it falls into the lesser category of material cooperation with evil (J. Rubio, ‘Animals, Evil, and Family Meals’, Journal of Moral Theology 3:2 (2014), 35–53). 157 

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of intensive animal farming and Christian faith, however, Christians have reason to go beyond their own food choices to find ways to challenge the disregard of animal lives that is represented so acutely in intensive farming. It is notable that Christians were active in the first efforts to improve the welfare of farmed animals through legal regulation. The first anti-cruelty legislation globally was enacted in England in 1822, with broad support from London clergy and magistrates, as a result of widespread concern over how horses, cows, oxen and sheep were being treated by their handlers. Two years later, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (later the RSPCA) was established at a meeting including Richard Martin, the drafter of the 1822 bill and otherwise known as ‘Humanity Dick’, the Quaker Fowell Buxton, the Anglican vicar Revd Arthur Broome, the evangelical William Wilberforce, who had been active in the campaign to legislate against the British slave trade, and Lewis Gompertz, a prominent Jew.159 In the twentieth century, it was the Quaker Ruth Harrison’s 1964 book Animal Machines160 that gained renewed public attention to farmed animal welfare, and led to the UK government’s commissioning of the Brambell Report, published in 1965, which investigated the intensive farming of animals.161 One argument commonly raised with me in favour of raising farmed animals intensively is that the costs of animal products from farming systems requiring higher welfare standards are very likely to be higher than those produced in intensive conditions. For most consumers, therefore, a limited budget means that avoiding animal products from intensive systems is likely to require some reduction in the overall quantity of animal products they consume. Such a shift would seem to be inevitable in moving away from intensive systems where maximum volume for minimum cost were the dominant goals, and would represent a J. Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain and Humanity in the Victorian Mind, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science (Baltimore, MD; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 39–41; A. Brown, Who Cares for Animals? 150 Years of the RSPCA (London: Heinemann, 1974), 13–17; C. D. Niven, History of the Humane Movement (London: Johnson, 1967), 65–78. 160  R. Harrison, Animal Machines: The New Factory Farming Industry (London: Vincent Stuart, 1964). For a brief biography of Harrison, see H. Van De Weerd and V. Sandilands, ‘Bringing the Issue of Animal Welfare to the Public: A Biography of Ruth Harrison (1920–2000)’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science 113:4 (2008), 404–10. 161  F. W. R. Brambell, Report of the Technical Committee to Enquire into the Welfare of Animals Kept under Intensive Livestock Husbandry Systems (London: HM Stationery Office, 1965). The report noted the problems caused by close constraint and stated that every farmed animal should have five freedoms: ‘to turn around, groom itself, get up, lie down and stretch its limbs’ (13). An advisory Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC) was later set up, which in 2009 updated the five Brambell freedoms as freedom from hunger and thirst; discomfort; pain, injury and disease; freedom to express normal behaviour; and freedom from fear and distress (Farm Animal Welfare Council, Farm Animal Welfare in Great Britain: Past, Present and Future (London: Farm Animal Welfare Council, 2009), 2). 159 

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movement back towards patterns of consumption of animal products before the recent intensification of farmed animal production. In a Christian context, it is important to recognize that the impact of higher prices for animal products with higher welfare standards will be strongest for those on the lowest incomes, and this is sometimes advanced as a justification for the intensive farming of animals. Christians should obviously be very concerned about how changes to systems of food production could impact on access to food for the most economically disadvantaged. There are a number of reasons, however, against considering this concern as a reason for perpetuating current systems of raising farmed animals. The first reason against the justification of intensive farming in relation to access to food for the economically disadvantaged is that we do not respond to parallel concerns in relation to other products in a similar way. For example, in response to the discovery that cheap clothing is being sold that relies on exploitative labour practices, unsafe working conditions or unsustainable environmental standards, to argue that adequate attention to any of these issues would impact on access to clothing for the poor is clearly an inadequate response. Instead, we should take what steps we can to ensure that those in the clothing supply chain behave responsibly in relation to their workers and the environment – as well as in relation to non-human animals, as discussed in the next chapter – and recognize that this will increase the retail price of clothes. If maintaining appropriate standards for the production of clothes means that they are unaffordable for those on low incomes, we should respond with steps to ensure that all members of society have a sufficient income, rather than abandon the standards in order to make clothes cheaper. One could imagine a counter-argument that the case of intensive farming is disanalogous because we are dealing with the interests of non-human animals, rather than human or environmental interests, but this objection fails because the theological account of animals I have developed requires that adequate regard is given to the interests of non-human animals. If it were the case that it was only possible to provide good food for the poor by exploiting farmed animals in intensive systems, that would be a potential justifying reason for the practice but, as discussed above, current patterns of consumption of animals are not healthy for humans, and there are preferable alternative ways of providing good food that do not require such exploitation. A second reason to reject the argument that intensive farming is justifiable in relation to concern about access to the food for the poor is that it fails in its own terms. As discussed above, devoting scarce resources of land, cereal crops and water to raising farmed animals is wasteful and contributes significantly to global human food and water insecurity. As a result, food is more expensive than it would be if we were raising fewer farmed animals. On a global scale, therefore, the choice to use scarce resources to raise farmed animals rather than grow crops for human consumption reduces access to food for the poor. On a local scale, it is true that in many neighbourhoods, current systems of food production, distribution and retail currently mean that consuming intensively farmed animal products is the cheapest way to eat, but this results in those living in such areas eating unhealthy diets with serious implications for their health. Literature on food deserts in urban

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areas demonstrates that there are places where fast food outlets predominate over supermarkets and access to the fruit and vegetables required for a healthy diet is problematic. In the USA, African Americans are disproportionately likely to live in such areas, as are those on low incomes.162 A. Breeze Harper’s ground-breaking book Sistah Vegan explores the connections between concern for the health of black women, food justice, racial oppression, sexual equality, poverty, and the exploitation of farmed animals.163 In neighbourhoods within food deserts, the supply of cheap, intensively farmed animal products is part of the problem, not part of the solution. The third key reason that intensive farming of animals cannot be justified by appeal to access to food for the poor is that it requires the exploitation of other poor people. As discussed above, slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants subject workers, who are disproportionately female, black and hispanic, and lowincome, to unsafe working conditions with negative impacts on their physical and mental health. The attempted justification therefore claims to advance the interests of disadvantaged consumers only at the expense of disadvantaged workers. These three reasons together show that intensive farming of animals is at least as bad for the poor as it is for the wealthy, and therefore that concern for the poor cannot serve as a justification for intensive patterns of farming. Animal products are made cheaply in intensive farming at severe costs to farmed animals, human workers, and the sustainability of human food production systems. The practice represents no benefit to the economically disadvantaged. Any large-scale change to raising farmed animals less intensively and to higher welfare standards within given constraints of land and energy use is very likely to reduce the supply of animal products and set in reverse the trend over the past decades towards increases in production from farmed animals. In this context, there would be less meat, fish, dairy and egg products to go round, and therefore overall consumption of these products would be reduced. Such a shift to reducing consumption, however, would be a net benefit to human food security provided resources released were redirected into production of human food crops. There is no overall trade-off, therefore, between moves to improve farmed animal welfare and providing food for humans: such a shift could be effected in a way that was advantageous on both sides. If Christians, the churches, and others recognizing the value of non-human animal life were to reject the products of intensive farming, the impact on the lives of farmed animals would be revolutionary. The consequent drop in consumer R. E. Walker, C. R. Keane and J. G. Burke, ‘Disparities and Access to Healthy Food in the United States: A Review of Food Deserts Literature’, Health Place 16:5 (September 2010), 876–84; D. Hendrickson, C. Smith and N. Eikenberry, ‘Fruit and Vegetable Access in Four Low-Income Food Deserts Communities in Minnesota’, Agriculture and Human Values 23:3 (2006), 371–83. 163  A. B. Harper, Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society (New York: Lantern Books, 2009). 162 

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demand for the products of intensive farming would mean many fewer animals would be subjected to the intensive conditions their fellows currently suffer and that farmers seeking to make a living through treating their animals substantially better would find an increasing market for their products. It would also help respond to the wider problems discussed above of human food and water security, climate change, pollution, and risks to human health. Given the scale of our practice in using other animals for food, any significant beneficial change in this area of human practice would dwarf the impact of change in any other area of our practice in relation to other animals. Convincing others of the importance of not cooperating with the systems that regard other animals as nothing more than resources to be exploited without restraint for human ends, seems therefore a substantial and worthwhile goal. I have argued that where there are sources of food that do not require the use of animals, as is the case for the vast majority of the human population today, a Christian appreciation of the theological meaning of the lives of other animals leads to the conclusion that it is not right to make use of them in systems of farming that fail to allow them to flourish and enjoy a good life. Since the vast majority of animal products available are outputs of systems that very obviously fail to allow farmed animals to flourish, Christians have strong faith-based reasons to stop eating the meat, fish, dairy and eggs that are produced in these ways. Perhaps it seems implausible that Christian faith commitments could require such a radical change in dietary habits for those in contexts where there are other sources of nutrition. In response I would observe that what requires this shift in Christian dietary practice are the radical changes that have taken place in the way farmed animals are raised in the past half-century or so. The churches have been insufficiently attentive to these changes, perhaps because each step towards the current intensive farming systems has seemed small, or has not been made public at all. Now, however, it seems very clear indeed that what has become standard practice in the intensive farming of other animals is fundamentally incompatible with a Christian understanding of the life of fellow animal creatures. If the conclusion seems wrong, either (1) my argument about the theological meaning of the lives of other animals is wrong – in which case it would be necessary to demonstrate very great mistakes across the whole of Volume I of this work – or (2) major features of my description in the first part of this chapter of what is currently being done to farmed animals are wrong – which given the sources I have drawn on seems implausible – or (3) I am wrong in judging (1) and (2) incompatible – which would require re-reviewing current intensive farming practice in order to demonstrate that one could do all those things to other animals while believing them to be fellow creatures willed into being by the good God that we worship, reconciled in peace with all things in heaven and earth through the work of Jesus Christ, and destined to enjoy with us the glorious freedom of the children of God in the new creation. I am open to critique and correction on any of these points, but it seems to me that the incompatibility of the intensive farming of animals and Christian faith commitments should be a ready and obvious point of agreement for all Christians.

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The conclusion that it is unacceptable to make use of other animals for food in the current majority intensive pattern inevitably raises the question of whether there are other ways of making use of other animals for food that are acceptable, and it is to those questions that I now turn.

Hunting for Food Hunting wild animals for food is clearly a very different practice from the farming of domesticated animals, and many of the considerations in the preceding discussion do not apply. Wild animals living in their natural habitat are not subject to the same human constraints as those raised in farm environments, and the entirety of their lives is not made instrumental to human needs as is the case with many farmed animals. In the ideal case, therefore, where a wild animal has lived to maturity in an environment that allows the creature’s flourishing, where there is no alternative source of human nutrition, where limits are in place to ensure that the population of the animals hunted and their wider environment is not threatened, and where an expert human hunter is able to kill the animal instantly without a long chase and without causing stress or suffering, hunting looks to be a much better option for the animals concerned than farming. This ideal case would seem to be the best possible way of obtaining meat, or fish, if it were necessary to do so. For the small number of human communities where there is no realistic alternative to subsistence hunting of this kind, therefore, it seems possible to hold a high respect for non-human animals alongside recognition of the regrettable necessity of the need to take their lives in order to sustain human life, and anthropological studies of such communities frequently indicates this attitude to the lives of other animals.164 The ideal case in relation to hunting, however, rarely applies. Very few humans are dependent on killing wild animals for food, and most current hunting of wild animals by humans is not primarily motivated by a need for food, and therefore does not fall under the heading of this chapter at all. The ethics of hunting wild animals for sport or entertainment is discussed in Chapter 6. We should consider one step away from the ideal case, however, which is where hunting is motivated by a need for food, but where the farming of non-human animals would represent an adequate alternative source of human nutrition. Michael Northcott notes that the sacrificial legislation of ancient Israel allowed only domesticated animals to be used

See, for example, L. Kemmerer, ‘Indigenous Traditions’, in Food, Ethics, and Society: An Introductory Text with Readings, ed. A. Barnhill, M. Budolfson and T. Doggett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); T. Ingold, ‘Hunting and Gathering as Ways of Perceiving the Environment’, in Redefining Nature: Ecology, Culture and Domestication, Explorations in Anthropology, ed. R. Ellen and K. Fukui (Oxford: Berg, 1996).

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for food, and that wild animals were therefore protected from harm.165 There seems something to be said for this division: allowing wild animals to live lives undisturbed by human predation, and taking the lives only of domesticated animals allowed to live a good life and slaughtered in a controlled way with minimal suffering. Equally, however, one could imagine an alternate ideal, where a mostly vegetable diet was supplemented by occasional hunting of wild animals that were killed quickly without a long chase. In contexts where killing other animals is necessary for human survival, therefore, either very good farming practice or very good hunting practice seem to be legitimate options.166 It is important to recognize that hunting practice often does not meet the ideal case of ending the life of the quarry without stress or suffering. The pursuit of a prey animal can last for hours or days, causing desperate stress and exhaustion, animals can languish in traps in great pain for long periods, projectiles can wound rather than kill an animal, leading to a long and lingering death. There remains the question of whether hunting for food could be legitimate in a context where ample supplies of produce are available that do not require the killing of animals. This is a parallel question to that of whether farming of animals could be ethical where it was not necessary, which I will discuss after considering the possibility of farming animals according to higher welfare standards.

The Possibility of a Better Life for Farmed Animals If the argument developed in the second section of this chapter that Christians have strong faith-based reasons to reject the intensive farming of animals is successful, there remains the question of whether other patterns of raising animals could be compatible with a Christian understanding of them. For a Christian to consider the use of other animals to produce human food in a context where such use is not necessary for human survival, it must be the case, at a minimum, that the lives of the animals so used can be recognized as lives in which they can flourish. This is because a theological understanding of their lives recognizes that they are with us fellow animal creatures of God, with a vocation to glorify God in their flourishing. Under pressure of necessity, many humans in the past and some humans today could not feed themselves without using other animals for food, and could not always ensure that other animals used in these ways were well treated. The vast M. Northcott, ‘"They Shall Not Hurt or Destroy in All My Holy Mountain" (Isaiah 65.25): Killing for Philosophy and a Creaturely Theology of Non-Violence’, in Creaturely Theology: On God, Humans and Other Animals, ed. C. Deane-Drummond and D. Clough (London: SCM, 2009), 236. 166  Lawrence Calhoone makes the case that some forms of hunting are not only preferable to raising domesticated farmed animals, but also cause fewer animal deaths than agrarian agriculture (L. Cahoone, ‘Hunting as a Moral Good’, Environmental Values 18:1 (2009), 67–89). This is additional grounds for not condemning all forms of hunting as a means of obtaining human food. 165 

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majority of modern humans, however, are not subject to this necessity, and could secure adequate nutrition without recourse to other animals, and with additional accompanying benefits, as noted above. Given that we have the choice whether or not to make use of animal creatures to feed ourselves, a choice to use them must, at least, not contradict our theological understanding of the life they are called upon to live, and not prevent them from flourishing in the way their creator and redeemer intends. It seems clear, then, that this is a necessary condition for a Christian judgement that it is appropriate to make use of other animals for food where alternative sources of nutrition exist. Note that I am not judging at this point whether this condition is sufficient, as well as necessary, to justify using other animals for food: that will be examined in the following section of this chapter. It is clearly the case that farmed animals raised extensively can live lives that are far preferable to the conditions in intensive systems. For example, a small beef herd may be allowed to graze good pasture with low stocking density for most of their lives, given appropriate shelter in the winter, with calves allowed to suckle from their mothers until they wean naturally. Most female calves may remain part of the herd for all their lives, with male calves raised on the farm for two or three years. Good veterinary care can be provided where necessary, and when animals are sent for slaughter, care taken to make the journey as short as possible and to ensure the animals are handled with care and stunned quickly and effectively to reduce stress and suffering before slaughter. Sheep can be raised extensively for their meat in similar ways. Pigs can be reared in free-range environments giving them opportunity to root in the soil and for sows to arrange bedding for their nests. Chickens can be raised in small flocks in well-designed free-range environments for meat or eggs, with chickens killed for meat at two or three times the age of the thirty-five-day intensive broiler hens, chosen from breeds not designed to put on weight so quickly that leg problems are common. The question is whether raising and slaughtering animals to higher welfare standards in this way is compatible with a Christian regard for their lives as fellow creatures of God. In a theological account of what a good life for farmed animals might consist in, it is important to recognize that length of life would be an important criterion. This is importantly distinct from a utilitarian approach, for example, where only the balance of good over bad experiences, or preferences satisfied or not satisfied, within an animal’s life span is relevant. For a utilitarian, the routine killing of male chicks as soon as they have been sexed is not a moral problem at all, if means could be found to ensure they do not suffer and are not otherwise mistreated. Similarly, the killing of young lambs would depend only on the quality of the life they had lived up to that point. In a theological account where the life of a creature is valued for its capacity to glorify God in its flourishing, it is very clear that what is done to the chick and the lamb is a grave ill, blocking them from growth into the creature they were made to be, and from the particular expression of creaturely life that they are called to realize. Killing young animals is much worse, in a theological perspective, than killing animals that have had the opportunity to grow into maturity and live out their life before their death. In modern farming systems, a good life in terms of length is offered to few farmed animals.

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Alongside the shape and length of lives the farmed animals live, there is also the issue of how far their bodies have been refashioned to conform to human needs and the impact this has on the animals. Farmers that prioritize a better life for their animals are likely to choose older breeds which have not been subjected to modern breeding techniques aimed at optimizing productivity at the cost of other aspects of the animal. Chickens should not be bred to put on weight so quickly that their legs have difficulty supporting their own bodyweight; dairy cows should not be bred so narrowly for maximum milk production that they suffer from lameness, mastitis and infertility. In order for the concept of a good life to have any meaning at all, the physiology of the animal must allow for its possibility. This means that (apparently serious) suggestions that farm animal welfare could be improved by genetically engineering animals to be unable to suffer pain miss the point entirely, in relation to a theological approach to using other animals for food.167 The capacity to experience pain is crucial for animals to adopt aversive reactions to contexts in which their bodies may be damaged: to retain the damaging environment but eliminate the aversive reaction would create an animal physiologically unable to function as such, akin to the organisms growing chicken parts in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, referred to in Volume I.168 One might say that current efforts to grow in vitro meat in laboratories, rather than using animals, is the ultimate step in such a project of reshaping animals to serve human ends, but I think we can discriminate morally between a morally horrific breeding programme that progressively reduces an animal to literally nothing but meat, and a laboratory project that builds meat from the ground up, without requiring animals beyond using them as donors for initial cell cultures.169 While the former seems to me a serious problem in the context of a Christian understanding of animals, the latter seems morally irrelevant in this context, since other animals have almost no part in the practice. Egg production is another example of how the reproductive functions of female animals are monopolized by humans. In the survey of practice in the first part of this chapter, I noted that because breeding programmes have aimed at maximizing egg laying in some breeds and meat quality in others, the male chicks of laying strains are of no economic use, and are therefore killed as soon as they have hatched and been sexed, usually by maceration, gassing or electrocution. While the suffering of the chicks could be considered negligible in a utilitarian A. Shriver, ‘Knocking Out Pain in Livestock: Can Technology Succeed Where Morality Has Stalled?’, Neuroethics 2:3 (2009), 115–24. 168  M. Atwood, Oryx and Crake (New York: Anchor Books, 2004), 202–3; discussed in Vol. I, 167–8. 169  See discussion in S. Welin, ‘In Vitro Meat – Some Moral Issues’, in Ethical Futures: Bioscience and Food Horizons, ed. K. Millar, P. Hobson West and B. Nerlich (Wageningen: Wageningen Academic Publishers, 2009); S. Welin, J. Gold, J. Berlin and D. M. Kaplan (eds), In Vitro Meat: What are the Moral Issues? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 167 

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context, this practice seems incompatible with a theological perspective that recognizes the value of each animal life. The killing of male chicks could only be avoided currently if farmers reverted to older breeds that were suitable for both purposes, but this would make both their eggs and their meat more expensive. I am not aware of any certification scheme that allows consumers to identify eggs not produced from specialized laying strains requiring the killing of male chicks, so there is currently no means of purchasing eggs for which male chicks have not been culled, unless one finds small-scale local producers who operate in a different way.170 In evaluating whether particular farming contexts are adequate in relation to a regard for farmed animals as creatures of God, it is crucial to recognize that assurances of good animal welfare are not any kind of reliable guide to whether farmed animals are being raised in conditions in which they can flourish and enjoy a good life. It is no doubt an advance that almost everyone who has to do with the raising of farmed animals now defends their practice in relation to language of animal welfare, but definitions of what constitutes good animal welfare are so diverse that interrogating what criteria are being used in a particular judgement is crucial.171 As I toured one broiler chicken facility, I was told by the manager of the operation raising 600,000 birds in windowless sheds for slaughter at 35–38 days that high standards of animal welfare were essential for his operation. Presumably he meant that a high prevalence of disease or disability would impede the ability of the chickens to ingest feed at the pace necessary to reach slaughter weight in the required time-frame, or that a fatality rate above a certain percentage would reduce his margins below economic viability. The owner of an intensive dairy facility where cows were kept permanently under cover without access to grazing, milked three times a day to produce over 11,000 litres per year, and sent for slaughter after an average of three to four lactations when their output or fertility dropped below monitored levels, told me that high animal welfare was entirely aligned with his economic interest, because only cows in prime health could sustain the high output he required. If animal welfare is interpreted as a narrow measure of physiological functioning, some broiler chickens and cows in intensive dairy operations could be specified as having high welfare – though leg disorders and lameness are Some hopes have been placed in the development of technologies that could enable the sexing of chicken embryos in the egg, so that male embryos could be destroyed at an early stage of development, rather than after hatching. Progress in one such research project is reported in A. Weissmann et al., ‘Sexing Domestic Chicken before Hatch: A New Method for in Ovo Gender Identification’, Theriogenology 80:3 (2013), 199–205, and one major egg producer has committed to introducing the technology by 2020 (M. McKenna, ‘By 2020, Male Chicks May Avoid Death by Grinder’, National Geographic, 13 June 2016. 171  A brief survey of different animal welfare models is provided in F. Ohl and F. J. Van Der Staay, ‘Animal Welfare: At the Interface between Science and Society’, Vet. J. 192:1 (2012), 13–19. The article also makes the case that scientific measures of welfare need to be in dialogue with societal expectations. 170 

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very common problems in these contexts – but any definition developed with reference to the UK Farm Animal Welfare Council’s ‘Five Freedoms’ – freedom from hunger and thirst; discomfort; pain, injury and disease; freedom to express normal behaviour; and freedom from fear and distress172 – would have to judge that both the hens and the cows suffered very poor welfare from being unable to express behaviours normal to their species, such as scratching in the dirt for food, or grazing grass, respectively.173 The physiological health of a non-human animal is of course an important condition for a judgement of its welfare, but it is inappropriate to appeal to narrow judgements of welfare based only on this criterion to justify raising farmed animals in intensive systems. The diversity about definitions of welfare also make it important to be critical in relation to the marketing of products as higher welfare. Studies have indicated, for example, that the commercial raising of free-range chickens for eggs in large flocks can result in lower welfare according to some measures than those raised in more intensive systems.174 Some labelling schemes promoting higher welfare can represent only limited changes to the lives of animals and therefore fall short of what could be considered a good life for the animals concerned. There are complexities with any certification system. In the UK, for example, Soil Association standards for organic farming mandate beneficial standards in many aspects of animal welfare, but I have talked to a farmer raising cattle for beef who decided not to join, partly because of the additional distance his animals would have to travel to reach the nearest abattoir with appropriate certification. No labelling scheme can substitute finally for a judgement about the degree to which the lives of particular farmed animals can be characterized as adequate, good or flourishing. In comparison with the extremity of exploitation of animals used for food in the intensive farming systems described in the first part of this chapter, it is clear that alternative patterns of raising farmed animals extensively in appropriate environments, giving them more opportunities for the expression of speciesspecific behaviours, generally lead to much better lives for the animals, in which they have greater opportunities to flourish. If non-human animals are to be raised by humans for food, it is therefore clearly preferable to raise them in contexts where they can express more of the behaviours that facilitate their flourishing. Equally clearly, however, the life of a farmed animal – even in higher welfare environments – cannot generally be construed as one in which they may flourish as creatures of God. Even in higher welfare environments, male chicks are routinely macerated when breeding laying hens, dairy calves are killed at birth or at a few

Farm Animal Welfare Council, Farm Animal Welfare, 2. Farm Animal Welfare Council, Farm Animal Welfare, 1–2. 174  See, for example, C. M. Sherwin, G. J. Richards and C. J. Nicol, ‘Comparison of the Welfare of Layer Hens in 4 Housing Systems in the UK’, British Poultry Science 51:4 (August 2010), 488–99; D. C. Lay et al., ‘Hen Welfare in Different Housing Systems’, Poultry Science 90:1 (January 2011), 278–94. 172  173 

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months old, lambs are killed at a few months old, many mothers and their young never meet or are separated early, female animals are forcibly impregnated, animals are subjected to painful mutilations such as castration without pain relief, most animals are sent for slaughter when it becomes unproductive to keep them, and journeys to slaughter may be long and stressful, with variable standards operative in the slaughterhouses many of which cause stress and suffering. Raising nonhuman animals to provide human food will therefore always require a compromise between the lives that would truly constitute their flourishing, and the lives that are compatible with our deriving food from them. While Christians should support shifts towards treating farmed animals better, the limitations placed on the flourishing of animals even in higher welfare contexts provoke the question of whether it would be preferable to avoid using other animals for food at all.175

Beyond Killing Animals for Food There are a number of ways in which we can approach the question of whether it is appropriate to use other animals for food in a theological context. First, we could turn to the Bible for guidance on the acceptability of using other animals for food. The most often-quoted text justifying killing other animals for food is the Noahide covenant in Genesis 9. After God has saved Noah, his family, and all the non-human animals brought in the ark, God makes a new covenant that modifies the human diet. ‘Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and just as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything’ (Gen. 9.3). For Martin Luther, these words ‘establish the butcher’s shop’ and ‘God sets himself up as the butcher; for with His Word he slaughters and kills the animals that are suited for food’.176 Luther counts this new permission as an extraordinary gift, because when human beings were so few it would not have been necessary to kill other animals to live, unlike his own day, he suggests, when it would not be possible to exist ‘on the fruits of the earth alone’.177 We could quibble with Luther’s commentary here: one might

We should note here that many of those seeking to achieve gains in the treatment of non-human animals reject the project of seeking improvement in the welfare of farmed and other domesticated animals on the basis that it is preferable to work for the abolition of the human use of other animals. This position is represented in Tom Regan’s book Empty Cages, a slogan which he expands to ‘Not larger cages, empty cages’ (Empty Cages: Facing the Challenge of Animal Rights (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 33). As argued in this section, I agree that improvements in welfare cannot resolve all the problems of farming animals, and as is evident in the next section, I am happy to make the case for the abolitionist position, but I am not convinced that it is necessary or wise to choose between advocating for higher welfare for the animals who are currently being farmed, and advocating that we should stop using animals for food at all. 176  Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. 2, 133. 177  Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. 2, 133. 175 

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think that after the great flood all the vegetation on the land would have died off, so that the other animals Noah brought with him could be the only source of food for the human travellers on the ark. The import of the passage is clear, however: the human diet specified in Gen. 1.29 of ‘every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit’ has been broadened to a permission to consume other animals, provided that ‘you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood’ (Gen. 9.4), and this permission is not rescinded anywhere in the subsequent biblical text. Luther’s conclusion is that our consciences should be ‘relaxed and free about using the things created by God and permitted to us for use’, and rails against the burdens that ‘villainous popes’ have imposed on God’s people through the imposition of restrictions on meat-eating.178 While Luther’s view about the permissibility of eating meat could not be clearer, and helps him to make a point against Rome, it is also clear that he considers meateating to be a departure from a previous, and infinitely better, state of humanity. ‘For Adam’, Luther observes, ‘it would have been an abomination to kill a little bird for food’; in Eden, Adam was a ‘gentle master’ of the other animals ‘rather than their slayer or consumer’.179 He did not need to use other animals for food, clothing or monetary gain, and so would have used them ‘only for the admiration of God and for a holy joy unknown to us in this corrupt state of nature’.180 This original order would have been better for human health: ‘our bodies would have been far more durable if the practice of eating all sorts of food – particularly, however, the consumption of meat – had not been introduced after the Deluge’ and ‘a diet of herbs rather than of meat would be far finer today’.181 The transformation of humanity from gentle master of other creatures to a tyrant is clearly a retrograde step. Luther sees meat-eating as a necessity in our present state, for which God graciously provides, but both we and the other animals would be much better off if we lived in our original condition in which human slaughter and consumption of other animals were not necessary. Luther’s strong sense of loss in relation to the peaceful and non-consumptive relationships between humans and other animals in Eden has its mirror image in prophetic visions of a future reign of God where peace will be restored as noted in the previous chapter: Isaiah’s vision of the rule of one from the stump of Jesse, interpreted by Christians as a prophecy of Jesus Christ, includes peaceful relations between humans and other animals, with nothing hurt or destroyed on God’s holy mountain (Isa. 11.6-9; 65.25-6). In his letter to the Romans, Paul shares this hope for a creation liberated from its groaning bondage into the freedom of the children of God (Rom. 8.21-22), and Revelation also looks forward to the time when God will dwell with mortals and tears, death, crying and pain will be no more (Rev. 21.3-4).

Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. 2, 133–4. Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. 2, 132, 134. 180  Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. 1, 71. 181  Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. 1, 36. See also 210. 178  179 

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The permission given to Noah to kill other animals for food, and our current practice of doing so, seem therefore to belong to a provisional ordering of our relationship with other animals, which cannot be identified either with God’s original or final ordering of creaturely relations. As I argued in Volume I, Chapter 5, predation between creatures should be seen in a Christian theological vision as a departure from God’s patterning of creation, and human predation on non-human animals cannot escape the implications of this judgement. I argued there that it is crucial to retain the doctrine of the fall as a way of describing the difference between the world as we experience it and the world as God willed and wills it. Situating the current reality of human eating of other animals, and God’s permission to do so in Genesis 9, within an overall context in which it is clear that God wills for our relationships with other creatures to be harmonious and peaceful, makes clear that the permission given to Noah is for an interim period in which there seems no alternative but for creatures to prey upon one another to live from day to day.182 For Christians, therefore, the decision about whether it is appropriate to kill other animals for food must be recognized as existing in the tension between creation as we know it and the new creation that God will bring, between the current world where God’s creatures groan for release from their bondage, and the in-breaking reign of Jesus Christ where all creatures live in peace. Christians disagree about how to construe their ethical responsibilities in this interim: some disagreements between those who think that war is permissible for Christians and those who think it is not can be traced back to a disagreement about whether Christian ethics in the here and now should attend primarily to the world-as-is or the world-to-come. Reinhold Niebuhr was famously critical of Christian pacifism, for example, on the basis that it underestimated the need to use forceful coercion against sinful people, and failed to recognize that the ultimate principles of the kingdom of God cannot be made into simple rules for the world as we find it.183 The critique of vegetarianism cited by Karl Barth that it is a ‘wanton anticipation of what is described by Isa. 11 and Rom. 8 as existence in the new aeon for which

The story of Peter’s vision, recorded in Acts 10.9–11.18, is often offered as a New Testament justification of meat-eating, despite being clearly interpreted within the text as metaphorically referring to the admission of Gentiles into the church, rather than about eating animals. Peter is puzzled about the meaning of the vision, and it is the arrival of Cornelius’s men that enables him to realize what the vision means (10.17, 19, 34-5). This is underlined later when he justifies baptizing the Gentiles to the Christians in Rome with reference to the vision (11.1-17). Since Acts interprets the vision metaphorically, it is strange to argue that it should instead be interpreted literally as an instruction to kill animals. For further discussion of the message of the vision, see Clinton Wahlen, ‘Peter’s Vision and Conflicting Definitions of Purity’, New Testament Studies 51:4 (2005), 505–18. 183  R. Niebuhr, ‘Why the Christian Church is Not Pacifist’, in Christianity and Power Politics (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1969), 14, 25. 182 

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we hope’ has common ground with Niebuhr’s concern.184 Yet Niebuhr agrees with his pacifist opponents that the law of love ‘is not some ultimate possibility which has nothing to do with human history’. Instead it ‘hovers over every situation as an ideal possibility’.185 In the sermon discussed at the beginning of Volume I, Chapter 6, John Wesley drew ethical implications from the vision of a new creation in Romans 8, arguing that recognizing the mercy that God would show to fellow animal creatures in releasing them from bondage in the new creation should ‘enlarge our hearts towards these creatures’.186 We are left, then, with the question of how a vision of the new creation should impact on a Christian understanding of relationships with other animal creatures here and now. It is worth following the thread of Barth’s thought before he noted the critique of vegetarianism just quoted. In considering the question of how respect for life should be expressed beyond the human sphere, Barth quotes Albert Schweitzer’s view that humans are only ethical if they are ‘obedient to the constraint to assist all life’ as they are able, recognizing that ‘Life as such is holy’ to them, noting the similarity with the insight of Francis of Assisi and Schweitzer’s legitimate protest ‘against our astonishing indifference and thoughtlessness in this matter’. Barth states that the starting point for ethics here must be ‘that in this matter too, as a living being in co-existence with non-human life’, the human being ‘has to think and act responsibly’, not in the same way as for human life, but as a serious secondary responsibility.187 For Barth, humans have lordship over fellow plant and animal creatures, but in relation to other animals, may make use of them only while respecting them as fellow creatures, created with humans on the sixth day and closely related to them, and therefore offering to them ‘careful, considerate, friendly and above all understanding treatment’.188 Barth then turns to the question of whether this respect could be compatible with taking the life of other animals, noting that this is unlike the case of plants: For the killing of animals, in contrast to the harvesting of plants and fruit, is annihilation. This is not a case of participation in the products of a sprouting nexus of life ceaselessly renewed in different forms, but the removing of a single being, a unique creature existing in an individuality which we cannot fathom but also cannot deny. The harvest is not a breach in the peace of creation, nor is the tending and using of animals, but the killing of animals presupposes that the peace of creation is at least threatened and itself constitutes a continuation of this threat. And the nearness of the animal to man irrevocably means that when K. Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. III/4, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. A. T. MacKay et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), 355–6. 185  Niebuhr, ‘Why the Christian Church is Not Pacifist’, 22, 25. 186  J. Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions, vol. 5 (New York: Ezekiel Cooper and John Wilson, 1806), 131–2, discussed in Vol. I, 135. 187  Barth, CD III/2, 349–50. 188  Barth, CD III/2, 349–52. 184 

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man kills a beast he does something which is at least very similar to homicide. We must be very clear about this if we maintain that the lordship of man over animals carries with it the freedom to slaughter them. Those who do not hear the prior command to desist have certainly no right to affirm this freedom or cross the frontier disclosed at this point.189

Barth turns to a consideration of the early chapters of Genesis, noting that the diet specified in Genesis 1 means that the peace of creation seems quite unbroken between humans and other animals. Earlier in his doctrine of creation, Barth observed that God’s instruction to humanity at the end of Genesis 1 implies a command not to kill and eat other animals, making clear that the dominion granted to humanity does not include the power of life and death, and he criticized Calvin for overlooking this.190 We do not know of many spheres of natural history ‘where life does not involve the death of another life’, Barth observes, but ‘the biblical witness looks beyond the field of natural history’.191 While Genesis 9 does grant permission to kill and eat animals, then, Barth is careful to state that ‘it should not be forgotten or expunged that it does not correspond with the true and original creative will of God, and that it therefore stands under a caveat’, as is made clear in the prophetic visions of a time ‘when there will be no more question of the struggle for existence and therefore of slaughter’ between humans and other animals. Only in the interim period between creation and consummation is the peace between creature and creature broken; only in this period can other animals threaten humanity and humanity kill them in order to live.192 Barth’s recognition of the seriousness of the act of taking the life of other animals means that the Genesis 9 permission must be recognized as provisional and limited. Strikingly, he declares that killing other animals for food is contrary to God’s command to respect life ‘except under the pressure of necessity’.193 The person who kills in other circumstances, sins in killing, ‘murders an animal’ and is already on the way to homicide.194 For Barth, then, the Genesis 9 permission to kill can be comprehended only as an exceptional case in the interim period between creation and consummation, where humans are compelled to kill in order to live. In a context where there is no such compulsion or necessity – which, as I argued in the second part of this chapter, is the case for the vast majority of humans today – Barth’s argument becomes an unambiguous prohibition of killing other animals for food. In the previous chapter, I argued that in a theological context, killing of animals is not a neutral act, but is always troubling and requiring justification. Both Luther’s Barth, CD III/2, 352–3. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. III/1, ed. T. F. Torrance and G. W. Bromiley, trans. J. W. Edwards, O. Bussey and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 211. 191  Barth, CD III/1, 208. 192  Barth, CD III/2, 353–4. 193  Barth, CD III/2, 354. 194  Barth, CD III/2, 355. 189  190 

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commentary on Genesis and Barth’s discussion of the killing of other animals for food are clearly informed by an appreciation of the problematic character of the act of killing. If, with Barth, we are persuaded of the profound moral seriousness of the act of killing a fellow animal creature in the context of God’s command to respect life, it is clear that where we have the choice not to kill to live, we should do so. Where killing is unnecessary, vegetarianism for Christians becomes, according to Barth’s express argument, not a ‘wanton anticipation’ of the new creation, but an obvious and mandatory expression of respecting the life of fellow animal creatures. For Barth, God’s command can always be distinguished from other commands by ‘the fact that it is permission – the granting of a very definite freedom’.195 Here the freedom granted by God’s command to respect life is most clear: where we no longer need to kill other animals to live, we are free to stop, and thereby escape the guilty ambivalence of knowing other animals are having their lives ended so that our life can continue.196 Or, as John Berkman and Stanley Hauerwas put it, ‘In this time between the times, the good news for the other animals is that Christians do not need to ask the other animals to be a part of a sacrifice that has no purpose in God’s kingdom’.197 Beyond the argument of the previous section, that Christians have a clear obligation to avoid the products of the intensive farming of other animals, we should recognize that Christians have strong reasons to avoid participating in the practice of killing other animals for food at all, even when we have taken steps to treat them as well as we can up to the point of slaughter. At this point in any number of discussions in which I have participated, a range of new arguments are introduced. What would happen to farmed animals if we stopped eating them? Would this result in increased dependence on food imports in many areas, with implications for climate change? Would the expansion in food crop production that would be required have problematic side-effects? How would we ensure everyone had enough food as we made this transition? What about the livelihoods and ways of life of the very many people who make a living from farmed animals or fishing, often in continuity with previous generations? What would prevent the land currently devoted to raising farmed animals being used to build tower blocks instead? None of these are foolish questions, but we need to realize that current global trends are towards substantial increases in the raising of farmed animals, so contingency plans for a rapid transition away from the farming of animals seem unlikely to be necessary. In the optimistic scenario that a growing number of Christians and others recognized either an obligation to stop eating

K. Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. II/2, ed. T. F. Torrance and G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 585. 196  Barth’s position, and the vegetarian logic of it, are discussed in J. Berkman and S. Hauerwas, ‘The Chief End of All Flesh’, Theology Today 49:2 (July 1992), 196–208, and D. K. Miller, ‘Killing on the Frontier: Meat Eating as an Extreme Case for Christian Ethics’, Modern Theology 28:1 (2012), 53–80. 197  Berkman and Hauerwas, ‘Chief End of All Flesh’, 208. 195 

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the products of intensive farming, or an obligation to stop consuming products requiring the suffering and killing of other animals altogether, we would see, first, a slowing of the growth of numbers of animals farmed intensively, and then a gradual decline. Progressively fewer non-human animals would be produced and raised in intensive conditions, and this would begin to effect a transition towards an expansion of arable farming. Progressively fewer people would be employed in raising farmed animals and fishing; progressively more would be employed in the production and processing of foods sourced from plants. As we have seen from the survey at the beginning of this chapter, this would progressively release some of the 78 per cent of agricultural land used to raise farmed animals, improve global food and water security, reduce environmental pollution, and reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.198 In a large-scale transition of this kind, we would be able to decide how to use land no longer required for food production. If we valued the presence of domesticated animals and the landscapes shaped by them sufficiently, perhaps we would choose to make some space for grazing animals previously raised for food products, supporting those charged with their care. We could choose to release some of the surplus land for use by the wild animals we previously displaced, expanding national parks and sanctuaries, providing for their wise management, perhaps with the aim of creating some spaces in which human management was no longer necessary.199 We can speculate about many scenarios of this kind, but we should recognize that these will not be decisions that will be faced any time soon. Recognizing a Christian obligation either to avoid the products of intensive animal farming or animal farming altogether would not precipitate any kind of crisis in the way these speculative questions imply.200 I noted above in relation to avoiding the products of intensive farming of animals, that the change in practice required seemed massive, which made it legitimate to ask what had changed to require this substantial departure from what Christians have generally understood to be the implications of their faith for daily life. As regards intensive farming, I argued that what had shifted was the radical change towards the intensive rearing of farmed animals, the moral implications of which Christians had been slow to recognize. It is appropriate to ask the same question in relation to my argument that Christians should go further, and stop consuming animal products at all: what could possibly have changed to create a new dietary obligation that previous generations of Christians have not recognized? We could suggest four answers to this question. First, in the context of the Christian tradition, it is important to recognize that animal products were usually expensive For an exploration of the potential for the rewilding of land currently under human control, see G. Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 199  Such projects of returning land for use by wild animals are discussed in Chapter 8. 200  One approach to planning for such a transition is outlined in M. Vinnari and E. Vinnari, ‘A Framework for Sustainability Transition: The Case of Plant-Based Diets’, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 27:3 (2014), 369–96. 198 

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luxuries for the rich, from which Christians were frequently advised to abstain.201 The large-scale raising of farmed animals exclusively for meat is a novelty, only beginning in England in the second half of the eighteenth century, for example, so the place of meat in the diet for most Christians was not a significant question until the last two centuries. The second reason the issue has not been prominent is the range of theological arguments provided to assert the legitimate human exploitation of other animals. Volume I of this work engaged them and found them wanting, but there is no doubt that, especially in the early modern period, the assertion of the divine right of humans to use new technologies to exploit creation in unprecedented ways persuaded many that there was no tension between Christianity and this enhanced dominion. The third reason Christians have frequently ducked the question of the permissibility of killing other animals for food is because of their uncritical assumption that it is necessary for human survival. The recognition from Plato onwards that meat-eating required increased land use in comparison with a plant-based diet seems to have been ignored by those such as Barth who assumed that it was necessary for humans to kill other animals for food. Perhaps it is easier at the beginning of the twenty-first century to take a global perspective that recognizes not only that farmed animal products are unnecessary for human nutrition, but also that reduced consumption of such products would contribute substantially to the promotion of human health, improved human food and water security, reduction of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and reduce pollution. The fourth reason we might give for thinking differently about eating animals now is the plethora of recent discoveries about the complex cognitive and social lives of other animals, and ways in which their thinking and behaviour has much more in common with our own than we have previously recognized. This new sense of what we share with other animals – as well as the ways in which they have complex modes of life that are radically other to ours – was explored in dialogue with theological understandings of what humans and other animals have in common in Chapter 2 of Volume I. It may well be that such new knowledge about the capacities of other animal creatures is a stimulus to new ethical thinking about our relationships with them. Up to this point in the chapter I have not distinguished between consuming meat and fish where non-human animals are killed directly for food and eating dairy and egg products, where products derived from farmed animals are consumed, rather than eating the animals themselves. This is the separation frequently made between diets that include meat and vegetarian diets. Theoretically, we can recognize a moral difference between the cases. There seems little reason to object to keeping a few hens in a large and diverse outdoor space, with access to shelter overnight, protection from predators, and ample provision of food, keeping them until they die a natural death, and eating the eggs that they lay. If the birds enjoy a good life, For an excellent overview of Christian dietary asceticism, see D. Grumett and R. Muers, Theology on the Menu: Asceticism, Meat and Christian Diet (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).

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are well cared for, using their unfertilized eggs for food is not to their detriment, and the practice seems entirely compatible with a full respect for their lives. Keeping bees for honey, where they are looked after competently, and are not deliberately killed, seems similarly benign, especially where habitat changes have reduced the wild bee populations. One can imagine an ideal case of obtaining milk from a cow, where small amounts of milk are taken alongside what her calf needs, and where male calves are allowed to live a good life and die a natural death even though they have no economic value. Such practices where other animals are raised in ways that promote their flourishing and where they are not slaughtered for their meat are clearly distinct from the farming practices described earlier, where farmed animals are allowed to live only as long as it is efficient to allow them to do so.202 Such forms of ideal vegetarianism, where farmed animals are given a good life and not killed, are practicable only on a very small scale. In contrast, all commercial production of milk and eggs involves the slaughter of farmed animals: killing all male chicks from laying poultry breeds as soon as they have hatched and been sexed; killing egg-laying hens for meat after their productivity decreases (around eighteen months in caged systems); killing the male offspring of cows, sheep, goats and buffalo raised for dairy production either at birth or at a young age; and killing female animals kept for milking after their productivity or fertility decreases (on average after three to four lactations for modern dairy cows). Farmed animals raised for milk or eggs may fare worse than those raised for meat: the life of extensively reared beef cattle is by many measures far preferable to that of an intensively reared dairy cow, who has her calves taken from her at birth and may be killed for beef at about the same age. While there may be a range of personal or health reasons for avoiding meat and fish but consuming dairy and eggs, given this close interlocking of the meat, dairy and egg production industries, to avoid consuming animal products from systems where animals are killed for food requires in practice the adoption of a vegan diet avoiding dairy and eggs, as well as meat and fish, unless one obtains milk and eggs from animals raised in the ideal and small-scale ways noted above. The choice to avoid all animal products in this way has the additional benefit of fully realizing all the other advantages of reducing dependence on animal products, in terms of releasing land from grazing

We could note as an aside, here, that none of the ethical concerns raised in this chapter would tell against eating animals after they had died a natural death. While it would often be unappetizing or unhealthy to eat other animals that had not been slaughtered, one could clearly consume meat from such animals without any of the concerns that arise from treating them poorly during their lives or killing them. Debates about the ethics of eating non-human animals killed on roads similarly bypass most moral arguments about meat-eating: see discussion in M. Michael, ‘Roadkill: Between Humans, Nonhuman Animals, and Technologies’, Society & Animals 12:4 (2004), 277– 98. Obviously, however, there are a wide range of other reasons why many would wish to refrain from eating fellow animal creatures in these contexts, too.

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and fodder crops for human food production, increasing human water security, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and wider environmental benefits. One potential justifying reason for holding back from the step to veganism, and preferring instead to accept the compromises detailed at the end of the previous section of the chapter, relates to a sense of the long history of humans living with domesticated animals. Texts such as Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet remind us of the complex intertwining of human lives with those of other animals over thousands of years.203 Spending time with some of the people that I know who work with farmed animals, I recognize and appreciate the hard work of doing one’s best for the farmed animals under one’s care, a life much more engaged with knowledge and care of other animals than mine. There would be clearly a form of loss in bringing an end to such relationships, even on the basis that they do not allow sufficiently for the flourishing of farmed animals. As noted above, in a world in which humans were no longer using other animals for food, we might decide to continue the relationship of domestication by keeping some chickens, cows, sheep and pigs, but they would be dramatically fewer in number than are kept today, and many fewer humans would be engaged with their care. While I recognize a kind of loss that would follow from no longer keeping other animals for food, I am not convinced that it is a sufficient reason for continuing to raise and slaughter them, both because domesticated contexts fail to allow them to flourish fully, and because, as noted above, reducing numbers of livestock would allow us to return large areas of land to become habitat for wild animals, which would represent the restoration of the much wider range of relationships with other animals brought to an end by our displacement of them in favour of domesticated animals raised for food. In a theological context, it is important to note that the choice to adopt a vegan diet can never be a claim to moral purity, as it sometimes seems in wider discussion of veganism. Even vegan gardeners have to defend the crops they cultivate from the other animals who want to consume them, and even if they are able to use non-lethal means to deter slugs and rabbits, they are demarcating an area that is under human control and inhospitable to the non-human animals that would threaten its human purpose. There is some inevitable competition, therefore, between the use the rabbits would make of the land in the absence of the garden and the use the human gardener needs to make of it in order to grow what is necessary to survive. Christian pacifists have to answer questions that remind them that they are not already living in the peaceable kingdom, such as what kind of restraint of evil they consider justifiable. Similarly, Christian vegans must recognize that they are not living in the new creation, so that bringing an area of land under cultivation means driving out some of the species of animals previously living there who would otherwise destroy the crops. A Christian may therefore decide to eat a vegan diet as a choice that is ethically responsible in relation both to human and non-human animals, and even as a partial

D. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2008).

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sign of the coming peaceable reign of Jesus Christ, but they should certainly not do so in the belief that they have achieved creaturely harmony by their own efforts.204 In the third part of this chapter, I noted that where human communities are dependent on hunting other animals for food, it is possible to recognize this practice as compatible with a high regard for the animals hunted, but that where hunting is a matter of choice rather than of necessity, the situation is different. If we imagine one possible pattern of life where a person does not kill animals for food, but delights in going to quiet places to watch wild animals flourishing, and another possibility where a person enjoys going out to hunt and kill wild animals, it is not hard to see which pattern more closely conforms to the peaceable relations between creatures that the Christian theological tradition looks back to in its creation stories and looks forward to in the new creation. A hunter’s choice to live by killing, where one could instead live without killing, must always seem a strange choice in a theological context.205

Conclusion This chapter has surveyed the ways farmed animals are being raised and killed in intensive systems, as well as the ways wild fish are pursued and then usually left to die of suffocation or are gutted alive. The lives and deaths we inflict on other animals in these systems very clearly fail to regard them as fellow creatures who glorify God in their flourishing, who are reconciled with all things in heaven and earth in the work of Jesus Christ, and who are heirs with us to the new creation where there will be peace between all creatures. We have seen that, far from being necessary for human survival, the intensive farming of animals also exacerbates food and water insecurity for the global human population, contributes significantly to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and creates other environmental Stephen Webb draws attention to the potential for veganism to become a spiritually and ecclesially problematic issue in Good Eating, The Christian Practice of Everyday Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001), 220–3. It is important to note, however, that his objection is to how Christian vegans understand themselves in relation to fellow Christians, rather than whether there are good reasons to adopt a vegan diet. The book helpfully addresses many other issues related to Christian vegetarianism. 205  Lawrence Calhoone argues that some forms of hunting require fewer animal deaths than those caused by modern agrarian agriculture (Cahoone, ‘Hunting as a Moral Good’, 79–81). A theological perspective that recognizes the value of the lives of fellow animal creatures will obviously lament deaths caused as a by-product of agrarian agriculture and seek ways to reduce this cost. Where it could be shown that obtaining nutrition through hunting causes fewer animal deaths than available alternatives, that would be a good argument in favour of hunting. The question of whether it is necessary in some cases to control the populations of wild ruminants, such as deer, where humans have exterminated their predators, is a separate question, which I discuss in Chapter 8. 204 

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problems. Both humans and other animals would be better off without the intensive farming of animals, therefore, and I have argued that Christians have an obligation to avoid participating in these systems as producers or consumers. In the fourth section of the chapter, I considered alternatives to intensive systems, and argued that the lives of farmed animals raised extensively in environments that permit them to engage in species-specific behaviours usually provide them with a substantially better life than their intensively reared counterparts. Where there is opportunity to shift farming towards practices that provide greater opportunities for farmed animals to flourish, such initiatives should be supported. This means that where the choice is between buying animal products derived from animals raised intensively and buying products from animals raised to higher welfare standards, the latter should be preferred. In the fifth section of the chapter, however, I set out the argument that, given that the killing of other animals is a moral concern in the theological framework I have developed, and given that most humans are no longer dependent on killing other animals for food, Christians have reason to be glad to embrace the opportunity of not having to kill other animals by adopting a vegan diet. I recognize that adopting a vegan diet represents a significant shift from the eating habits of most Christians, and that it is therefore challenging to accept the practical implications of the arguments of this chapter. In fact, I am convinced that a recognition of the radical practical changes that would be required once theological and ethical arguments in this area are accepted influences some people to find problems with the theoretical arguments merely to avoid such changes in practice. Food habits are deeply habituated in individuals, overlaid with strong familial, cultural, historical and religious dimensions. Eating a meal with meat as a central element with one’s family members on a Sunday, or at particular feasts at Christmas or Easter, is a significant communal act for many Christians, and considering alternatives can threaten to disrupt relationships with those who do not yet share a desire to change. With patience and grace on all sides, such differences can be resolved. Within my own family, we gradually transitioned over a period of years from one meat-eating relative bringing meat to our house when he visited so that he could add it to his plate, to his eating vegetarian meals in our home, to the situation today where he is happy to stay with us at Christmas and join us for a vegan celebratory Christmas dinner. We properly recognize that our eating practices are basic social practices, and therefore that change has to be negotiated carefully in order to respect the relationships shaped by the way we eat together. For some reason, the perfect seems to be the enemy of the good in relation to choices about eating products derived from other animals more often than in any other area of ethics. If I seek to become more charitable, then every occasion in which I give away money is a step in the right direction; if I seek to lose my temper less with others, then I can be glad whenever I successfully find other ways of channelling my feelings; but once the choice is about eating other animals, it often seems that we expect people to be wholly and utterly consistent in their practice, or it is of no value at all. It is clear that moral choice in relation to eating animal

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products is not an all-or-nothing affair. If a person reduces their consumption of meat, dairy and eggs from intensive systems, or from all sources, then demand for these products will be reduced, and fewer animals will be bred and raised in these conditions: any reduction is therefore a benefit to other animals with the accompanying human benefits noted in this chapter. One could start by planning a single meal that avoids such products, then perhaps one day each week. Many Christians used to avoid meat on Fridays, of course, and many still do so today, though my argument suggests that we now have reason to include fish alongside the flesh of other animals, and dairy and egg products should be off the menu, too. Lent is another excellent opportunity to discover that one is not dependent on consuming animals to survive: the chance to break existing habits and begin new ones. At the Reformation, Lent was only one of a large number of days Roman Catholic Christians abstained from all animal products, which has been estimated at 90–150 days per year.206 Coptic Christians today are vegan for 240 days or twothirds of the year because of the number of fast days.207 This association with longstanding traditions of fasting in Christian practice is helpful in reminding us that making dietary practice a part of faith is not a novelty for Christians, but it is important to note that it does not require stern ascetic discipline, and that adopting a vegan diet need not be an ascetic option.208 It is striking to me that the basic foodstuffs in many biblical texts are bread, oil and wine, none of which is derived from animals. An abundance of these elements are associated with the enjoyment of plenty, as in Psalm 104, celebrating God’s goodness to all creation, and thanking God for ‘wine to gladden the human heart, oil to make the face shine, and bread to strengthen the human heart’ (v. 15). One can feast, as well as fast, while avoiding making use of other animals for food, as a glance at any good vegan cookery book will confirm.

K. Albala and T. Eden (eds), Food & Faith in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 42. 207  L. M. Farag (ed.), The Coptic Christian Heritage: History, Faith and Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 2013), 133. 208  There is a growing literature of the relationship between diet and Christianity: see, for example R. Muers and D. Grumett (eds), Eating and Believing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vegetarianism and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2008); Grumett and Muers, Theology on the Menu; Webb, Good Eating. 206 

Chapter 3 U SI N G O T H E R A N I M A L S F O R C L O T H I N G AND TEXTILES The ethical question concerning the use of other animals for clothing and textiles has obvious overlap with the permissibility of using them for food discussed in the previous chapter. The conclusion argued for there, that the flourishing of nonhuman animals used for human food is inevitably compromised, and therefore that Christians have faith-based reasons to avoid using other animals for food, clearly has application here too. Where the source of non-human animal products for clothing and textiles is farmed or wild animals who have been killed or whose flourishing has been compromised, Christians should avoid supporting such systems as producers or consumers where it is possible to do so. Sourcing textiles from animals raised to higher welfare standards is clearly preferable to obtaining them from intensively farmed animals, but Christians who are persuaded of the arguments at the end of the previous chapter will wish to avoid any unnecessary use of other animals for clothing and textiles. The practice of using other animals for clothing and textiles also has clear overlap with their use for human food. Many products, such as leather and wool, are derived from animals whose bodies are also used for meat. As we shall see, however, a significant number of non-human animals not used for food are now raised for their fur, leather, skins, feathers or silk for use in clothing and accessories that are usually luxury items. Here the judgements of necessity discussed in the previous chapter must lead to a very clear and unambiguous judgement: where the human good obtained from other animals is the obviously superfluous production of goods required by no one, there is no reason at all to balance the prima facie wrong of killing a fellow creature, and Christians should therefore have no part in these practices. With this initial ethical framework in place from the previous chapter, I will now proceed to a survey of how other animals are currently being used to produce human clothing and other textiles.

How Humans Use Other Animals for Clothing and Textiles The main uses of non-human animals for human clothing and textiles are leather, from cows, buffaloes, sheep, goats, kangaroos, and some fish; wool from sheep, goats, alpacas, llamas and rabbits; fur from a wide range of mammals; skins from reptiles; feather down from ducks and geese; and silk from silk worms.

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Leather is by far the greatest use of non-human animals for clothing, with average annual production between 2011 and 2013 of 6.7 million tonnes of bovine hides and skins, and 449,000 tonnes of sheepskins. Over 80 per cent of this production takes place in the developing world.1 The vast majority of hides are obtained from slaughtering cattle and sheep. Hides are the most valuable non-meat product from the carcass, worth in the region of 5–10 per cent of the value of the live animal.2 The lives of cattle and sheep raised for meat were discussed in the previous chapter, but it is worth noting in addition the significant environmental impact of leather production. Among other sources of leather, it is notable that several million kangaroos are killed in Australia each year, mostly for their skins alone,3 and fish species such as sharks and salmon are used for leather, many of which come from species under pressure.4 Processing animal hides for leather is an elaborate and chemical-intensive process, typically incorporating soaking, liming, deliming, pickling, chrome tanning, wetting back, rechroming, basification, neutralization, retanning, dyeing, fatliquoring and finishing. An analysis of leather production in India found that to produce 1 square metre of leather generates 152 kilograms carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gas emissions and 0.7 kilograms sulphur dioxide equivalent acidification; requires 1.7 kilograms of coal, 70 grams of fuel oil, 0.2 cubic metres of water and 3.5 kilograms of chemicals; and generates 14 kilograms of solid waste.5 Pollutants discharged by leather tanneries are a significant environmental threat – including to wild animals – and the process also consumes significant quantities of water.6 Even in comparison with synthetic plastic alternatives dependent on oil, leather is substantially more environmentally problematic on a wide range of environmental measures.7 It is notable that there is evidence that the demand for leather is less than the current supply, so that cutting livestock numbers would not require production of synthetic leather alternatives.8 P. Mascianà, World Statistical Compendium for Raw Hides and Skins, Leather and Leather Footwear, 1998–2014 (Rome: FAO, 2015), vii. 2 Estimate from figures provided in D. M. Marti, R. J. Johnson and K. H. Mathews, Where’s the (Not) Meat?: Byproducts from Beef and Pork Production (Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture, 2011), 2. 3 M. Hercock, ‘The Wild Kangaroo Industry: Developing the Potential for Sustainability’, Environmentalist 24:2 (2004), 77, 80. 4 FAO, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2014 (Rome: FAO, 2014), 45; Melissa Grey et al., ‘The USA’s International Trade in Fish Leather, from a Conservation Perspective’, Environmental Conservation 1:2 (2006), 100–8. 5 K. Joseph and N. Nithya, ‘Material Flows in the Life Cycle of Leather’, Journal of Cleaner Production 17:7 (2009), 676–82. 6 FAO, Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options (Rome: FAO, 2006), 133. 7 M. Gottfridsson and Y. Zhang, ‘Environmental Impacts of Shoe Consumption: Combining Product Flow Analysis with an LCA Model for Sweden’, Master's Degree in Industrial Ecology thesis, Chalmers University of Technology, 2015, 23–31. 8 T. Garnett, ‘Livestock-Related Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Impacts and Options for Policy Makers’, Environmental Science & Policy 12:4 (2009), 497. 1

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Global production of wool was 2 million tonnes in 2010, but has been on a downward trend for the past two decades and with increased production of synthetic fibres now represents only 1.3 per cent of global fibre consumption.9 The relationship of wool to meat production depends on the geographical area and is subject to change over time, though in all large-scale commercial operations even animals raised primarily for wool will be sent for slaughter for meat once they are no longer useful for shearing, and skins from animals raised for meat are sold for textile and other uses. Wool was the main purpose of sheep breeding in Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, Eastern Europe, and the former USSR, but sheep meat production has been growing and wool production declining in recent years. Australia remains the leading global supplier of wool, though China has overtaken it in numbers of sheep being raised.10 Some key animal welfare issues are specific to raising sheep for wool in Australia. The ‘mulesing’ surgical procedure removes wool-bearing skin from the rear of the sheep in order to reduce incidence of fly-strike and make shearing easier. The procedure is used on 95 per cent of all Merino sheep and has been practised without anaesthetic, though boycotts and other pressure from campaigning organizations has encouraged parts of the industry to reconsider the practice.11 Shearing is a stressful experience for sheep, and because shearers are usually paid at a piece rate, there is an incentive to work quickly rather than with maximal concern to avoid injury to the sheep.12 Like other Australian sheep, and as discussed in the previous chapter, many of these sheep will also face the hardships of long road and sea journeys as live exports to the Middle East. There are small-scale farms that produce wool from sheep that are not slaughtered for their meat, which has the potential to satisfy the criterion of enabling their flourishing,13 but such projects are clearly treating sheep very differently from those supplying the vast majority of wool globally. While direct archaeological evidence is hard to find, it is very likely that killing mammals for their fur has prehistoric origins, was a crucial strategy for human survival in cold climates, and was a valuable commodity for trade between human

R. Pattinson et al., NSW Wool Industry and Future Opportunities (Orange, New South Wales: NSW Department of Primary Industries, 2015), 2. 10  FAO figures for 2016 show that China raised 162 million sheep, Australia 68 million (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Statistics Division, ‘FAOSTAT’ (2016). 11  C. Lee and A. D. Fisher, ‘Welfare Consequences of Mulesing of Sheep’, Aust Vet J 85:3 (March 2007), 89–93; P. Windsor, S. Lomax and P. White, ‘Progress in Pain Management for Livestock Husbandry Procedures’. Proceedings of the Combined Australian Cattle Veterinarians & Australian Sheep Veterinarians Conference, Hobart, c. 2015; K. Dowler, ‘Sheepmeat Council of Australia Rejects Mulesing’, The Weekly Times, 4 October 2017. 12  H. Dobson et al., ‘Effects of Stress on Reproduction in Ewes’, Animal Reproduction Science 130:3-4 (2012), 135–40. 13  For a British example, see the Izzy Lane sheep sanctuary in North Yorkshire. URL: http:// izzylane.com.  9 

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prehistoric communities.14 Furs were traded between Ancient Egypt, Arabia and Phoenicia, imported by the Greeks from Libya and Scythia, and by the Romans from Germany.15 They were signs of wealth and luxury for medieval royalty: King Henry IV had a single robe made of 12,000 squirrel and 80 ermine skins; Anne of Brittany was married to Charles VIII in a robe made from 160 sable pelts.16 Fur was in such high demand that European populations of mammals killed for fur were in steep decline by the early 1600s, and early American colonists from Europe earned substantial income shipping furs back to their homelands.17 It was only in the twentieth century, however, that mammals were first raised in cages to be killed for their fur. Fur farms now supply 85 per cent of the global production of fur, with the majority of fur farms located in Europe. The scale of their operations is vast: 87 million mink were killed for fur in 2013–14, and 7.8 million foxes. The remaining 15 per cent of global fur production comes from wild-caught animals, mostly from the United States, Canada and Russia.18 In 1989, the UK Farm Animal Welfare Council issued a press release disapproving of mink and fox farming. The Council expressed concern about ‘the keeping of what are essentially wild animals in small barren cages’, and its belief that ‘the systems employed in the farming of mink and fox do not satisfy some of the most basic criteria which it has identified for protecting the welfare of farm animals’, such as ‘appropriate comfort or shelter’, the ‘freedom to display most normal patterns of behaviour’, and enrichment in their cages, including access to water.19 This opinion was influential in approval by the UK parliament of a ban on fur farming in 2000; Austria banned fur farming in 2004. Recent studies confirm the council concerns that animals farmed for fur suffer from not being able to engage in normal behavioural patterns and show signs of stress from confinement.20 They are subjected to a range of problematic

A. Anderson, ‘Economic Change and the Prehistoric Fur Trade in Northern Sweden: The Relevance of a Canadian Model’, Norwegian Archaeological Review 14:1 (1981), 1–16; I. Gilligan, ‘Clothing and Modern Human Behaviour: Prehistoric Tasmania as a Case Study’, Archaeology in Oceania 42:3 (2007), 102–11. 15  E. J. Dolin, Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), 25. 16  Dolin, Fur, Fortune, and Empire, 26. 17  Dolin, Fur, Fortune, and Empire, 27–8. Dolin notes that the Pilgrim Fathers sustained their colony in the first decade substantially through trading with Native Americans for beaver pelts to sell in England. See also T. Morantz and D. Francis, Partners in Furs: A History of the Fur Trade in Eastern James Bay 1600–1870 (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983). 18  International Fur Federation, ‘About the Fur Trade’ (2015). 19  Farm Animal Welfare Council, ‘Press Notice: Farm Animal Welfare Council Disapproves of Mink and Fox Farming’ (4 April 1989). 20  G. J. Mason, J. Cooper and C. Clareborough, ‘Frustrations of Fur-Farmed Mink’, Nature 410 (2001), 35–36; L. Olofsson and L. Lidfors, ‘Abnormal Behaviour in Swedish Farm 14 

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slaughter methods, including gas poisoning, electrocution, or breaking their necks, and in some cases a lack of care concerning whether the animals have been killed means they are skinned alive.21 Where animals are taken from the wild to be killed for fur, they obviously avoid the lifetime of close confinement suffered by farmed animals. In many cases, however, they undergo suffering before their deaths that is very much more severe than the deaths of animals raised in farms. In a 2013 article reviewing video footage of the Canadian commercial seal hunt from an animal welfare perspective, veterinary scientists Andrew Butterworth and Mary Richardson note the following five principles of humane slaughter of animals accepted by Canada, the United States and Europe: ‘Minimizing distress experienced by the animal prior to stunning’; ‘Rendering the animal unconscious (and therefore insensitive to pain) without the need to repeat the application of the stunning method’; ‘Confirming unconsciousness by monitoring for multiple indicators of consciousness’; ‘Delivering death without delay through an accepted euthanasia method’; and ‘Ensuring unconsciousness persists until death’.22 Assessing the adequacy of regulation and practice in relation to these principles, they reach the following shocking conclusion: Canada’s Marine Mammal Regulations and Conditions of Sealing licenses fail to adequately prescribe any of these steps, allowing sealers to legally herd seals prior to stunning, stun and kill animals in view of each other, repeatedly club or shoot seals to achieve unconsciousness, leave wounded seals to suffer for extended periods of time, impale conscious seals on metal hooks and drag them across the ice, and cut open seals whilst they may be responsive to pain.23

Butterworth and Richardson report that 98 per cent of the harp seals killed in the hunt are below three months of age. The hunt is the largest commercial slaughter of marine mammals, killing 1,782,560 between 2003 and 2008.24 While trapping organizations claim that wild trapping can be humane, there is no doubt that the means used to trap and kill the majority of animals captured

Mink During Winter’, in Proceedings of the Xth International Scientific Congress in Fur Animal Production, ed. P. F. Larsen et al. (Wageningen, the Netherlands: Wageningen Academic Publishers, 2012). 21  R. Roman, ‘Fur/Fur Farming’, in Humans and Animals: A Geography of Coexistence, ed. J. Urbanik and C. L. Johnston (Santa Barbara, CA; Denver, CO: ABC-CLIO, 2017), 162; R. Clubb, ‘The Welfare of Animals Bred for Their Fur in China’, in Animals, Ethics and Trade: The Challenge of Animal Sentience, ed. J. D’Silva and J. Turner (London; Sterling, VA: Earthscan, 2012), 189. 22  A. Butterworth and M. Richardson, ‘A Review of Animal Welfare Implications of the Canadian Commercial Seal Hunt’, Marine Policy 38 (2013), 460. 23  Butterworth and Richardson, ‘Review of Animal Welfare Implications’, 461. 24  Butterworth and Richardson, ‘Review of Animal Welfare Implications’, 457.

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from the wild for their fur fail the accepted standards of humane slaughter noted by Butterworth and Richardson. Traps that are designed to clamp shut on the leg of an animal to restrain it until the trapper returns to slaughter it are considered inhumane and banned within the European Union and by eighty countries globally, but are in common use in the USA and Canada. It is obvious that such traps do not minimize the animal’s distress, as required by the accepted standards for humane slaughter. Bernard Rollin notes that coyotes have been known to chew their own legs off when caught in such traps, showing their response to restraint is so aversive that the excruciating pain caused by chewing through their own leg is preferable.25 This is the case even when the animal is not significantly injured by the restraint, but fractured limbs and severed tendons and ligaments are common, together with a wide range of other major injuries.26 Even under ‘best practice’ guidelines in which trappers are supposed to visit each trap once per day, trapped animals can be left to suffer in this way for up to 36 hours. Submerged traps are used to hold aquatic mammals such as otters and beavers underwater, killing them from drowning-induced hypoxia following a period of distress in which they struggle to reach the surface which may last up to 15–20 minutes.27 Such horrifying deaths are clearly incompatible with any notion of humane slaughter. The lack of selectivity in many types of traps means that it is common for more non-target species to be killed than target species.28 Large numbers of reptiles are killed for their skins: while production statistics are hard to locate, figures for international trade indicate that at least 1.2 million crocodiles and alligators are killed for their skins annually. The numbers documented as being caught in the wild reduced from 1.5 million in 1985 to less than 100,000 in 1999. ‘Ranching’ – the practice of taking eggs from the wild and raising the animals in captivity – accounted for a further 200,000. Significant captive breeding of crocodiles and alligators began only in the 1990s, but accounted for over 60 per cent of the documented sources of skins in 1999;29 700,000 lizard skins were recorded as being traded internationally in 2008, and an average of 500,000 python skins between 2000 and 2009.30 The Bernard E. Rollin, ‘The Moral Status of Invasive Animal Research’, Hastings Center Report (2012), S6. 26  G. Iossa, C. D. Soulsbury and S. Harris, ‘Mammal Trapping: A Review of Animal Welfare Standards of Killing and Restraining Traps’, Animal Welfare 16:3 (2007), 345; S. R. Harrop, ‘The International Regulation of Animal Welfare and Conservation Issues through Standards Dealing with the Trapping of Wild Mammals’, Journal of Environmental Law 12:3 (2000), 357, quoted in T. Wyatt, ‘Non-Human Animal Abuse and Wildlife Trade: Harm in the Fur and Falcon Trades’, Society & Animals 22:2 (2014), 203–4. 27  Iossa, Soulsbury and Harris, ‘Mammal Trapping’, 338. 28  Iossa, Soulsbury and Harris, ‘Mammal Trapping’, 342. 29  United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Improving International Systems for Trade in Reptile Skins Based on Sustainable Use (New York and Geneva: United Nations, 2012), 7–8. 30  UNCTAD, Improving International Systems for Trade in Reptile Skins, 8–9. 25 

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vast majority of snake and lizard skins are derived from animals caught in the wild. It is important to note that these figures only record international trade, are incomplete and do not include any species not covered by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). When CITES was set up in 1973, it was thought that the farming of endangered reptile species might help reduce pressure on wild populations, but sourcing animals for farming has depleted some wild populations, farms have been used to ‘launder’ wild-caught animals, and critics argue that there are very few examples of any measurable conservation success related to CITES.31 Wild populations of reptiles and amphibians have been in significant global decline in recent decades and one study suggests imports of reptiles to the USA alone have potentially impacted wild populations detrimentally.32 Slaughter methods for reptiles killed for their skins are a very serious concern: shockingly, reptiles are often skinned alive and/or die slow and painful deaths because stunning is ineffective or decapitation is erroneously believed to cause death quickly. Crocodiles, for example, can remain conscious for nearly two hours after being decapitated, because of their ability to function at a low metabolic rate. Snakes may be filled with water or air to facilitate the removal of their skin in advance of being asphyxiated or having a cardiac arrest induced.33 A UN report notes that supply chains are so long and complex that it is unrealistic that any retailer could have adequate oversight over the operative animal welfare conditions where animals are caught, kept and killed.34 Down feathers of ducks and geese are used as fillers to provide thermal insulation in clothing and bedding. In 2000, the world trade in down was 55,000 tons and worth 600 million US dollars. China produced just over half of this output, with other major producers including Taiwan, Thailand and Hungary.35 There are three ways in which down can be obtained: from the carcasses of birds killed for meat, from plucking feathers from live birds, and

UNCTAD, Improving International Systems for Trade in Reptile Skins, 12–13; J. A. Lyons and D. J. D. Natusch, ‘Wildlife Laundering through Breeding Farms: Illegal Harvest, Population Declines and a Means of Regulating the Trade of Green Pythons (Morelia Viridis) from Indonesia’, Biological Conservation 144:12 (2011), 3073–81; D. W. S. Challender, S. R. Harrop and D. C. MacMillan, ‘Towards Informed and Multi-Faceted Wildlife Trade Interventions’, Global Ecology and Conservation 3 (2015), 129–48. 32  M. A. Schlaepfer, C. Hoover and C. Kenneth Dodd, ‘Challenges in Evaluating the Impact of the Trade in Amphibians and Reptiles on Wild Populations’, BioScience 55:3 (2005), 256–64. 33  A. Kasterine et al., ‘The Trade in Southeast Asian Python Skins’, Geneva, c. 2012 41–2. 34  UNCTAD, Improving International Systems for Trade in Reptile Skins, 14–16. 35  J. Kozák, I. Gara and T. Kawada, ‘Production and Welfare Aspects of Goose Down and Feather Harvesting’, World’s Poultry Science Journal 66:04 (2010), 768. 31 

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from gathering feathers from nests. For feathers obtained from carcasses, the same considerations apply as those discussed in relation to food in the previous chapter. A large and growing proportion of ducks in China are raised intensively, in stacked slatted cages.36 Live plucking produces a higher quality of down, but is widely recognized to be painful for the birds.37 There is wide disagreement about the proportion of world production derived from live plucking of birds: a 2009 Swedish documentary suggested that 50–80 per cent of production was obtained by this method, but producers dispute this and claim that the figure is very much lower.38 Gathering down from nests is much less problematic in relation to welfare: it can be done when the birds have left the nests, or down can be replaced by straw while the birds are nesting. The practice has been used for centuries in northern Norway to collect eiderdown from the eider duck: the people of Helgeland provide food and shelter for the ducks, protect them from predators and collect down from their nests when they leave.39 Nest-harvested down is potentially compatible with the flourishing of ducks and geese, but represents a very small component of the overall supply. Any down not clearly identified as derived from nest harvesting can be assumed to be sourced from birds killed for meat or live-plucked. One further major use of non-human animals to produce textiles for clothing is in the production of silk. While the cocoons of silk moths can be gathered after the moths have emerged from their cocoons, the moth emits a brown fluid to dissolve part of the cocoon to create a hole and allow it to exit. For producers, it is far preferable to be able to harvest silk from undamaged cocoons: this allows the long and continuous silk filament of 400–1,500 metres from the inner casing of the cocoon to be transferred directly to a reel. Commercial silk producers therefore

D. Guémené, Z. D. Shi and G. Guy, ‘Production Systems for Waterfowl’, in Alternative Systems for Poultry: Health, Welfare and Productivity, Poultry Science Symposium Series, vol. 30, ed. V. Sandilands and P. M. Hocking, 128–54 (Wallingford, Oxfordshire: CABI, 2012). 37  M. J. Gentle and L. N. Hunter, ‘Physiological and Behavioural Responses Associated with Feather Removal in Gallus Gallus Var Domesticus’, Research in Veterinary Science 50:1 (1991), 95–101; Panel on Animal Health and Welfare (AHAW EFSA), ‘Scientific Opinion on the Practice of Harvesting (Collecting) Feathers from Live Geese for Down Production’, EFSA Journal 8:11 (2010), 1886. 38  A. Stuijt, ‘Ikea Drops Live-Plucked Chinese Down Bedding from Shops’, Digital Journal, 17 February 2009; Kozák, Gara and Kawada, ‘Production and Welfare Aspects’, 768; Xinhua News Agency, ‘China Down Industry Disputes Swedish Reports’, CHINA.ORG. CN, 10 February 2009. 39  B. Berglund, ‘Fugela Feđerumin Archaeological Perspective – Eider Down as a Trade Commodity in Prehistoric Northern Europe’, Acta Borealia 26:2 (2009), 119–35; B. Sundsvold, ‘Stedets Herligheter – Amenities of Place: Eider Down Harvesting through Changing Times’, Acta Borealia 27:1 (2010), 91–115. 36 

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kill the pupae inside the cocoons by exposing them to steam or drying them in hot air. One kilogram of raw silk requires 600–1,000 cocoons.40 In 2012, global production of raw silk was 153,000 tonnes, so 90–150 billion pupae are killed each year in this way.

A Christian Ethical Assessment of the Use of Other Animals for Clothing and Textiles The Genesis 2 creation story pictures a relationship between humans and other animals in which humans require nothing from other animals. Their food is derived from plants and they require no clothing, being unashamed in their nakedness (Gen. 2.25). In this narrative humans and other animals exist in a relationship that is free from any relationship of use, dwelling in peaceable innocence together. All this changes with the fateful act of human disobedience, the first consequence of which is the man’s and the woman’s awareness of their nakedness. In response they clothe themselves in loincloths made of fig leaves sewn together (Gen. 3.7). Clothing is therefore a mark of human shame at its origin. After judgement has been pronounced on the man and the woman, God ‘made them garments of skins’ and clothed them (Gen. 3.21), apparently replacing the sewn fig leaves. Since creaturely death seems not to be part of life in Eden, the origin of these skins is obscure. Perhaps this second act of clothing is an act of mercy by God. Calvin suggests that God chose the skins of other animals because they would have a more degrading appearance than those made of linen or wool, as a shameful reminder of human sin.41 Using other animals for clothing, therefore, from the beginning is not an innocent act. Like the human use of other animals for food, clothing humans in the skins of other animals was not part of God’s original plan; in the peace between all creatures of the new creation no animal will be killed to clothe human beings. We are confronted here, then, with a second question of what is permissible between the times. As noted above, it is very likely that in some periods of human history in particular climates it was necessary for human survival to make use of other animals for clothing. For the few human populations where this remains the case, such as would seem to be the case for pastoralist Siberian reindeer herders, there are grounds to justify the use of other animals to make clothing.42 For the vast majority of the human population currently, however, this is not the case, and there are very R. K. Datta and M. Nanavaty, Global Silk Industry: A Complete Source Book (New Delhi: APH Publishing Corporation, 2007), 87, 121. 41  J. Calvin, Genesis, ed. J. King, trans. J. King (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), 106. 42  I. Krupnik, Arctic Adaptations: Native Whalers and Reindeer Herders of Northern Eurasia, trans. M. Levenson (Hanover, NH; London: University Press of New England, 2002). 40 

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many materials available for the manufacture of clothing that do not require the use of other animals, making the use of other animals for clothing unnecessary. We must therefore consider the question of whether it is appropriate to make use of other animals for clothing in the context of the recognition that we do not need to do so. The evidence cited in the previous section, that the environmental costs of processing leather are greater than those of synthetic alternatives, suggests that deriving textiles from animals is undesirable from an environmental perspective as well. Obviously, Christians who seek to live without depending on the killing of fellow animal creatures for meat will also seek to find sources of clothing that avoids the need for their killing. One argument in favour of using leather produced from the hides of beef cattle identifies leather as a by-product of the industry, which it is better to use than allowing it to go to waste. Along these lines, we might reason that although we object to raising these animals for meat, making use of the by-product of their hides is better than the alternative of discarding them. Hopefully to state this argument is to recognize its deficiencies. Since, as outlined in the previous section, the value of the hide is 5–10 per cent of the value of the animal carcass, purchasing leather products makes a substantial contribution to the economic viability of the farming systems that raise animals for meat: this percentage might be similar to the profit margin for many producers and processors. Whether leather is appropriately described as a by-product is therefore irrelevant: it is a product of the meat industry that contributes to its profits. Reduced demand for leather would therefore have a similar impact to reduced demand for meat: it would result in fewer animals being raised in these systems. Where those systems are judged inadequate in relation to the criterion of allowing farmed animals to flourish as fellow creatures of God, avoiding purchasing leather products derived from them is therefore significant in the same way as avoiding purchasing meat from these sources. The environmental impact of the tanning process is an additional reason to reject the argument that it is better to process hides for leather production than to discard them. Having dealt with the cases where non-human animal products for clothing are necessary for human survival, or obtained from processes primarily aimed at their use for food, we can now turn to the questions particular to this chapter, when the use of other animals for clothing is the primary aim in raising them in farmed environments or killing them in the wild. The raising of sheep and other animals for wool seems appropriate to consider first. As discussed in the previous section, it is possible to envisage systems of raising sheep for wool that would meet the criterion of allowing them to flourish in good lives. They may be raised extensively, and making use of their wool does not require their deaths. Shearing and other handling procedures cause stress to the sheep, but could be done at a slower pace than is currently the norm and with much more care for the welfare of the sheep. While it is possible to purchase wool from small-scale farms that operate in this way, as noted above, it is important to recognize that this is not how the vast majority of wool is produced. Australia is the leading producer of wool, and sheep there undergo a range of painful procedures including castration, taildocking, and the mulesing surgery described above. After pressure from animal

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welfare groups, anaesthesia is being used more commonly for the latter, but this is far from universal, and other painful procedures continue to be practised without anaesthesia. It is clear that farmers have been insufficiently attentive to the pain and suffering caused by these procedures, and that sheep continue to be subjected to suffering that could be avoided. The fate of Australian sheep at the end of their lives is of even greater concern: like the sheep raised primarily for meat discussed in the previous chapter, they are likely to be subjected to long land journeys by rail or road, followed by live export to China or the Middle East, exposed to high temperatures on the decks of cargo ships, and poor standards of animal welfare at slaughter. Except where the source of wool is known as providing a good life for the sheep, consumption of wool is by no means an innocent use of farmed animals, and the current conditions of supply from Australia cannot be counted as compatible with a good life for the sheep concerned. As I approach the question of using other animals for fur, my writing is interrupted by what the trapping and fur farming literature calls a ‘fur bearer’. This particular fur-bearer, our cat Mitsy, makes her presence known at the door of my study, and leads me into the kitchen for one of her chief pleasures: to roll on her back and have her tummy tickled. Her eyes close, her paws curl, she stretches out, given over to the pleasure she so evidently feels and communicates. She will happily remain like this for several minutes, though it is wise to keep an eye on her: the first sign of her having had enough is often an attempted play bite, which can draw blood. Her fur is soft and warm – a delight to touch – there is no doubt that the glossy websites I have been reading promoting fur are right about the sensual pleasure humans derive from its feel. I am reminded that a long time ago when living in rural Cumbria I cycled past a rabbit that had been hit by a passing car and lay dead by the side of the road. Even in death, the rabbit was very beautiful, and I decided to take the body home. I wanted to keep the softness of its fur, and so, though never having done so before, I cut the body open, removed the rabbit’s innards, head and feet, and found myself with a rabbit pelt. Untreated, the skin dried hard, but the fur remained soft. I did not keep it long, though: while the softness was preserved, the rabbit’s beauty was not. It was the remnant only of a corpse. I wished then for the skills of a taxidermist, though now when I view specimens in the galleries of natural history museums it seems that the beauty of the animals has escaped them, too. Below Mitsy’s fur I feel her ribs, her rapid heart beat, the vulnerability of her intricate body beneath her fur and skin. And then I think about her fur-bearing peers, possessing their own particular individuality and complex sociality, capable of flourishing as animal creatures in their own particular ways, but even now, as I stroke Mitsy, isolated in small barren cages, being put into the kill box to be gassed, or lying in the backwoods, caught by a wounded leg in a trap or trapped underwater, making terrified and desperate attempts to escape. The term ‘fur-bearer’ seems well-chosen to reduce these fellow creatures to carriers of a commodity to us. Like the cows, pigs, sheep, goats, buffalo, rabbits, and other mammals farmed for food, animals killed for their fur are fellow mammal creatures, as well as being fellow animal creatures, with the additional shared experience discussed in the previous

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chapter, especially in relation to the maternal-infant bond. These fellow animal creatures are no more properly described as ‘fur-bearers’ than we are as ‘skinbearers’. The relationship I value with Mitsy, the relationships others enjoy with cats like her, or with dogs, or rabbits or guinea pigs, should all help us recall the less-intensive, but no less real, relationship of fellow animal creature we have with all animals farmed or trapped for their fur. The use of other animals for fur is distinct from the use of skins of animals killed for their meat, or wool derived from sheep and other animals raised domestically, in two key ways. First, fur is derived from wild animals, raised in cages in substantial numbers for the first time only in the last few decades. Theoretically, wild capture could provide a freer life than could be offered in captivity, followed by a painless death, but in practice, as the previous section demonstrated, the hunting and trapping of wild animals for fur often results in very high levels of suffering, extended over periods of up to 36 hours, even when best practice guidelines for trapping are followed. Farming these wild animals is problematic for the animals in different ways: they are not suited to the confinement, and do not have the ability to engage in natural behaviours – such as access to water, for mink. In short, it is primarily the deaths inflicted on animals hunted or trapped in the wild, and the lives inflicted on animals raised in cages, that should be judged unacceptable. The wild status of animals used for fur is therefore an additional concern beyond those related to leather or wool, whether they are hunted, trapped or raised in cages. The second distinction from considerations relating to leather or wool is the status of fur as a luxury product. Few human beings are now dependent on wearing fur to keep warm. The vast majority of fur produced is sold at very high prices to the very wealthy where the purchase is motivated presumably by a desire for luxury and/or display of elite status, though recent reports suggest that the volume of fur farming has increased such that it has become economically attractive to market real fur as fake.43 While I have argued that only for very few humans is it necessary to use other animals for food or clothing to survive, there is an appreciable difference of degree between a choice to buy a pair of shoes made from leather in a context where this is common and alternatives are not always readily available, and the choice to purchase a mink coat requiring the caged raising and killing of forty mink. In a theological perspective that recognizes mink and other furry mammals as fellow creatures of God, called to glorify God in their flourishing, it is inconceivable that a desire for luxury goods could ever be a sufficient justification for raising them in captivity or killing them in the wild, causing substantial stress and suffering. While I have suggested good reasons to judge that the use of leather and wool are problematic given a theological appreciation of the value of the lives of other animals before God, the theological objection to killing other animals for fur is stronger, on the

S. Hajibagheri, ‘Real Animal Fur Sold as Fake on British High Street’ (10 April 2017).

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basis that these are wild animals, unable to thrive in domesticated contexts, and usually killed inhumanely in hunting or traps, used only to supply luxury products that are by definition the antithesis of necessity. It may be that some humans are currently economically dependent on selling furs, at any point in the production and retail chains, but there are other ways of making a living that do not require the cruelties inflicted on these fellow creatures. The killing of reptiles for their skins raises very similar concerns to the killing of mammals for their fur, except that, if anything, they seem to be treated still worse at slaughter either out of disregard for their welfare or ignorance concerning their physiology. Like mammals killed for fur, these are wild animals that are likely to suffer from being hunted or trapped from the wild, and are unsuited to being raised in captivity. Like fur, reptile skins are luxury products for a rich elite, which means the disregard and disrespect of the status of these animals as our fellow creatures cannot be justified. Unlike mammals killed for fur, we are not ourselves reptiles, and so – herpetologists excepted – our response to the plight of reptiles may be less strongly informed by the intuitive empathy we are able to experience for mammals. Our understanding of reptile cognition remains at a rudimentary level in comparison with our understanding of cognition in mammals.44 It is important, however, to avoid allowing this additional separation between their creatureliness and ours to be an excuse for inattention or unconcern. We have no reason to doubt their ability to flourish, and to suffer from stress and injury. The pluralist theological scheme I outlined in the opening chapter allows that some animals may be less affectively engaging to us or less closely related to us without being judged less morally significant. The relationship that is fundamental in this context is our relationship to reptiles as fellow animal creatures, and it is on this that we should depend if we do not find ourselves empathetically engaged with the suffering and death of a crocodile in the same way as we are towards an arctic fox caged and killed for fur. Just as in the case of fur, there is no adequate justification in a theological context to cause the suffering and death of reptiles in order to make their skins into luxury products for humans. Some have suggested that sustainable practices of killing reptiles and trading in their skins is a good strategy for enabling local populations to value their local environment appropriately.45 I discuss the ethics of conservation projects of this kind in Chapter 8, but alternative conservation strategies that do not require causing the suffering and death of the animals protected would seem to be very obviously preferable. For a survey, see A. Wilkinson and L. Huber, ‘Cold-Blooded Cognition: Reptilian Cognitive Abilities’, in The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Evolutionary Psychology, Oxford Library of Psychology, ed. J. Vonk and T. K. Shackelford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 45  See, for example, the case studies discussed in R. Prescott-Allen and C. PrescottAllen (eds), Assessing the Sustainability of Uses of Wild Species: Case Studies and Initial Assessment Procedure (Gland, Switzerland: IUCN, 1996). 44 

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As noted above, the vast majority of the duck and goose down produced annually is either taken from the carcasses of birds killed for meat, or painfully plucked from live birds. China is the major producer, where ducks are increasingly raised intensively, raising the same serious concerns as with the intensive rearing of hens described in the previous chapter. There are good reasons to choose plant-based or synthetic alternatives for thermal insulation in clothes and bedding, unless the down is traceable to the very small number of suppliers who are gathering the down from nests without harming the birds. And so, finally, to the many billions of silkmoth larvae that are heated or dried to death in order to avoid causing damage to the silk of their cocoons. Again, we must recognize that there are relevant differences here between the case of killing these animals for their silk, and the cases of leather, wool, fur and reptile skin, discussed above. These are very much simpler creatures than any previously discussed, with much less well-developed cognitive capacities. Other larvae have been shown to exhibit aversive reactions to damaging stimuli, and it is likely that, if anyone were interested, aversive reactions from the larvae inside silkmoth pupae could be observed, and that there is some overlap between what we understand as the experience of pain in these creatures and the vertebrates we have been discussing up to this point in the chapter.46 The pluralist theological account outlined in the first chapter means, however, that not everything in a theological account depends on what we could judge to be the experience of the animal. I argued there that it is clear that Leibniz was right to replace the grub he was studying back on its leaf on the basis of what it means for him to be compassionate, rather than because of our conclusions about the cognitive or sensory capacities of the grub. The teleological perspective of theology is also material here: to kill a silkmoth larva and thereby block its becoming a moth is at odds with a desire for its flourishing as a creature that glorifies God in its becoming. Once we have recognized that the commercial production of silk requires the killing of silkmoth larvae, and that we can clothe ourselves without this material, we seem to have a good reason not to contribute to the demand for silk, or to purchase silk only from the small numbers of producers who avoid killing the larvae for ethical reasons.47 The limited cognitive capacities of the larvae are no block in a theological context to the recognition that choosing to clothe ourselves in materials that do not require the deaths of such fellow creatures is preferable.

Conclusion Concern for the lives and deaths of other animals is clearly not the only ethical consideration in relation to choice of clothing. There has been publicity concerning R. W. Elwood, ‘Pain and Suffering in Invertebrates?’, Institute for Laboratory Animal Research Journal 52:2 (2011), 175. 47  For an example of this ‘ahimsa silk’, see A. Sankar, ‘The Story of Ethicus: India’s First Ethical Fashion Brand’, Journal of Values-Based Leadership 5:1 (2012), 9. 46 

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exploitative labour practices in the textile industry, particularly in the developing world, with low wages and poor health and safety conditions, and attention given to the environmental impact of cotton and other plant fibres.48 This chapter has argued that ethical issues in relation to human responsibilities towards nonhuman animals are also significant and that there are strong reasons derived from a theological understanding of other animals to give careful consideration to the use we make of them for clothing. The killing of animals for their fur or skins seems particularly problematic, in the light of the non-necessity of the practice and the very considerable suffering caused when these animals are raised in captivity or hunted or trapped in the wild. The production of leather, wool and down according to current practices is also problematic, for reasons similar to those discussed in the previous chapter, and there seems no justification for counting the larvae of silkmoths, and therefore the production of silk, as outside the sphere of theological concern. The use of animal products for clothing involves humans in practices that cause unnecessary suffering and death to other animals, and provides strong reasons for those giving allegiance to a theological view of animal life to exercise care in their activity as consumers and producers. The theological view of other animals for which I have argued requires, in relation to the vast majority of products currently available, that Christians seek to avoid cooperating in the use of other animals for clothing and textiles.

A. Hale and J. Wills (eds), Threads of Labour: Garment Industry Supply Chains from the Workers’ Perspective (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Subramanian Senthilkannan Muthu, Assessing the Environmental Impact of Textiles and the Clothing Supply Chain, Woodhead Publishing Series in Textiles (Amsterdam: Woodhead Publishing, 2014).

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Chapter 4 U SI N G O T H E R A N I M A L S F O R L A B O U R Using the bodies of other animals to produce food, clothing and textiles, as discussed in the previous two chapters, is certainly labour of a kind. Jason Hribal identifies such work as the labour of reproduction: ‘Oxen, bulls, cows, and goats were producing the leather industry. Sheep were producing the wool industry. Cows were the ones who produced the milk, cheese, and butter industries. Chickens produced the egg industry. Pigs and cattle produced the flesh industry.’ Alongside this kind of labour, Hribal notes a second and different kind of work: the labour of production of non-human animals, which was at its height in Europe and North America at the time of the Industrial Revolution: On the agricultural farms, it was oxen, horses, mules, and donkeys, as well as the occasional cow, ewe, or large dog, which pulled and powered the plows, harrows, seed-drills, threshers, binders, presses, reapers, mowers, and harvesters. In the mines, they towed the gold, silver, iron-ore, lead, and coal. On the cotton plantations and in the spinning factories, they turned the mechanical mills that cleaned, pressed, carded, and spun the cotton. On the sugar plantations, they crushed and transported the cane. On the docks, roads, and canals, they moved the carts, wagons, and barges of mail, commodities, and people. In the cities, they powered the carriages, trams, buses, and ferries. On the battlefields, they deployed the artillery and supplies, they provided the reconnaissance, and they charged the lines.1

The tasks given by humans to other animals have diversified further since this time. We now use dogs in a wide range of novel roles: to detect drugs or evidence of arson, for example, to assist persons with disabilities and to provide therapies to hospital patients. Other human uses of other animals discussed in later chapters, in research laboratories, for sport, as companions and pets, or in zoos, could also be categorized as their labouring on our behalf. The focus of this chapter is those human uses of other animals that are distinct from Hribal’s category of reproductive labour, in making use of the strength and skills of non-human animals, rather than merely their bodies, and distinct from uses of other animals for sport or entertainment, in that they pertain to human activities that are not merely recreational. These uses of non-human animals to do human J. Hribal, ‘Animals, Agency, and Class: Writing the History of Animals from Below’, Human Ecology Review 14:1 (2007), 105.

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work raise some moral considerations that are distinct from the issues of other chapters. The relationship of a hearing dog to the human she helps with hearing loss, for example, can be one in which the dog is a much-loved companion as well as providing assistance that helps enable greater independence for the person with hearing disability. This is not to say there are no costs to the dogs used in this way, that we do not need to attend to the moral complexities that overlap with many of those discussed in Chapter 7 on companion animals, or that some disability assistance dogs are not ill-treated. There is clear potential in this context, however, for a relationship of mutuality in which the dog concerned can enjoy a good life while being appreciated for their particular aptitude for attention to and communication with humans. Unlike most non-human animals used for food or clothing, there is no necessity to kill animals used in this way, and they may be well looked after until their deaths. Unlike uses of other animals for sport or entertainment, dogs employed in this way are contributing to the meeting of some kind of human need, rather than being used for activity that is primarily for amusement. The chapter will survey some of the astonishingly diverse human uses of the labour of other animals, and will then consider how we should assess these uses ethically in a theological context.

How Humans Use Other Animals for Labour Human Collaboration with Wild Animals Before considering examples of domesticated animals doing work for humans, it is helpful to consider what could be construed as the ideal case of human use of nonhuman labour, where humans and non-domesticated animals collaborate in order to obtain food together. There are several examples of this cooperation. First, African honeyguide birds, which feed on beeswax and bee larvae, guide humans to the nests of bees, which they would otherwise be unable to access. Humans break open the nest and extract the honey, after which the birds are able to obtain food for themselves. The birds and humans communicate with calls, and human calls to the birds have been shown to influence their behaviour. Hunts for the nests of bees may be initiated by the bird, flying close to a human settlement and giving a specific guiding call to attract human attention, or by humans whistling to attract the attention of the birds. The honeyguides lead humans to the nest, indicating its direction and distance by the direction and length of short flights. The Hadza people of northern Tanzania derive 15 per cent of their total calories from honey, most of which is obtained with the help of the honeyguides. There are stories in some places of the humans setting aside some of the nest for the birds as a reward, although research among the Hadza people showed the reverse: often remains of the nest would be buried or burned, with the aim of keeping the birds sufficiently hungry to guide humans to further nests. It seems likely, however, that even where this is practised, the birds are able to obtain sufficient food reward to make their guiding worthwhile.2 B. M. Wood et al., ‘Mutualism and Manipulation in Hadza–Honeyguide Interactions’, Evolution and Human Behavior 35:6 (2014), 55–6.

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A second example of this collaboration in obtaining food is the cooperative fishing between bottlenose dolphins and humans that has been observed in two sites in Brazil. Mullet are caught using cast nets with circumference of around 30 metres. The casting of the nets appears to cause the mullet school to lose cohesion, allowing escaping fish to be caught by the dolphins. In the waters of the Barra de Imbé/Tramandaí, a small group of about nine dolphins interact daily with the fishermen. The dolphins drive schools of fish from deeper waters to the coastline, then surround the fish near the beach, before giving a nodding signal to the fishermen indicating when and where to cast the nets. The fishermen are unable to see the fish because of the turbulence in the water, so can aim the nets accurately only with the direction of the dolphins. The dolphins are known individually by name to the fishermen, who judge some more reliable than others in pointing to the fish. Dolphins also recognize human individuals, preferring to work with some rather than others. On occasion a dolphin is caught in one of the nets when he or she swims the wrong way. When this happens, the net is quickly cut to release the dolphin, and fishing is interrupted to mend the net. There is no record of when the cooperative fishing began, though the fishermen report that it has taken place at least since their grandparents’ time, which means it has been passed down intergenerationally on both the human and dolphin sides. The fishermen see the cooperation with the dolphins as important for their economic wellbeing, reporting that one day of cooperative fishing with the dolphins is sufficient to provide for the necessities of their family for a week. They are concerned that tourist activity frightens the dolphins away from the beach, and fear that one day the dolphins may disappear.3 There are accounts of similar cooperative hunting between orcas (also known as ‘killer whales’) and human whalers in Twofold Bay, New South Wales: The reports tell of cooperation between the predators and the whalers, with the Killer Whales sometimes actively attracting the attention of shore lookouts when a baleen whale was detected. After the kill, which involved the coordinated actions of the predators and Killer Whales, the whalers allowed the predators to feed, unmolested, on the tongue and lips of the sinking large whale. The following day, the whalers returned to the refloated carcass, and claimed their prize, complete except for the less commercially valuable tongue and lips. This practice finally died out as, over the years, the Killer Whales apparently died or moved elsewhere, and the technique became less profitable for the whalers.4

C. A. Zappes et al., ‘“Human-Dolphin (Tursiops Truncatus Montagu, 1821) Cooperative Fishery” and Its Influence on Cast Net Fishing Activities in Barra De Imbé/Tramandaí, Southern Brazil’, Ocean & Coastal Management 54:5 (2011), 427–32. 4 Th. A. Jefferson, P. J. Stacey and R. W. Baird, ‘A Review of Killer Whale Interactions with Other Marine Mammals: Predation to Co-Existence’, Mammal Review 21:4 (1991), 160. 3

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Other accounts of cooperation between humans and non-domesticated animals include the assistance in herding livestock given by wagtails and drongos in South Africa, giving alarm calls when predators approach.5 It seems likely that these particular accounts of humans and other animals cooperating in the work of obtaining food are representative of a much wider range of cooperative activity. Working with Dogs Some accounts of the origins of the domestication of dogs suggest that it could have been a similar two-sided collaboration. There is consensus that the human domestication of dogs pre-dated the domestication of any other animal by a substantial margin. Dogs were domesticated at least 16,000 years ago, and some suggest that human-canid cooperation has a history of over 100,000 years.6 The earliest evidence for the domestication of other animal species is from the Near East, where the ancestors of sheep, goats, cattle, pigs and cats were domesticated 10,000 to 11,000 years ago. The circumstances of the earliest domestications of dogs, and the roles they played in relation to human communities, is not completely clear, and is likely to have arisen in various ways in different places, but there was regular contact between humans and wolves in this period and it seems likely that on occasion wolf pups were raised as companion animals, and that some wolves became used to obtaining food from human sources. The wolves that were least frightened of humans are likely to have self-selected a life lived in proximity to humans, and those that were aggressive towards humans would have been driven off, leading in time to a shaping of the behaviour and genetics of the wolves living in relationship to humans that was the origin of the domestic dog. It is likely that dogs would have been an asset in hunting, especially as humans developed ranged weapons, to chase down wounded prey, and they may have helped protect human/

N. J. Jacobs, ‘Herding Birds, Interspecific Communication, and Translations: Les Oiseaux Rassembleurs de Troupeau, Communication Interspécifique et Traductions’, Critical African Studies (2015), 1–10. 6 J. D. Vigne, ‘The Origins of Animal Domestication and Husbandry: A Major Change in the History of Humanity and the Biosphere’, Comptes Rendus Biologies 334:3 (2011), 171; D. F. Morey and R. Jeger, ‘Paleolithic Dogs: Why Sustained Domestication Then?’, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 3 (2015), 420–8; N. D. Ovodov et al., ‘A 33,000-Year-old Incipient Dog from the Altai Mountains of Siberia: Evidence of the Earliest Domestication Disrupted by the Last Glacial Maximum’, PLoS One 6:7 (2011), e22821. Wolfgang Schleidt and Michael Shalter have proposed the theory that humans and canids could have coevolved together for over 100,000 years; see W. M. Schleidt and M. D. Shalter, ‘CoEvolution of Humans and Canids: An Alternative View of Dog Domestication: Homo Homini Lupus?’, Evolution and Cognition 9:1 (2003), 57–72. 5

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dog groups from other predators.7 The original domestication of non-human animals could therefore be seen as a collaboration between humans and wolves, in a similar way to the examples of human collaboration with honeyguides, dolphins and orcas discussed above. Some modern human use of the work of dogs could be seen as in continuity with such collaborative relationships. Dogs used by police forces, for example, are commonly reared by a single handler, whose working life is devoted to enabling the dog’s work. Dogs may live as companions in the handler’s home, and are often now trained through positive rewards rather than negative correction, with studies indicating that this is more effective than aversive methods.8 Dogs are valued for the particular skills they bring to the police team that complement its human members, and dog handlers must trust the dog’s instincts, and have a rapport with the dog that allows excellent communication. Clinton Sanders’s ethnographic study of ‘K-9’ unit officers and their dogs makes clear the qualities valued in a police dog: trainers explained that dogs must be an appropriate size, agile, healthy, intelligent, self-confident, able to handle stress, and must exhibit a desire for the play used to motivate them together with ‘a sense of duty, loyalty, dependability, and service’.9 The dog handlers must be skilled in establishing a rapport with their dog, and have ‘dog-sense’: ‘Every dog is different, and the big thing about being a handler is being able to read your dog. You have to understand his body language. You have to know what your dog is doing.’10 Training manuals emphasize the need for mutuality in the relationship between the dog and their handler, and for dogs to find the work rewarding: The dog should enjoy his work and do things for his handler because of his strong desire to please and not because of fear of retaliation for an error. If you are forced to submit to a superior, you find it degrading and will build up a dislike for the person. Why, then, should it be any different for your canine partner? Let your dog be an equal worker, sharing with you your on-duty and off-duty activities. Make him your friend and not your slave. Just as it is much J. Clutton-Brock, ‘Origins of the Domestic Dog: Domestication and Early History’, in The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behaviour and Interactions with People, ed. J. Serpell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); D. Morey, Dogs: Domestication and the Development of a Social Bond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ch. 4.  8  D. Lefebvre et al., ‘The Quality of the Relation between Handler and Military Dogs Influences Efficiency and Welfare of Dogs’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science 104:1-2 (2007), 59; J. Ensminger, Police and Military Dogs: Criminal Detection, Forensic Evidence, and Judicial Admissibility (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2011), 7.  9  C. R. Sanders, ‘“The Dog You Deserve”: Ambivalence in the K-9 Officer/Patrol Dog Relationship’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35:2 (2006), 154, 158, quoting J. Rapp, How to Organize a Canine Unit and Train Dogs for Police Work (Fairfax, VA: Denlinger, 1979), 50. 10  Sanders, ‘The Dog You Deserve’, 156.  7 

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easier for you to work with somebody than it is for somebody, it is better for the dog to understand that you are the leader and the boss, but you are fair in your punishment and do not forget to reward for a job well done.11

One K-9 handler comments to Sanders that he thinks he has the ‘best job in law enforcement’; another is enthusiastic about the confidence working with the dog gives him: It’s really a two-way street. When you see the officer and the dog work together for a while, there is just something there. It’s like the dog can read the handler’s mind … When you do traffic stops, it is a great feeling to know the dog is back there. That dog will save your ass more than you ever know. He will be better than another cop. The dog will feed off you. He will read how you react.12

Sanders was struck by ambiguities in the handler/dog relationship. One trainer comments that in some US states dogs are classified as police officers, and he has to warn handlers that they cannot use lethal force to defend their dog: ‘But in the excitement of the moment when the adrenaline is up, it is hard to think about that. To a handler, harming his dog is like harming a person. But the dog is just a tool.’13 It may be that the trainer is over-emphatic here as a result of the pedagogical need to remind handlers of the legal framework under which they operate, but his identification of dogs merely as tools is jarring, because it seems wholly incompatible with the emphasis on the relationship handlers need to develop with the dogs to work effectively with them, which comes closer to thinking of them as persons. Beyond attending to the experience of dogs engaged in working partnerships with police officers, it is important to be aware of issues concerning the welfare of the dogs used for this purpose that are peripheral to the practice. For example, Sanders discovered that many dogs for the police force he worked with were obtained from brokers who sourced dogs from Czechoslovakia, which officers identified as ‘a problem’, because they were kept in kennels except when they were taken out for ‘bite training’, were not healthy, and may have been fed poor diets.14 There are also the questions of what happens to dogs who are assessed as unsuitable for training, what happens to dogs that do not complete training, and what happens to dogs at the end of their working life. A recent study of Australian working dogs in different sectors found that 43 per cent of candidate dogs were rejected before training and a further 25 per cent failed to complete training successfully.15 These Sanders, ‘The Dog You Deserve’, 161–2, quoting R. S. Eden, K-9 Officer’s Manual (Bellingham, WA: Temeron Books, 1993), 49. 12  Sanders, ‘The Dog You Deserve’, 167. 13  Sanders, ‘The Dog You Deserve’, 165. 14  Sanders, ‘The Dog You Deserve’, 153. 15  N. Branson, M. Cobb and P. McGreevy, Australian Working Dog Survey Report (Canberra: Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, 2009), 22, 31. 11 

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rejected dogs ‘are not highly valued and may be rehomed, euthanased or face other fates’.16 Most dogs in the survey who were retired from service were kept in the same environment as previously, or rehomed as companion animals, but nearly half of dogs used by government agencies were killed at the end of their working life.17 Even where dogs are treated well during their working lives, therefore, the wider context of where dogs are sourced from, and what happens to dogs that are unsuitable for work at any point in their life, may give strong grounds for concern. Dogs play a valuable role in search and rescue operations on a similar model to their use in police work, working in close relationship with a single handler. Such use dates back at least as far as the dogs at the monastery at the Great Saint Bernard Pass in Switzerland, who were kept as guardians and companions, and accompanied the monks on their patrols for travellers in need of help in the mountains.18 Training can begin as puppies with hide-and-seek games, using positive reinforcement through praise and rewards to encourage the dogs to be enthusiastic about their role, then progressing through various more specialized tasks. Training for a handler/dog team takes twenty to thirty hours per week for around two years.19 One trainer notes that the dog needs to be confident and to have the capacity for ‘intelligent disobedience’, disobeying their handlers’ commands when the dog knows it is right to do so.20 Notably, and in continuity with welfare concerns of pedigree breeding in Chapter 7, the breeding of St Bernard dogs has led to susceptibility to epilepsy and hip dysplasia and very high mortality rates, with 50 per cent of dogs dying before reaching eight years old, which have reduced the capacity of the dogs to play a working role.21 Dogs assisting humans with disabilities have a similar one-to-one relationship with their handlers, and their effectiveness depends on the rapport established between the two partners. Such assistance is not a recent innovation: a wall fresco at Pompeii buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 depicts a blind man with a staff being led by a small dog, and a thirteenth-century Chinese scroll painting shows a blind man holding a leash in his left hand and a staff in his right. In the mid-thirteenth century, the English monk Bartholomew observed that blind P. D. McGreevy et al., Valuable Behavioural Phenotypes in Australian Farm Dogs (Barton, Canberra: Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, 2015), 2. 17  Branson, Cobb and McGreevy, Australian Working Dog Survey Report, 13. 18  A. G. Drake and C. P. Klingenberg, ‘The Pace of Morphological Change: Historical Transformation of Skull Shape in St Bernard Dogs’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B 275:1630 (2008), 71–2. 19  V. Fenton, ‘The Use of Dogs in Search, Rescue and Recovery’, Journal of Wilderness Medicine 3 (1992), 292–300. 20  Fenton, ‘Use of Dogs in Search, Rescue and Recovery’, 294. 21  A. Egenvall et al., ‘Mortality in over 350,000 Insured Swedish Dogs from 1995–2000: II. Breed-Specific Age and Survival Patterns and Relative Risk for Causes of Death’, Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica 46:3 (2005), 133; Fenton, ‘Use of Dogs in Search, Rescue and Recovery’, 293–4. 16 

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people often have to rely on servants, children or dogs to guide them, and guiding dogs are frequently depicted in later medieval drawings and paintings.22 Writing in the sixteenth century, Michel de Montaigne gives the guidance provided by dogs to the blind in France as evidence of their intelligence: We have all had our fill I expect of the sort of monkey-tricks which minstrels teach their dogs to do: those dances in which they never miss a note they hear or those varied jumps and movements which they perform on command. But I am much more moved to wonder by the action of guide-dogs used by the blind in town and country, common enough as they are. I have watched these dogs stop at certain doors where people regularly give alms, and seen how, even when there is room enough to squeeze through themselves, they still avoid encounters with carts and coaches; I have seen one, following the town trench but abandoning a level, even path for a worse one, in order to keep its master away from the ditch. How was that dog brought to realize that it was its duty to neglect its own interests and to serve its master? How does it know that a path might be wide enough for itself but not wide enough for a blind man? Could all that be grasped without thought and reasoning?23

Assistance dogs were first trained on a large scale to guide German war veterans blinded by mustard gas in the First World War, and by 1927 it is estimated that there were 4,000 dogs being used in Germany for this purpose. Shortly afterwards The Seeing Eye school for guide dogs was set up in the United States, followed by the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association in the United Kingdom.24 More recently, the roles of dogs in assisting humans with disabilities have expanded to include alerting those with hearing loss, and performing tasks for those with limited mobility. Karen Kraft, who suffers from scoliosis that limits her mobility severely, reports that her dog, Journey, has a repertoire of a hundred tasks ‘including doing the laundry, helping me to dress and undress, picking up dropped items, grocery shopping, going to college with me to carry my books, and finding the phone if I fell’, and

B. Anglicus, De Proprietatibus Rerum, ed. S. Batman, trans. J. Trevisa (London: Thomas East, 1582), bk 7, ch. 20; G. A. Fishman, ‘When Your Eyes Have a Wet Nose: The Evolution of the Use of Guide Dogs and Establishing the Seeing Eye’, Survey of Ophthalmology 48:4 (2003), 452–3. 23  M. De Montaigne, ‘An Apology for Raymond Sebond’, in The Essays of Michel De Montaigne, ed. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 2003), 516, cited in M. Derr, ‘Assistance Dogs’, in Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships: A Global Exploration of Our Connections with Animals, ed. M. Bekoff (Westport, CT; London: Greenwood, 2007), 9. 24  Fishman, ‘When Your Eyes Have a Wet Nose’, 454; Guide Dogs Association, ‘The History of Guide Dogs’ (2015). 22 

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gave her the independence to escape domestic abuse.25 Dogs also provide valuable assistance to those with mental illnesses: enabling persons with schizophrenia to determine whether they are hallucinating, alerting those with bipolar disorder that they are in a hypomanic phase, and helping those who suffer from panic attacks to recognize the signs of an impending attack and take preventative action.26 They have been trained to warn those suffering from seizure disorders of impending attacks, as well as reducing their frequency, and to detect cancer indicators in urine samples.27 Dogs are not the only non-human animals that are used to provide assistance to humans with disabilities: monkeys have been taught to perform tasks for humans suffering from quadriplegia, for example, and miniature ponies have been used in place of guide dogs for those with sight loss.28 Non-human animals have also been used more generally in therapeutic contexts, beyond the one-to-one disability assistance model. James Serpell notes that this practice, too, has a long history, with other animals occupying ‘a central position in theories concerning the ontology and treatment of sickness and disease’ through their spirits being the source of illness or misfortune, or their aid being called upon for healing.29 Ancient Greek authors, including Hippocrates, judged horse-riding beneficial for human health, and horses are widely used in therapeutic programmes to improve physical, psychological, emotional and social wellbeing, with over 40,000 people currently participating in programmes in the United States.30 The presence of other animals K. Kraft, ‘Service Dogs: A Personal Essay’, in Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships: A Global Exploration of Our Connections with Animals, ed. M. Bekoff (Westport, CT; London: Greenwood, 2007), 21. 26  J. Esnayra, ‘Psychiatric Service Dogs’, in Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships: A Global Exploration of Our Connections with Animals, ed. M. Bekoff (Westport, CT; London: Greenwood, 2007), 17–18. 27  J. N. Cornu et al., ‘Olfactory Detection of Prostate Cancer by Dogs Sniffing Urine: A Step Forward in Early Diagnosis’, European Urology 59:2 (2011), 197–201; V. Strong et al., ‘Effect of Trained Seizure Alert Dogs® on Frequency of Tonic–Clonic Seizures’, Seizure 11:6 (2002), 402–5. 28  B. L. Deputte and M. Busnel, ‘An Example of a Monkey Assistance Program: P.A.S.T. – the French Project of Simian Help to Quadriplegics’, Anthrozoös 10:2 (1997), 76–81; I. Dorothea and N. Rowan Andrew, ‘Ethical Issues in Animal-Assisted Therapy Programs’, Anthrozoös 4:3 (1991), 154–63; B. Witkind Davis, ‘Assistance and Therapy Animals’, in Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships: A Global Exploration of Our Connections with Animals, ed. M. Bekoff (Westport, CT; London: Greenwood, 2007). 29  J. A. Serpell, ‘Animal-Assisted Interventions in Historical Perspective’, in Handbook on Animal-Assisted Therapy: Theoretical Foundations and Guidelines for Practice, ed. A. H. Fine (Amsterdam: Academic Press, 2006), 16. 30  C. Thomas, ‘Horse-Assisted Therapy; Psychotherapy with Horses’, in Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships: A Global Exploration of Our Connections with Animals, ed. M. Bekoff (Westport, CT; London: Greenwood, 2007), 13. 25 

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has long been recognized as beneficial for patients: a mental asylum founded by the Society of Friends in the late eighteenth century used rabbits, sea-gulls, hawks and poultry to enable patients to focus on something outside themselves, and there are examples of similar initiatives in the nineteenth century, including the recognition by Florence Nightingale of the benefits of animal companionship in healing.31 Modern animal-assisted therapy programmes take companion or domestic animals to meet humans in libraries, schools, farms, hospitals, retirement homes, prisons, and elsewhere with the aim of improving human wellbeing. Most programmes are run by volunteers, often using their own companion animals.32 Many of the animals used to assist persons with disabilities are well looked after and have an enjoyable working life. Lucky, a hearing dog that was a great boon to the life of my grandfather in his late years, lived as any other domestic dog, the only difference being the training she had received to alert him – which my grandfather was not always conscientious in maintaining. The same issues noted above in connection with police dogs, of how the animals are sourced, what happens to those found unsuitable for work and what happens to those retired from service are relevant here, in addition to other considerations discussed in relation to companion animals in Chapter 7. Some animals have to undergo uncomfortable procedures in order to be accommodated in a domestic context: capuchin monkeys used to assist humans with quadriplegia, for instance, may have their teeth filed down or even extracted to prevent biting, and it seems likely that using animals such as these with a shorter history of domestication is likely to cause additional problems beyond those involved in using dogs or horses.33 Some persons with disabilities may not be able to care for their assistance animals without support, which means neglect may be a problem where this support is not forthcoming. Contexts where humans work with other animals on a one-to-one basis, where the duties performed by the animal are not usually unpleasant or exhausting, and where the work depends on a strong relationship of rapport between the members of the human/non-human partnership, are likely to be the least problematic of any uses of other animals by humans for work. The life of a dog trained to guide a human with sight loss, or a police dog skilled in detecting explosives, can be happy and fulfilling for the dog if their human partners value their skills, care for their needs, and the wider context of obtaining animals and providing for animals unable or no longer able to perform their work is appropriate. To the particular examples discussed above, we could add many others, such as dogs trained to herd sheep and cattle, or horses used by police for patrol. The vast majority of nonD. Altschiller, Animal-Assisted Therapy (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 3–4. L. Meers, D. Coultis and W. E. Samuels, ‘Animal-Assisted Interventions’, in Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships: A Global Exploration of Our Connections with Animals, ed. M. Bekoff (Westport, CT; London: Greenwood, 2007), 2. 33  Deputte and Busnel, ‘An Example of a Monkey Assistance Program’, 78. 31  32 

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human animals used to labour for humans, however, are used to provide power for transport or agricultural machinery, and it is to this work which I now turn. Using Other Animals for Draught Labour Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty was published in 1877, around the peak of human use of horses for labour. The book is striking in being narrated in the first person by the eponymous horse, whose eventful life demonstrates a wide range of contemporary uses of horses. While his first memory is of ‘a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it’, early in the story he witnesses a violent scene as human hunters make use of horses and dogs to pursue a hare: On came the dogs, they burst over the bank, leapt the stream, and came dashing across the field, followed by the huntsmen. Six or eight men leaped their horses clean over, close upon the dogs. The hare tried to get through the fence; it was too thick, and she turned sharp round to make for the road, but it was too late; the dogs were upon her with their wild cries; we heard one shriek, and that was the end of her. One of the huntsmen rode up and whipped off the dogs, who would soon have torn her to pieces. He held her up by the leg, torn and bleeding, and all the gentlemen seemed well pleased.34

Two horses fall in the stream. Rob Roy, ‘a good bold horse’ whom Black Beauty’s mother has known for years, groans with a broken leg before being shot by the farrier. One of the human hunters breaks his neck, which one of the colts comments serves him right. Black Beauty’s mother rebukes the colt, but is mystified ‘why men are so fond of this sport; they often hurt themselves, often spoil good horses, and tear up the fields, and all for a hare or a fox, or a stag, that they could get more easily some other way’.35 Black Beauty then describes the process of ‘breaking’, to train a horse to ‘never start at what he sees, nor speak to other horses, nor bite, nor kick, nor have any will of his own; but always do his master’s will, even though he may be very tired or hungry; but the worst of all is, when his harness is once on, he may neither jump for joy nor lie down for weariness’. He describes the discomfort of a bit in his mouth, of having iron shoes nailed to his feet, and a stiff crupper strap fixed beneath his tail, and hears the stories of Ginger, who resists cruel treatment and is punished as a result.36 When Black Beauty becomes a cab horse in London, his life becomes harder, and he witnesses many cruelties. He also gets to know Captain, a horse that has seen war service, and describes the scene after an intense battle:

A. Sewell, Black Beauty (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 3, 7–8. Sewell, Black Beauty, 8. 36  Sewell, Black Beauty, 11–13, 31–2. 34  35 

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Some of the horses had been so badly wounded that they could scarcely move from the loss of blood; other noble creatures were trying on three legs to drag themselves along, and others were struggling to rise on their fore feet, when their hind legs had been shattered by shot. Their groans were piteous to hear, and the beseeching look in their eyes as those who escaped passed them by and left them to their fate, I shall never forget.37

Black Beauty encounters his old friend Ginger in a very bad way in London: she is also a cab horse, but driven without mercy and without rest by her master. Ginger wishes to be dead rather than continue her suffering, and later Black Beauty sees a cart with a dead horse, the ‘head hung out of the cart-tail, the lifeless tongue was slowly dropping with blood; and the sunken eyes! but I can’t speak of them, the sight was too dreadful’. The horse bears some of Ginger’s features, and Black Beauty hopes it is her, exclaiming ‘Oh! if men were more merciful, they would shoot us before we came to such misery’.38 Soon it is Black Beauty that is in a desperate state: forced to pull an overloaded cab up Ludgate Hill by a driver using a whip with a sharp metal end that draws blood, his legs slip and he collapses from exhaustion. A farrier judges that six months’ rest will restore his health, but this does not suit his owner, whose plan is ‘to work ’em as long as they’ll go, and then sell ’em for what they’ll fetch, at the knacker’s or elsewhere’.39 The farrier persuades him that resting him until a horse sale in ten days’ time may raise ‘more than his skin is worth’, and so Black Beauty is spared for the sale, where he finds himself with the old, broken-down, lame and broken-winded horses, though Sewell observes that many of those bargaining about them did not seem much better off: ‘poor old men, trying to get a horse or pony for a few pounds, that might drag about some little wood or coal cart’, or ‘poor men trying to sell a worn-out beast for two or three pounds, rather than have the greater loss of killing them’.40 Black Beauty is taken pity on by the grandson of one of the farmers at the sale, and is fortunate enough to be allowed to end his life in the countryside where his life began. Sewell’s fictional account surveys a wide range of uses made of horses for draught labour in the late nineteenth century. Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka report that 10,000 hansom cabs were operating in London in this period, each pulled by two horses; Jason Hribal suggests that 35 million horses and mules were labouring in US cities by the early twentieth century.41 As noted in the quotation from Hribal at the beginning of the chapter, however, horses and other animals were used for a much wider range of industrial uses in this period, operating agricultural machinery, pulling ore and coal from the mines, turning mills to

Sewell, Black Beauty, 179. Sewell, Black Beauty, 210–11. 39  Sewell, Black Beauty, 252. 40  Sewell, Black Beauty, 252, 254. 41  S. Donaldson and W. Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 271 n. 3; Hribal, ‘Animals, Agency, and Class’, 104. 37  38 

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produce cotton, transporting and crushing cane on sugar plantations, and pulling carts, wagons and barges on roads, docks and canals. Selective breeding doubled the size of horses during the nineteenth century in order to improve their ability to perform such labour.42 The origins of the use of other animals to provide power in this way post-dated the use of dogs for help in guarding and hunting by at least 10,000 years: the use of oxen to pull ploughs began around 4,500 BC.43 It is notable, however, that this was long after cattle, wheat and barley were domesticated, which means that the use of oxen for labour was not necessary for the early development of agriculture, and seems to have been a by-product of their domestication as a source of food.44 By the end of the Bronze Age, non-human animals were being widely used to power automated bucket systems to bring up water from wells.45 While the early twentieth century was the peak of the use of non-human animals for labour in industrializing countries, in a global context, they remain highly significant in providing power for agriculture in Asia, and their use in Sub-Saharan Africa is increasing. In 1994 estimates of numbers of non-human animals used for draught labour put the global population at 400 million: 246 million bullocks, 60 million buffalo, 40 million donkeys, 27 million horses, 16 million camels and 10 million mules; 33 per cent of these animals were in India, 25 per cent in China, 14 per cent in other parts of Asia, with the remainder in Africa and Turkey.46 Indian estimates suggest that the population of draught animals there fell by 1 per cent per year between 1972 and 1997, and it is reasonable to judge that the same may be the case for China and other parts of Asia, which might mean the current population of animals used for draught labour could be closer to 300 million.47 In Sub-Saharan Africa, however, the use of draught animals was only introduced in the 1960s to increase production and export of cash crops such as groundnut in Senegal and cotton in Mali, and their population has been increasing for the past fifty years, with projections suggesting their use will continue to increase.48 A large proportion of farmers in developing

Hribal, ‘Animals, Agency, and Class’, 105. L. Kalof, Looking at Animals in Human History (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 11. 44  R. W. Bulliet, Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relationships (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 72–81. 45  J. P. Oleson, Greek and Roman Mechanical Water-Lifting Devices: The History of a Technology (Dordrecht: Springer Science & Business Media, 1984), 6. 46  N. S. Ramaswamy, ‘Draught Animals and Welfare’, Revue Scientifique et Technique (International Office of Epizootics) 13:1 (1994), 196–7. 47  Down to Earth, ‘65 Million Draught Animals’ (2004); P. E. Brockway, J. K. Steinberger and J. R. Barrett, Understanding China’s Past and Future Energy Demand: An Energy Efficiency and Decomposition Analysis, Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, no. 80 (Leeds: Sustainability Research Institute, 2015), 8. 48  E. Vall and Ph. Lhoste, ‘Animal Power in the West and Central Francophone Zone of Africa in a Renewed Context: The Issues for Development and Research Achievements’, in Working Animals in Agriculture and Transport: A Collection of Some Current Research 42  43 

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countries remain dependent on draught animal power for small-scale agriculture and transportation in contexts where mechanized power remains uneconomic.49 Non-human animals used for draught labour often suffer from being overworked and poorly cared for: Animals are often goaded by beating, to make them carry heavy loads beyond their capacity, or work longer hours. Sick and injured animals may be put to work. The state of health of draught animals is poor, as they are not fed adequately to replenish the energy needed for work. Implements, carts and other devices may be attached to animals by ill-fitting harnesses, thus causing unnecessary pain; neck injuries often lead to callosity and/or cancer.50

In many areas where farmers make use of other animals for this labour, however, it is important to note that they are surviving at subsistence level, facing adverse environments, uncertain rainfall, and unpredictable markets for their goods.51 Animal welfare is understandably a lower priority than human survival in such contexts, though some proposed initiatives could avoid this zero-sum game by both increasing the welfare of animals used for draught labour and the economic return on their labour.52 One particular group of non-human animals used for draught labour merits special attention: Asian elephants. They not are significant by number – representing fewer than 15,000 of the 300 million plus animals used for draught labour – but this domesticated population probably represents at least 25 per cent of the global population of Asian elephants.53 Elephants have the largest brain of any land animal, containing as many neurons as the human brain. Even in relation to their body size, their brain is relatively large, though below the relative

and Development Observations, EAAP Technical Series no. 6, ed. R. A. Pearson et al. (the Netherlands: Wageningen Academic Publishers, 2003), 14, 17; A. Fall et al., ‘The Role of Work Animals in Semi-Arid West Africa: Current Use and Their Potential for Future Contributions’, in Working Animals in Agriculture and Transport: A Collection of Some Current Research and Development Observations, EAAP Technical Series no. 6, ed. R. A. Pearson et al. (the Netherlands: Wageningen Academic Publishers, 2003), 27–8, 33. 49  Ramaswamy, ‘Draught Animals and Welfare’, 198, 202. 50  Ramaswamy, ‘Draught Animals and Welfare’, 198. 51  Ramaswamy, ‘Draught Animals and Welfare’, 198. 52  L. Van Dijk et al., The Role, Impact and Welfare of Working (Traction and Transport) Animals (Rome: FAO, 2011). 53  Mid-range estimates from the 2002 international workshop on domesticated Asian elephants total 45,500 wild elephants in Asia and 14,500 domesticated elephants (Masakazu Kashio, ‘Summary of the International Workshop on the Domesticated Asian Elephant’, in Giants on Our Hands: Proceedings of the International Workshop on the Domesticated Asian Elephant, ed. I. Baker and M. Kashio (Bangkok: FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, 2002), 20).

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size of humans or dolphins. The structure of elephant society is among the most elaborate of any vertebrate, and individuals may know and differentiate between several hundred different individuals, far in excess of non-human primates.54 They have sophisticated abilities in spatial mapping, ranging over great areas in order to locate food resources at appropriate times of year, and manufacture simple tools for scratching, removing ticks and keeping flies away.55 The earliest evidence of elephant domestication is in the Indus Valley civilization in the third millennium BC, though it is unclear in what ways they were used, before the Aryans began using them for war and transport from at least 1000 BC.56 In the modern period, domesticated Asian elephants have been used as status symbols, for hunting, to help capture wild elephants, as skilled labour for logging operations, for tourism, religious processions, in circuses and for agriculture.57 The process of ‘breaking’ elephants in order to render them submissive to their human handlers is often brutal. This is a description of how elephants are subdued in preparation for logging work in Sri Lanka: This is done with the help of fetters on all legs, binding rope around the neck and body, and around sensitive spots. Veteran monitor elephants are also made to flank the new recruit to keep it under control. Often the monitors play their role by lashing, nudging, kicking and beating the newcomer. Their mere presence is an influence on the wild elephant. For the first week the trapped elephant is starved, except to give an occasional drink. In any case the wild one is in no mood to eat and is in a state of trauma. As it gets weaker, the mahout tempts it by offering water. Gradually the elephant responds to the approach of the mahout.58

The elephant mahouts use an iron spike and hook mounted on a long pole to control the elephants: this can be used to apply painful pressure to nerve centres to keep the elephant under control.59 In some illegal logging camps in Thailand, elephants are frequently drugged with amphetamines so they can be made to

R. W. Byrne and L. A. Bates, ‘Elephant Cognition: What We Know about What Elephants Know’, in The Amboseli Elephants: A Long-Term Perspective on a Long-Lived Mammal, ed. C. J. Moss, H. Croze and P. C. Lee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 174–5. 55  Byrne and Bates, ‘Elephant Cognition’, 175–6. 56  Raman Sukumar, The Living Elephants: Evolutionary Ecology, Behavior, and Conservation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 56–61. 57  S. S. Bist et al., ‘The Domesticated Asian Elephant in India’, in Giants on Our Hands: Proceedings of the International Workshop on the Domesticated Asian Elephant, ed. I. Baker and M. Kashio (Bangkok: FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, 2002), 130. 58  P. Jayasekera and S. Atapattu, ‘Elephants in Logging Operations in Sri Lanka’, Forest Harvesting Case-Study (FAO) 5 (1999). 59  Jayasekera and Atapattu, ‘Elephants in Logging Operations in Sri Lanka’. 54 

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work longer hours.60 In addition to these serious concerns about the employment of elephants to provide draught labour, their unemployment in many areas has also given rise to serious problems. The suspension of legal logging operations in Thailand and elsewhere left many elephants and their mahouts unemployed. Some have been employed in tourist resorts where their welfare receives little attention; others are employed in illegal logging operations or are taken to big cities with their mahouts to wander the streets begging.61 Military Uses of Other Animals Most references to horses in the Bible refer to their military use, the final category of using other animals to do work I will consider in this chapter. The Egyptians pursue the Israelites with horses and chariots before they are overwhelmed by the sea (Exod. 14.9, 15.1); the Israelites are instructed not to be afraid in the face of horses and chariots (Deut. 20.1; Josh. 11.6); Solomon’s military might is measured by the 40,000 stalls he has for chariot horses and 12,000 horses and riders (1 Kgs 4.26, 10.26); to name but a few examples. The military use of chariots was disrupted by the development of mounted archers – the first cavalry – around 700 BC, but the ‘war horse and rider was a viable military weapons system for more than 3,000 years, far longer than any other military system’.62 The use of horses for war reached its peak intensity in the wars of the twentieth century, however: in the First World War eight million horses died, and in the Second World War, 14 million horses from the Soviet Union alone were killed.63 R. Lohanan, ‘The Elephant Situation in Thailand and a Plea for Co-Operation’, in Giants on Our Hands: Proceedings of the International Workshop on the Domesticated Asian Elephant, ed. I. Baker and M. Kashio (Bangkok: FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, 2002), 234. 61  Lohanan, ‘Elephant Situation in Thailand’, 233–4; Prasob Tipprasert, ‘Elephants and Ecotourism in Thailand’, in Giants on Our Hands: Proceedings of the International Workshop on the Domesticated Asian Elephant, ed. I. Baker and M. Kashio (Bangkok: FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, 2002); Viroj Pimmanrojnagool and Sawai Wanghongsa, ‘A Study of Street Wandering Elephants in Bangkok and the Socio-Economic Life of Their Mahouts’, in Giants on Our Hands: Proceedings of the International Workshop on the Domesticated Asian Elephant, ed. I. Baker and Masakazu K. (Bangkok: FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, 2002); J. Jayewardene, ‘The Care and Management of Domesticated Asian Elephants in Sri Lanka’, in Giants on Our Hands: Proceedings of the International Workshop on the Domesticated Asian Elephant, ed. I. Baker and Masakazu K. (Bangkok: FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, 2002). 62  L. A. DiMarco, War Horse: A History of the Military Horse and Rider (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2008), ix, quoted in R. Hediger, ‘Animals and War: Introduction’, in Animals and War: Studies of Europe and North America, ed. R. Hediger (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 6. 63  Hediger, ‘Animals and War’, 10–11. 60 

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In addition to their wide variety of other forms of work, dogs have also been used in a wide variety of ways to support military action: Dogs have been guards, mine and bomb detectors, messengers, detectors of enemy troops and traps, load bearers carrying ammunition, communication wire, carts full of equipment, food, and other necessities. They have run wiring or messages or equipment through tunnels and across no-man’s land. They have scoured trenches for the rats that learned to live in them, been paratroopers, scented for soldiers hidden underwater (with the United States in Vietnam). They have attacked opposing forces directly, pulling gunners out of their hiding places and the like. The Soviets used dogs as ‘suicide’ bombers, strapping a charge to their backs and having them crawl under tanks.64

Despite the value of the contribution made by dogs, the US military had a policy of killing them at the end of their military service, until President Clinton signed a law permitting them to be adopted in 2000.65 In 2015 a law was passed guaranteeing them retirement in the US.66 Alongside the ancient use of elephants already noted above, camels, mules, donkeys, buffaloes and oxen have been used in similar roles to horses, and birds have been used as messengers from 1150 BC until the Second World War.67 More recently, the US military has trained sea lions, orcas and dolphins to retrieve items and sweep for mines, and is researching the creation of insect and other animal cyborgs, who could be controlled remotely via neural implants.68

A Christian Ethical Assessment of the Use of Other Animals for Labour In approaching the question of what, if any, human uses of other animals might be considered legitimate in a theological perspective, it is important to recognize that at least some human/non-human working relationships seem to escape views of other animals as resources for exploitation. Jason Hribal recounts a story suggesting that at least some human uses of other animals for labour are accompanied by attitudes that they are not merely instrumental to human ends:

Hediger, ‘Animals and War’, 10–11. Hediger, ‘Animals and War’, 12. 66  C. Keady, ‘Every U.S. Military Dog Will be Brought Home, Thanks to New Law’, Huffington Post, 7 December 2015. 67  Hediger, ‘Animals and War’, 7. 68  Hediger, ‘Animals and War’, 7; B. Hamilton and E. M. Katz, ‘The Future of War and Animals’, in Animals and War: Confronting the Military-Animal Industrial Complex, ed. A. J. Nocella, C. Salter and J. K. C. Bentley (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 126. 64  65 

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In the 1880s, William Hornaday, the prolific animal collector for American museums, was traveling to Southeast Asia for an expedition. While docked in Ireland outside of Belfast, he purchased several donkeys from a local resident, as he wanted their skeletons for an exhibition. On the roadside, the man killed the donkeys, and Hornaday began the process of skinning and gutting their bodies. These actions, however, were soon halted, as several Catholic cottiers happened upon the scene. So affected by the slaughter and dismemberment of their fellow creatures, one member of the group exclaimed, ‘didn’t Jesus Christ once ride on a Jackass’, and the entire group set upon Hornaday and the donkey-seller with a fury of spades and fists. Hornaday had to actually seek shelter in a nearby cabin, and only escaped with his life when armed soldiers were called to assist him in fleeing the parish.69

Hribal notes that for the cottiers, donkeys could be property and could be put to work and punished for misbehaviour, but they were not commodities: they had names and genders, intelligence, individual personalities, spirituality and customary rights.70 Hornaday’s action was shocking to them, therefore, because it resulted from a very different understanding of the lives of the donkeys, and disregarded the relationship between the cottiers and the donkeys, and the boundaries of appropriate treatment of the donkeys that resulted from this relationship. We might still judge that the work the donkeys were put to by the cottiers or the way they were treated by them was insufficiently respectful of them as fellow creatures, but it seems inappropriate to rush to this judgement, given the loyalty to the donkeys evident in the cottiers’ response to Hornaday’s thoughtless killing of them. The examples of honeyguide birds, dolphins, orcas, and other animals cooperating with humans in labouring to obtain food, with benefit to both parties, make clear that there is no reason in principle that human use of non-human animal labour should be considered morally problematic. As Anna Peterson notes, we have reason to recognize that non-human animals labour on their own behalf and that the concept of labour should be recognized as a more than human phenomenon.71 Jason Hribal argues that the non-human animals used in various ways to enable the Industrial Revolution belonged to the working class alongside its human members, and that the shift away from using non-human animal labour should not be attributed merely to technological progress, but to the resistance the animals made to the increasing intensity of their work, and the resistance to their exploitation shown by their human allies, such as Anna Sewell.72 Other scholars, Hribal, ‘Animals, Agency, and Class’, 101. Hribal, ‘Animals, Agency, and Class’, 101. 71  A. L. Peterson, Being Animal: Beasts and Boundaries in Nature Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 168–70. 72  J. Hribal, ‘“Animals are Part of the Working Class”: A Challenge to Labor History’, Labor History 44:4 (2003), 435–53; Hribal, ‘Animals, Agency, and Class’, 109. 69  70 

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such as Joshua Kercsmar, have traced the relationships between the domestication of non-human animal labour and the use of human slaves, arguing that slaveowners developed overlapping strategies for managing non-human animals and slaves, and treated the two categories of labourers in similar ways in many respects.73 Such recognition of the cross-over between the labour of humans and other animals, and analogies between the racist exploitation of human labour in slavery, and the situation of some domesticated animals, is illuminating. The recognition of humans and other animals as fellow labourers is clearly present in the Bible, in the inclusion of non-human animals used for draught labour in the regulation of the Sabbath. Three times the stipulation is repeated that on the Sabbath neither the Israelites, nor their sons or daughters, nor their male or female slaves, nor their livestock, oxen or donkeys, nor the resident aliens in their towns, may work (Exod. 20.8-11, 23.12; Deut. 5.14). The prohibition on muzzling oxen while they are treading grain makes clear that non-human animals used to provide draught labour are entitled to fair conditions of work (Deut. 25.4). As discussed in the Introduction, Paul’s quotation of this verse and the associated rhetorical question about God’s concern for oxen should not be interpreted as contradicting the many Old Testament texts affirming God’s care for all creatures. The other quotation of this text in the New Testament recognizes the overlap between biblical concern for human and non-human animal labourers. 1 Timothy 5 makes the argument that elders who rule well, preach and teach are ‘worthy of double honour’, because ‘the scripture says “You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain’, and, ‘The labourer deserves to be paid’” (1 Tim. 5.17-18). The argument here depends on an appreciation that texts relating to labouring humans and other animals are mutually applicable. Where non-human animal labour can be coordinated with human labour in ways that are genuinely of mutual benefit, and allow non-human animal labourers to flourish as fellow creatures and glorify God in their flourishing, there seems no reason to consider such cooperation morally suspect. There are inevitable dangers, of course, where asymmetrical power relations tempt those with power to abuse their position, but this is clearly by no means unique to human/non-human working relationships. Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka argue that since we are able to distinguish between just and unjust use of humans for labour, and institute protections for those who would otherwise be vulnerable to exploitation, there seems no reason why we could not develop similar ways of distinguishing between just and unjust uses of non-human animal labour in an analogous way.74 We should bear in mind that despite our ability to recognize where humans are being subjected to unjust labour conditions, we very frequently tolerate and collude in the exploitation of human labourers out of thoughtlessness and desire for the cheap products such exploitation permits. There is every reason to be concerned, J. Kercsmar, ‘The Politics of Husbandry: Managing Animal and Slave Labor in England and America, 1550–1815’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2014). 74  Donaldson and Kymlicka, Zoopolis, 91. 73 

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therefore, that without adequate vigilance non-human animals are also liable to be maltreated. This vulnerability, however, does not provide grounds for a universal judgement that human use of non-human labour is illegitimate. One alternative to this assessment that particular cases of the human use of other animals for work could be permissible is to judge all human use of nonhuman labour illegitimate. This would be in line with the option of seeking an end to all domestication of non-human animals discussed in the Introduction. The arguments against such a position discussed there were that such a separation was unrealistic, was contrary to theological visions of harmony between human and non-human animal creatures, and that it reinstated a human-exceptionalism in insisting that other animals had to be insulated from human contact. It would clearly be challenging to abolish all use of non-human labour, but if there were sufficient commitment to alternative means of enabling agricultural development where farmers are currently dependent on draught animal labour, it is not entirely unthinkable. More economically developed nations are clearly less dependent on non-human animal labour: if dogs and horses were for some reason unavailable to the police, for example, other means would be found to perform the work for which they are employed. These might be less efficient, but policing without dogs and horses is clearly a human possibility. In a theological context, however, the abolitionist route does not look attractive because it rejects the possibility of harmony between humans and other animals and reinstates humanexceptionalism. Returning to the possible scenario of the origins of domestication of dogs where some wolves found it advantageous to live in the vicinity of humans and humans recognized reciprocal benefits from the association, it is not clear on what grounds we would judge the alternative of maintaining separation between humans and wolves to have been a better option, either for the wolves or the humans. We could go further, to suggest that the mutual understanding that developed between wolves and humans was a small and partial realization of the harmony between humans and other animals pictured in the Genesis 2 creation account and looked forward to by the prophets as a sign of the Messianic reign (e.g. Isa. 11.6-8). The appreciation of particular skills and abilities of other animals that go beyond what is possible for humans and therefore complement human capacities in a working partnership seems potentially a very fruitful aspect of such collaborations. The rejection of human/non-human separation as an ideal in the theological account of human and non-human animals I have developed therefore means that the abolition of all human use of non-human animal labour is not intrinsically desirable, though abolition of particular human uses of other animals for labour may well be the best option for non-human animals in many cases. The brief account I have given of the use of dogs for policing suggests that this could be an area where humans could make appropriate use of the work of other animals in the context of mutual benefit. If dogs are sourced from breeders that treat them well, and are prepared to find appropriate homes for dogs found to be unsuitable for police work; if training methods use positive reward to motivate the dogs, such that they come to find their work enjoyable; if good provision is made for dogs who do not complete training; if the relationship between dog and handler involves mutual

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respect and companionship, with handlers caring for dogs in their own homes and working with them as partners; if dogs are not put into situations of unreasonable risk to their safety; and if dogs are looked after following their retirement through injury, illness or old age, there seems reason to think that this use of the labour of dogs could be compatible with their flourishing. It is likely that very few contexts currently satisfy the full range of these requirements, but where at least some of these criteria are met it seems appropriate to seek progress in relation to the others, rather than seeking an end to the police use of dogs entirely. Similar considerations would apply to other contexts where non-human animals work alongside humans in a one-to-one relationship, such as the use of horses in various contexts, the working relationship between farmers and dogs used to herd sheep or other livestock, or dogs trained to assist humans with disabilities. In such cases, the non-human animals are playing a valuable role that is dependent on a strong and respectful relationship with a human partner, and while it is by no means assured that they will be adequately cared for in these contexts, there is clearly the potential for this to be the case. The situation of the 300 million or so non-human animals used for draught labour in agriculture and transport in developing countries is very different. While their labour may well be valued in these contexts, those responsible for their care often have inadequate resources to provide for themselves and their families, and as a result are unable to provide appropriately for their non-human animals. The difficult environment in which they farm may be compounded by poor education in relation to how to provide for the welfare of their working animals and how to derive sufficient economic return on their labour to provide sufficient food, housing and veterinary care. Clearly, the interests of non-human animals are by no means the only ethical concern in such circumstances, and it would be absurd to attend to the welfare of draught non-human animals in subsistence contexts without attending to the welfare of the humans struggling to make a living. There is the potential, however, for initiatives that would improve both human and nonhuman welfare. A 2011 Food and Agriculture Organization report on the role of working animals suggests that good practice guidelines concerning the use and welfare of working animals could benefit both humans and animal welfare, and recommends that these animals should be included in development programmes, emergency responses and guidelines, and that their contribution to food security, poverty alleviation and rural development should be noted.75 As I was writing this chapter, Paris was attacked by ISIS terrorists. In the major police operation that followed to apprehend those responsible for planning the attacks, dogs were part of the teams used to raid the homes of suspects. One of the dogs, a seven-year-old Belgian Malinois called Diesel, made international headlines because she was killed after being sent into an apartment to scout for her handler, shortly before one of the suspects detonated a suicide belt.76 She was widely van Dijk et al., Role, Impact and Welfare, 20–1, 24. K. Willshire, ‘Diesel, French Police Dog Killed in St-Denis Raid, was Due to Retire’, The Guardian, 22 November 2015.

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praised for bravery and for her sacrifice in service of law enforcement, with the Twitter hash tag #JeSuisChien used in her support, echoing the #JeSuisCharlie campaign in response to the Charlie Ebdo attacks at the beginning of 2015.77 Other social media comment questioned the focus on the death of a dog in the context of over a hundred human deaths, or complained that it was wrong for humans to use dogs like Diesel to undertake such dangerous missions. Diesel’s death is a reminder that policing often puts dogs in harm’s way, and that we need to reckon with this risk in assessing the ethics of their use in such roles. Humans involved in policing also risk their safety, of course. We might differentiate between risking harm to human police officers and the dogs working alongside them on the basis that the humans have chosen this career with the knowledge that there were such risks, and have decided that the work is sufficiently important to society, and/or sufficiently interesting and rewarding, and/or has sufficiently good terms of service, to make undertaking the role worthwhile despite these risks. The dogs have not made a decision in this way and have no such choice. ‘They had no choice’ is inscribed on the ‘Animals in War’ memorial installed in London’s Hyde Park in 2004. On this analysis, Diesel’s handler knew why she or he was participating in the raid on the apartment and could have chosen a different job that did not require such action, whereas Diesel was merely being obedient to her handler. Such a differentiation on the basis of freedom of choice between humans and canines undertaking police work must always be a difference of degree, rather than kind, however. Perhaps Diesel’s handler had parents who were police officers, and who had such strong expectations that she or he would have a police career that entering the police service did not seem to be a matter of choice. Perhaps she or he considered quitting, but could not locate another job that would pay the bills. After Karl Marx, human freedom, especially in relation to labour, cannot be considered absolute. We could consider the matter of choice on the side of the dog, too. Some dogs who were candidates to become police dogs alongside Diesel will have been rejected because they were unsuitable for the work. In part, this judgement of suitability will have been one of capacity: the dogs rejected for training may have been found to be not clever or strong enough to undertake policing work. In part, however, the judgement of suitability will have been one of aptitude: other dogs rejected for training may have cowered in the face of aggression, or could not tolerate loud noises, or showed no desire to pursue a quarry. Diesel is likely to have been selected because she demonstrated ability, aptitude and enthusiasm for the work, which are criteria for selection that are not discontinuous from those used for human recruits. There are uses of dogs by the military that are clearly incompatible with respecting them as fellow creatures whose purpose is to glorify God in their flourishing. The use of dogs in suicide missions by the Soviet Union, as discussed in the first section of this chapter, is obviously inappropriate on this basis. In H. Horton, ‘#JeSuisChien Trends after Police Dog is Killed by Terrorist during SaintDenis Raid’, The Telegraph, 18 November 2015.

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that case, the dogs were being used merely as cheap explosive delivery devices, without regard for their lives. This seems to be anomalous in a modern context, however: most police and military use of dogs seems rather to value them for the particular skills they bring as a member of a human/dog team. Where this is the case, where the dogs are not being exposed to greater risks than those expected of the human members of the team, and where they have been selected on the basis of their preparedness or enthusiasm for undertaking the task given to them, to protest on the dogs’ behalf and not on behalf of the humans seems to remain stuck on the human/non-human separation I have argued is at odds with a theological perspective on human/non-human animal relationships. There may be good reasons to object on theological grounds to military projects, or particular forms of policing, but if we recognize the participation of dogs and humans in a multi-species community, where we judge a situation justifies to placing humans at risk, there seems no clear grounds for considering that non-human members of military or police teams may not legitimately be exposed to similar levels of risk. The case of using dogs to assist with mountain rescues is similar in risking human and canine life in order to rescue human beings.

Conclusion While there are myriad ways in which non-human animals have been abused in the human employment of them for labour, and much evidence of continuing abuse, there are good reasons for a theological perspective that acknowledges other animals as fellow creatures with humans to recognize the possibility of their legitimate work alongside human workers. The reciprocality required for such cooperation in labour to be appropriate is clearest in the examples surveyed above of wild birds, dolphins and whales collaborating to obtain food, but it is possible for sheepdogs working with hill farmers, or horses or dogs working in the military or police, to enjoy a similar relationship of mutual benefit, in which they are well cared for in exchange for the particular set of valued skills they add to the teams in which they work. The guarding role of dogs, for example, may be close to the development of reciprocity between wolves and humans that led to the first domestication of non-human animals. The possibility of mutual respect and benefit in such relationships could be seen as a partial anticipation of the restoration of harmony between human and non-human animal creatures expressed in Isaiah’s visions of the Messianic reign and the new creation (Isa. 11.6-9; 65.25-6). Here a theological perspective is in strong contrast to versions of animal ethics that resist all forms of domestication of non-human animals. Very many non-human animals used by humans for labour are abused and maltreated, however, as is evident from the survey in the first part of this chapter. Even in contexts where particular animals are valued for their aptitude and skills, such as may be the case between police dog and handler, there remains the issue of how dogs are treated who are not found suitable for the role, and what happens

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to them when they are retired from service. The much greater numbers of nonhuman animals used for draught labour are likely to be treated worse than dogs in these specialized roles, but, as noted above, the approach most likely to improve their wellbeing may well be to attend in similar ways to the valuable additional contribution they make to human wellbeing, and therefore to attend to the welfare of non-human animals used for draught labour when seeking to improve the wellbeing of the human communities making use of their labour. In conditions of subsistence agriculture, abolishing the human use of non-human animals appears impractical, but initiatives that educate farmers about good care for their livestock and support them in improving animal welfare standards are likely to increase the economic return from the labour of non-human animals and in turn make available resources to care for them alongside human members of the community. Where there is demonstrable human need and where non-human animals are treated justly and able to flourish as fellow creatures, use of their labour can be judged to be justifiable in a theological perspective, and is less problematic than the uses surveyed in the previous chapters where it is their bodies or products of their bodies, rather than their activity, which is of interest. The following chapter returns to the question of the human use of non-human animal bodies in considering the question of using other animals for experimentation and medicine.

Chapter 5 U SI N G O T H E R A N I M A L S F O R R E SE A R C H , M E D IC I N E A N D E DU C AT IO N The preceding chapters have considered the human use of other animals to provide the basic necessities of food and clothing, and to enhance human productive power through the use of their labour. This chapter turns to the human use of other animals in a very different mode: to gain knowledge. This practice has been considered ethically distinct from the uses of non-human animals for food, clothing and labour that have been considered in the previous chapters. For example, as Rod Preece observes, few Christians in nineteenth-century Britain were vegetarian, but most were strongly opposed to research experimentation on non-human animals.1 While some of the ethical concerns of previous chapters apply in relation to research experimentation, there are some that are particular to this use. In contrast to uses of other animals for food, clothing and labour, the widespread use of non-human animals for research experimentation is novel, dating only from the mid-nineteenth century, and many Christians witnessing the expansion of the practice in the nineteenth century had particular faith-based objections to using other animals in this way. In the first part of the chapter, I survey current practices of research experimentation on non-human animals, before turning in the second part to considering the reasons for Christian opposition to the practice in the past, and the implications for a Christian ethical appraisal today.

How Humans Use Other Animals for Research Experimentation Research experimentation on non-human animals is insufficiently regulated in most countries to make reliable estimates of the numbers of animals involved, or to provide accurate information concerning the nature of the procedures to which they are subjected. The countries using the greatest numbers of non-human animals for research experimentation do not provide sufficient data on their activities. Official statistics for the USA, for example, do not include mice, rats, fish, birds, amphibians

R. Preece, Animal Sensibility and Inclusive Justice in the Age of Bernard Shaw (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 143.

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or reptiles, which account for 93 per cent of all procedures in the European Union. Japan and China publish no statistics at all.2 The most thorough study by Taylor et al. estimates that in 2005, 115 million non-human animals were used for research experimentation globally, with the largest users being the USA (17 million), Japan (11 million), China (3 million), France (2.4 million), Australia (2.4 million), Canada (2.3 million), UK (1.9 million) and Germany (1.8 million).3 The study makes an estimated extrapolation of the numbers of non-human animals used where data are not available, but the authors acknowledge their total is likely to be conservative.4 The US Animal Plant Health Inspection Service in 2000 estimated on the basis of a survey of research institutions that between 31 and 156 million animals were being used in the USA alone, which are higher than the US figures reported in Taylor’s study by 180 per cent to 900 per cent.5 Other researchers estimate the US numbers to be as high as 500 million animals.6 Further indications that current numbers are likely to be well in excess of the Taylor estimates are a 2015 survey of US laboratories receiving National Institutes of Health funding, which found that the numbers of animals rose by 73 per cent between 2000 and 2015, mostly driven by increases in the use of mice, and UK official statistics showing that the number of animals used rose by 58 per cent between 2001 and 2015.7 In the UK, Home Office authorization is required for all scientific research experimentation involving non-human animals and the Home Office reports annually on procedures that have been carried out. The 2016 report provides a snapshot that may be indicative of general patterns of laboratory use of animals elsewhere. The report differentiates between experimental procedures, defined as ‘any procedure applied to a protected animal for an experimental or other scientific purpose, or for an educational purpose, that may have the effect of causing an animal pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm equivalent to, or higher than, that caused by the introduction of a needle in accordance with good veterinary practice’, and procedures involving the breeding of animals ‘if the animal is bred from, or is the descendant of, an animal whose genes have mutated or been K. Taylor et al., ‘Estimates for Worldwide Laboratory Animal Use in 2005’, HSI Animal Studies Repository (2008), 333, 337. 3 Taylor et al., ‘Estimates for Worldwide Laboratory Animal Use in 2005’, 333–6. 4 Andrew Knight makes the case that 127 million would be a better estimate for 2005 on the basis of the data used in the study (A. Knight, ‘Estimates of Worldwide Laboratory Animal Use’, Alternatives to Laboratory Animals 36:5 (2008), 495). 5 Taylor et al., ‘Estimates for Worldwide Laboratory Animal Use in 2005’, 337. 6 H. R. Ferdowsian and J. P. Gluck, ‘The Ethical Challenges of Animal Research’, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 24:4 (2015), 394. 7 J. Goodman, A. Chandna and K. Roe, ‘Trends in Animal Use at US Research Facilities’, Journal of Medical Ethics 41:7 (2015), 1–3; Home Office, Statistics of Scientific Procedures on Living Animals Great Britain 2001 (London: HMSO, 2002), 12; Home Office, Annual Statistics of Scientific Procedures on Living Animals Great Britain 2015 (London: HMSO, 2016), 9. 2

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modified’.8 The report records 3.94 million scientific procedures in the UK in 2016 on protected non-human animals, which in the UK are defined as any living nonhuman vertebrate and any cephalopod (octopus, squid or cuttlefish). The number of procedures is very slightly higher than the number of animals used, because a small number of animals were used in more than one procedure; 49 per cent of the procedures recorded were for the ‘creation/breeding’ of genetically altered animals not used for further procedures. Scientific procedures on non-human animals in the UK rose from 1 million in 1945 to a peak of 5.6 million procedures in 1971, but then dropped back to 2.6 million in 2001.9 Since 2001, however, the number of procedures has risen again, very largely because of the rise in the breeding of genetically modified animals, 86 per cent (1.65 million) of which were mice in 2016, followed by zebrafish (13 per cent) and rats (0.6 per cent). Of the 2 million experimental procedures, 60 per cent were conducted on mice, 14 per cent on fish, 12 per cent on rats, 7 per cent on birds, and 6 per cent on other species.10 Seven per cent (149,000) of the procedures were on animals genetically modified to have harmful physical or biochemical defects, for example immune deficiency, or the development of a tumour.11 Horses, dogs, cats and primates are classified as ‘specially protected’ in the UK, and use of these species represented 0.9 per cent of the total in 2016: 8,900 horses, 4,900 dogs, 3,600 primates and 190 cats.12 No great apes have been used for scientific research in the UK since 1987 and such use has been prohibited since 2013. No reptiles or cephalopods were used in 2016.13 The UK uses European Union (EU) categories to classify procedures on animals used for research in relation to their severity. ‘Sub-threshold’ describes procedures causing less pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm than a well-administered hypodermic needle; ‘non-recovery’ is used to describe procedures conducted under general anaesthetic where animals are killed before they recover from the anaesthetic; ‘mild’ is defined as pain or suffering that is ‘only slight or transitory and minor so that animals return to their normal state within a short period of time’; ‘moderate’ is used to mean significant disturbance to an animal’s normal state that is not life-threatening; and ‘severe’ is defined as causing ‘a major departure from the animal’s usual state of health and well-being’, including ‘long-term disease where assistance with normal activities such as feeding and drinking are required or where significant deficits in behaviour/activities persist’. Of the 2 million experimental procedures performed in the UK in 2016, 12 per cent were classified as sub-threshold, 8 per cent as non-recovery, 46 per cent as mild, 29 per cent as moderate, and 6 per cent (114,000) as severe. Sixty-seven per cent of procedures Home Office, Annual Statistics of Scientific Procedures on Living Animals Great Britain 2016 (London: HMSO, 2017), 5.  9  Home Office, Annual Statistics, 2016, 12. 10  Home Office, Annual Statistics, 2016, 19, 29. 11  Home Office, Annual Statistics, 2016, 24. 12  Home Office, Annual Statistics, 2016, 19. 13  Home Office, Annual Statistics, 2016, 22.  8 

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involving the breeding of genetically modified animals were classified as subthreshold, with 29 per cent mild, 3 per cent moderate, and 2 per cent severe.14 UK scientific procedures on non-human animals are also classified with regard to their ‘primary purpose’. As noted above, 49 per cent of procedures in 2016 were for the breeding of genetically modified animals. Of the 2 million experimental procedures, 55 per cent were undertaken for basic research, ‘designed to add knowledge about the normal and abnormal structure, functioning and behaviour of living organisms and the environment’, including ‘fundamental studies in toxicology’; 26 per cent for regulatory use, ‘carried out to satisfy legal requirements including the production of substances to legal specification’; 17 per cent for translational/applied research, ‘designed to address human or animal disease including development of drugs and treatments’, excluding regulatory purposes; and 1 per cent for other purposes, including protection of the environment (0.7 per cent), higher education or training (0.04 per cent), and preservation of species (0.05 per cent).15 Given that the UK is among the countries with the most developed regulation of research experimentation on non-human animals, it is important to note that in the UK the approval and inspection regime is not sufficiently rigorous to ensure that all animal subjects of experiments are treated according to the stated standards of practice. Most of the reports on experimental procedures and the communications between researchers and the Home Office are kept confidential but in The Politics of Animal Experimentation, Dan Lyons provides a detailed account of a xenotransplantation research project conducted by Imutran at Huntingdon Life Sciences between 1995 and 2000. Lyons’s account is made possible by court decisions that there was a public interest in the documents being made public.16 The project aimed to assess the viability of the xenotransplantation of organs from pigs to humans by demonstrating its viability in monkeys and baboons in advance of human clinical trials. During the five-year period, Imutran gained Home Office approval to use about 445 monkeys and baboons for the trial, some of which were captured from the wild and imported to the UK to be experimented on, in addition to an unspecified number of pigs from which organs were taken. The documentation reviewed by Lyons demonstrates that Imutran failed to observe the terms of their licence in a number of areas. It consistently understated the severity of the suffering of the primate experimental subjects, so that, for example, a procedure in which baboons had pig hearts implanted into their necks, causing one to have a stroke-inducing limb spasms and paralysis, and another to die over a ten-day period with a swollen neck and seeping wound, were classified only as ‘moderate’. Much of the suffering caused to the monkeys and baboons was as a result of the toxic effects of the immunosuppressive drugs, which was not Home Office, Annual Statistics, 2016, 17. Home Office, Annual Statistics, 2016, 14. 16  D. Lyons, The Politics of Animal Experimentation (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), ch. 8, 240–302. 14  15 

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identified as a welfare issue in the project application or reported to the Home Office. Many monkeys and baboons died immediately following surgery as a result of ‘technical failures’ in the surgical procedures. Some were found dead, indicating their health and their suffering had not been monitored carefully. Imutran also consistently overstated the success of its experiments, failing to disclose that the toxicity of the immunosuppressants was leading to life spans only of days in the monkeys and baboons that survived surgery, whereas survival of over a year would have to be demonstrated before human trials. This meant that the experiments were very unlikely to lead to human clinical trials at all, which was the key potential benefit of the research identified by Imutran and accepted by the Home Office. Imutran also used more baboons than their licence permitted, which led to a complaint from the Home Office that they had a ‘cavalier attitude’ to the controls of the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986.17 Despite this judgement, however, approval was given for further procedures before Imutran abandoned the project. At its conclusion, therefore, 445 monkeys and baboons had been experimented on and killed, some taken from the wild for this purpose, many of whom experienced very considerable suffering before their deaths. Pigs were also manipulated to be suitable sources of organs, and killed for their organs. Imutran understated the costs and overstated the benefits of the experiments, and their resulting inaccurate cost-benefit analysis was accepted by the Home Office. Given that non-human primates are ‘specially protected’ under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act, the regulatory failures in this case are particularly alarming, and Lyons notes that oversight of the severity of procedures is likely to be weakened following recent UK regulatory changes.18 Given that the details of this case would have been confidential in the absence of a court ruling, it is likely that other regulatory breaches are going unreported. Most research experimentation on non-human animals takes place in countries with little or no regulation, and even in countries where research experimentation on non-human animals is regulated, we should not assume that all the experiments that take place conform to the regulations. Hope Ferdowsian and John Gluck discuss examples of recent ethically problematic experimentation on animals. The first is of a 2010 study of pain in mice, in which researchers videoed the responses of mice to various painful stimuli with the hope of developing a coding system for pain. Researchers applied painful stimuli to restrained mice by injecting noxious chemicals into their ankles, hands, and feet, and by hind paw incisions. They induced bladder inflammation with a chemical known to cause painful cystitis in humans and injected acetic acid into their abdomens, causing them to writhe in pain on the test chamber floor. Researchers placed mice on hot plates, had their tails submerged in hot water, clamped metal binder clips on the tips of their tails, and induced nerve injury that is known to cause severe distress in humans. Lyons, Politics of Animal Experimentation, 275. Lyons, Politics of Animal Experimentation, 324.

17  18 

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Some painful stimuli remained active for as long as four hours. The only time an analgesic was provided was to determine its experimental effects on facial expressions. The mice were kept alive for about two weeks thereafter, without pain relief.19

The second study that Ferdowsian and Gluck consider induced heart failure in dogs by inserting pacemakers that accelerated their hearts to around double the normal rate for up to a month. As a result, terminal heart failure was induced and was determined clinically by symptoms of lethargy, anorexia, chronic shortness of breath (dyspnea), or accumulation of fluid in the abdominal cavity (ascites). Once a clinical endpoint was reached, the dogs in the experimental group underwent CRT [cardiac resynchronization therapy], whereas controls continued in the accelerated pacing mode without treatment. After several additional weeks, all the dogs were terminally anesthetized, and researchers surgically harvested their hearts.20

Other studies discussed by Ferdowsian and Gluck include a study that induced post-traumatic stress disorder in rats by restraining them and exposing them to attempted attacks by a cat for 45 minute periods, and a study of severe lung injury and subcutaneous burning in sheep in which over 40 per cent of their body area was burned with a propane torch and their lungs burned by being forced to inhale hot smoke.21 They also note that studies continue into maternal deprivation by taking baby monkeys from their mothers and raising them in isolation.22 The examples above were reported by Lyons, Ferdowsian and Gluck because they were particularly egregious examples of problematic practice in research experimentation on animals. In my own visits to research laboratories the experiments I saw were less dramatic: guinea pigs being used to test the safety of a new kind of ear implant; cancerous tumours induced in rats in order to test the effect of different kinds of diet on tumour growth; mice given Prion disease and having a virus injected into their brains to test its effectiveness in treating the disorder; and pigs being reared to experiment with organ transplantation. I spoke to technicians in the laboratories who were there because they enjoyed working with animals, and were proud of contributing to the design of enclosures that were preferred by the animals. In the laboratories I visited, it seemed to me that the animals were being looked after as well as possible given the experimental regimes, but it was also apparent that the experiments were imposing very significant burdens on them, keeping them in small enclosures, inducing incapacitating and debilitating diseases, and almost universally killing them at the end of the procedure. I was told that this

Ferdowsian and Gluck, ‘The Ethical Challenges of Animal Research’, 394–5. Ferdowsian and Gluck, ‘The Ethical Challenges of Animal Research’, 396. 21  Ferdowsian and Gluck, ‘The Ethical Challenges of Animal Research’, 399–401. 22  Ferdowsian and Gluck, ‘The Ethical Challenges of Animal Research’, 396–8. 19  20 

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‘euthanizing’ was a significant part of the work of technicians, and disliked by them. New technicians had to be inducted into the killing carefully. I was astonished to find that the terminology of ‘sacrifice’ was in use to describe the killing of the animal research subjects.23 I was particularly struck by the plight of animals who had been genetically modified to make them dysfunctional in ways that were useful for research, such as to be susceptible to cancer. The vested interests in continuing to experiment were also clearly evident in my visits: big investments by universities in new buildings and equipment, and professors who had made successful careers and gained research funding through animal experiments who were now training doctoral and post-doctoral researchers to make their careers in the same way. In relation to Russell and Burch’s three Rs – Replacement, Reduction and Refinement – I met people who seemed motivated to act on the latter two, but replacing animal experiments with non-animal methods seemed directly contrary to the interests of everyone.24 The day-to-day practice of what is being done to non-human animals in research experimentation even in well-organized laboratories operating in countries where experimentation is regulated provokes significant ethical concerns.

Christian Opposition to Research Experimentation on Other Animals Experimentation on live animals in order to gain scientific knowledge is not a modern phenomenon: discoveries about the function of the optic nerve, the process of swallowing, the difference between tendons and nerves, and between sensory and motor nerves were made in ancient Greece between 500 and 240 BC through experimentation on live animals, and Galen of Pergamon developed vivisection techniques to study respiration and the functions of the heart, brain and spinal cord and performed public dissections.25 Tertullian condemned one of these, Herophilus, as a ‘butcher’ for his dissections of human bodies, some of which seem to have been on living human beings: criminals supplied by rulers.26 Augustine also objected to the work of anatomists cutting up dead human bodies and killing This and other aspects of experimental practice are described and discussed in L. Birke, A. Arluke and M. Michael, The Sacrifice: How Scientific Experiments Transform Animals and People (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007). 24  W. M. S. Russell and R. L. Burch, The Principles of Humane Experimental Technique (London: Methuen, 1959). For a critical discussion of the three Rs, see D. M. Ibrahim, ‘Reduce, Refine, Replace: The Failure of the Three R’s and the Future of Animal Experimentation’, University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (2006), 195–229. 25  A.-H. Maehle and U. Trohler, ‘Animal Experimentation from Antiquity to the End of the Eighteenth Century’, in Vivisection in Historical Perspective, ed. N. A. Rupke (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 15–16. 26  Tertullian, ‘Treatise on the Soul’, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325, vol. 3, ed. A. C. Coxe, J. Donaldson and A. Roberts (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), ch. 10. Heinrich von Staden notes the disagreement 23 

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sick patients under their knives.27 Perhaps in part because of Christian concerns about the practice of vivisection, there is little evidence of further practice until the sixteenth century, when a group of anatomists in Padua are reported to have experimented on live dogs and other animals. Christian concern about the practice is again evident in the story that one of them, Andreas Vesalius, was condemned by the Inquisition for conducting a post-mortem dissection of a man whose heart was found still to be beating.28 As discussed in Volume I, in the seventeenth century Descartes’ theory of the animal as machine was used to defend vivisection. The obvious signs of the suffering of the animals in these experiments were dismissed as mechanical operations.29 The position of the Cartesians that the victims of these experiments suffered no pain was so implausible, however, that it was not widely accepted, and Christianity was seen as a reason vivisection was not more widely practised. In 1686 Robert Boyle complained that ‘The veneration wherewith men are imbued for what they call nature has been a discouraging impediment to the empire of men over the inferior creatures of God: for many have not only looked upon it, as an impossible thing to compass, but as something impious to attempt.’30 Individuals continued to pursue research involving vivisection in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with Samuel Pepys, Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson noting their concern about its cruelty,31 but the work of Claude Bernard in the nineteenth century was a landmark in establishing vivisection as mainstream scientific practice. Bernard was motivated by the desire to make clinical medicine scientific, according to the deterministic paradigm of contemporary physics. As Hugh LaFollette and Niall Shanks make clear, Bernard believed that he could only defend the scientific status of clinical medicine if its hypotheses could be tested in the laboratory, and that the only way of testing its hypotheses in the laboratory was to conduct experiments on non-human animals. His work depended on the belief that the only differences between species were

concerning whether Tertullian was referring to dissection of living human beings, but judges that both Tertullian’s text and independent evidence that this was Herophilus’s practice makes it likely (H. Von Staden, Herophilus: The Art of Medicine in Early Alexandria: Edition, Translation and Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 142–5.) 27  Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), bk 22, ch. 24; Augustine, ‘A Treatise on the Soul and Its Origin’, in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. First Series, vol. 5, ed. P. Schaff (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), bk 4, ch. 3; cited in A. Carlino, Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning, trans. J. Tedeschi and A. C. Tedeschi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 165. 28  D. L. Loriaux, A Biographical History of Endocrinology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 38. 29  Vol. I, ch. 5, 137–40. 30  Quoted in Preece, Animal Sensibility, 105. 31  Preece, Animal Sensibility, 105.

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quantitative, so that the effects of medicine on laboratory animals were directly applicable to humans, once necessary adjustments had been made for differences in relative mass or other measurements.32 Bernard’s major work, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, was published in 1865 and quickly attracted the attention of many who were interested in establishing a scientific basis for medicine. Bernard’s work therefore made research experimentation on animals not merely a method for learning about comparative anatomy, but a foundation for medical science. The significance of his work for the discipline of physiology is clear in the celebration of the recent bicentenary of his birth.33 His starting principle, that results from non-human animals are applicable to humans, remains the basis of research experimentation on animals. In the Introduction, he acknowledges that strangers to science may fail to recognize any difference between physiologists and the emperor Nero, since they both mutilate living beings. The difference, Bernard claims, is that physiologists perform these acts in pursuit of the idea of science: A physiologist is not a man of fashion, he is a man of science, absorbed by the scientific idea which he pursues: he no longer hears the cry of animals, he no longer sees the blood that flows, he sees only his idea and perceives only organisms concealing problems which he intends to solve.34

The publication of Bernard’s work and the expansion of vivisection that followed provoked an anti-vivisection campaign that was led by Christians and which used Christian faith-based reasons against vivisection. An early example of this was a story Bernard himself told of an unnamed British Quaker who visited the laboratory of Claude Bernard’s mentor François Magendie in the 1830s or 1840s in order to protest against his experiments on live animals. According to Bernard, the Quaker told Magendie that ‘thee must stop experiments of this kind because thee has no right to cause the death of animals or to make them suffer, and because thee sets a bad example and accustoms thy fellows to cruelty’. When Magendie countered that war is cruel but sometimes necessary, and that hunting inflicts more suffering on animals than physiology, the Quaker replied that he was opposed to those practices, too.35 H. LaFollette and N. Shanks, ‘Animal Experimentation: The Legacy of Claude Bernard’, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 8:3 (1994), 195–210. See also H. LaFollette and N. Shanks, Brute Science: Dilemmas of Animal Experimentation (New York: Routledge, 1996), 38–53. 33  See, for example, J. F. X. Jones, ‘A Bicentennial Celebration of the Birth of Claude Bernard’, Irish Journal of Medical Science 4:182 (2013), 543. 34  C. Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, trans. H. C. Greene (New York: Henry Schuman, Inc., 1949), 103. 35  J. M. D. Olmsted, Claude Bernard and the Experimental Method in Medicine (New York: H. Schuman, 1952), 31, quoted in H. R. Glaholt, ‘Vivisection as War: The “Moral Diseases” of Animal Experimentation and Slavery in British Victorian Quaker Pacifist Ethics’, Society and Animals 20:2 (2012), 168. 32 

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By no means all those who objected to vivisection were pacifists, but the campaign against vivisection in the second half of the nineteenth century was led by Christians with more radical instincts than were evident in the RSPCA, which did not have a clear position on vivisection. Basil Wilberforce, the Archdeacon of Westminster, refused to speak at RSPCA platforms because of its weak stance on the issue.36 In the absence of leadership from the RSPCA, a new society was founded called the Victoria Street Society for Protection of Animals from Vivisection, which, as Rod Preece notes, had no shortage of prominent supporters: The immediate membership of the society consisted in part of a veritable who’s-who of establishment personages: the Anglican Archbishop of York, the Roman Catholic cardinal Henry [Edward] Manning, John Coleridge (soon to become Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, founder of the NSPCC), the poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson, the celebrated historian Thomas Carlyle… Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University John Ruskin, and prominent literary figures Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti, both of whom wrote poems damning vivisection. There were also a number of other senior clergy, including several bishops, and members of the aristocracy. The first president of the society was evangelical Tory and prominent humanitarian the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury.37

The Christian roots of concern for the non-human animal subjects of the vivisectionists is clearly evident in the speeches and writings of advocates, but their contributions to the debate at the end of the nineteenth century are largely forgotten, despite seeming to me of enduring relevance for the Christian ethics of research on other animals. The following pages provide a survey account of the arguments made by Christians against vivisection in this period, drawing primarily on the research of Rod Preece and Chien-hui Li. In a long speech to a House of Lords debate about controls on vivisection in 1876, Lord Shaftesbury gives a list of cruelties inflicted on animals by experimenters, such as making holes in a dog’s head and forcing ‘a red hot iron into each of the anterior lobes of the brain’ to study the results.38 In a further debate on legislation three years later, he asked about the basis for justifying vivisection in Christian revelation: On what authority of Scripture, or any other form of Revelation, he asked most solemnly, did they rest their right to subject God’s creatures to such unspeakable sufferings? The thought had troubled the mind of many vivisectors; it had deeply touched the heart of Sir Charles Bell. That they might take the life of animals for food, or to remove danger or annoyance, he fully admitted; but he utterly Preece, Animal Sensibility, 97. Preece, Animal Sensibility, 113. 38  ‘Cruelty to Animals Bill (Second Reading)’, in Hansard Lords Debates, 3rd series, vol. 229, cols 1016–1030, 22 May 1876, col. 1023. 36  37 

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denied that they were permitted to indulge their curiosity, or even advance their knowledge, by the infliction of exquisite torture on the sentient creation. They were told, in haughty and dogmatic style, that the secrets of Nature could be learnt in no other way. Learned in no other way! Could it be believed that the Almighty had issued such a decree? The animals were His creatures as much as we were His creatures; and ‘His tender mercies’, so the Bible told us, ‘were over all His works’. He, along with many, repudiated such an atrocious and shallow doctrine; and, under that conviction, he would ever do his best to put down a system that was as needless as it was cruel.39

Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, another founder of the Victoria Street Society, argued that the example of Christ should make clear the obligation on Christians to oppose vivisection: What would our Lord have said, what looks would He have bent, upon a chamber filled with the ‘unoffending creatures which He loves’, dying under torture deliberately and intentionally inflicted, or kept alive to endure further torment in pursuit of knowledge? … [T]o any one who recognizes the authority of our Lord … the mind of Christ must be the guide of life. ‘Shouldst thou not have had compassion upon these, even as I had pity on thee?’ So he seems to say, and I shall act accordingly.40

The theme of what Christ’s attitude to vivisection would have been was widespread in Christian anti-vivisectionist arguments. A 1902 edition of the anti-vivisectionist Animals’ Guardian carried a drawing by Robert Morley entitled ‘Christ in the Laboratory’, inspired by this theme (Figure 5.1).41 The picture shows a scientist in front of a bench, on which a dog is tied to the corners by her paws, with an apparatus of clamps holding her head locked and jaws open, presumably for some procedure involving forced feeding. A scalpel and pliers lie on the bench. The attention of the experimenter is drawn to the figure of Christ behind the dog, crowned by thorns, surrounded by radiant light, and holding the gaze of the man steadily. A banner between them carries the words of Christ from Luke’s Sermon on the Plain: ‘Be ye therefore merciful as your Father also is merciful’ (Lk. 6.36), and the drawing has the title ‘Love, the fulfilling of the law’ (Rom. 13.10). Below the image are two quotations. The first is from Brooke Westcott, Bishop of Durham, until his death in 1901:

‘Cruelty to Animals Bill (Second Reading)’, in Hansard Lords Debates, 3rd series, vol. 248, cols 425–33, 15 July 1879, cols 430–1. 40  Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, ‘The Nineteenth Century Defenders of Vivisection’, Fortnightly Review (February 1882), 236. The passage is quoted in R. Preece, ‘Darwinism, Christianity, and the Great Vivisection Debate’, Journal of the History of Ideas 64:3 (2003), 417. 41  R. Morley, ‘Christ in the Laboratory’, Animals’ Guardian (1902), 57. 39 

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Figure 5.1  Christ in the Laboratory, Robert Morley, 1902. (c) The British Library Board.

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But if He who made us made all other creatures also, if they find a place in His providential plan, if His tender mercies reach to them – and this we Christians most certainly believe – then I find it absolutely inconceivable that He should have so arranged the avenues of knowledge that we can attain to truths which it is his will that we should master only through the unutterable agonies of beings which trust in us.

The second quotation is from John William Graham, and follows the theme of Coleridge’s words above: If I were convinced that vivisection is right, it would, in my mind, constitute a difficulty in the way of harmonising the teaching of Jesus with other facts: Christ and this torture are as far apart as the east is from the west. I can fancy I see a figure wandering among the moaning dogs tied in their troughs in the deserted laboratory in the darkness of the long hours of night – the figure of the sorrowing Christ.

Letters written to Quaker magazines in the period often asked whether Friends could picture Christ vivisecting an animal, and whether God would allow such a practice in God’s kingdom.42 Robert Buchanan’s contemporary poem ‘The City of Dream’ includes the image of Christ being crucified on the vivisector’s bench: Then, lo! A miracle – face, form and limbs, Changed on the instant – neither hound nor faun Lay there awaiting the tormentor’s knife, But one, a living form as white as wax, Stigmata on his feet and on his hands, And on his feet and on his hands, And on his face, still shining as a star, The beauty of Eros and the pain of Christ! I knew him, but none other mortal knew Though every tiny faun and god of the wood, Still garrulously babbling, named the name; And looking up into the torturer’s face He wept and murmur’d, ‘Even as ye use The very meanest of my little ones, So use ye me!’43

Glaholt, ‘Vivisection as War’, 162–3. R. Buchanan, ‘The City without God’, The Monthly Record and Animals’ Guardian (June 1901), quoted in C. Li, ‘Mobilizing Christianity in the Antivivisection Movement in Victorian Britain’, Journal of Animal Ethics 2 (2012), 150.

42  43 

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John Henry Newman’s sermon ‘The Crucifixion’ makes an even more direct connection between the sufferings of Christ and those of the victims of vivisection. He reminds his congregation that Jesus is called a lamb, and notes the similarities between some vivisection and crucifixion: I mean, consider how very horrible it is to read the accounts which sometimes meet us of cruelties exercised on brute animals. Does it not sometimes make us shudder to hear tell of them, or to read them in some chance publication which we take up? At one time it is the wanton deed of barbarous and angry owners who ill-treat their cattle, or beasts of burden; and at another, it is the cold-blooded and calculating act of men of science, who make experiments on brute animals, perhaps merely from a sort of curiosity. I do not like to go into particulars, for many reasons; but one of those instances which we read of as happening in this day, and which seems more shocking than the rest, is, when the poor dumb victim is fastened against a wall, pierced, gashed, and so left to linger out its life. Now do you not see that I have a reason for saying this, and am not using these distressing words for nothing? For what was this but the very cruelty inflicted upon our Lord? He was gashed with the scourge, pierced through hands and feet, and so fastened to the Cross, and there left, and that as a spectacle.44

Newman asks his congregation what it is that is so sickening about cruelty to other animals, and responds that first, that they have done no harm; next, that they have no power whatever of resistance; it is the cowardice and tyranny of which they are the victims which makes their sufferings so especially touching. For instance, if they were dangerous animals, take the case of wild beasts at large, able not only to defend themselves, but even to attack us; much as we might dislike to hear of their wounds and agony, yet our feelings would be of a very different kind; but there is something so very dreadful, so satanic in tormenting those who never have harmed us, and who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power, who have weapons neither of offence nor defence, that none but very hardened persons can endure the thought of it. Now this was just our Saviour’s case: He had laid aside His glory, He had (as it were) disbanded His legions of Angels, He came on earth without arms, except the arms of truth, meekness, and righteousness, and committed Himself to the world in perfect innocence and sinlessness, and in utter helplessness, as the Lamb of God.45

J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons (London, 1868), vol. 7, 136–7. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 7, 137. Part of the text is widely quoted with the addition of the sentence, ‘Cruelty to animals is as if man did not love God’, but this is not present in the sermon text I have located. Andrew Linzey discusses the sermon in A. Linzey, Why Animal Suffering Matters: Philosophy, Theology, and Practical Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 38–9.

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Christians also made anti-vivisection arguments on the basis of the sacrifice made by God in Christ. Where vivisectionists believed it permissible to sacrifice weaker non-human animals for the stronger and nobler human race, many Christians judged that this was opposed to the call of Christ for the strong to serve and make sacrifice for the weak. The Roman Catholic convert Henry Nutcombe Oxenham argued that ‘their very inferiority and dependence on us … gives them that claim upon our kindness which the weak have upon the strong, and which it has been a special function and glory of Christianity to enforce’,46 and a writer for the Church Anti-Vivisection League made a case against vivisection on the basis of the doctrine of the incarnation: ‘Noblesse oblige’, is not this the great lesson of the incarnation – the highest sacrificing himself for the lowest. ‘Noblesse dispense’, is on the contrary the motto of the vivisector. To the real or fancied good of the higher animal, all beneath him must be ruthlessly sacrificed. Can there be a sharper contrast than that which exists between the spirit of Christ and the spirit of vivisection?47

Basil Wilberforce, the Anglican Archdeacon of Westminster Abbey, rejected the sacrificing of non-animals through vivisection in even more vivid terms. Recalling the Earl of Shaftesbury’s words that he would rather be the animal tortured than the man who was the animal’s torturer, Wilberforce stated ‘I agree entirely with Lord Shaftesbury – I would rather die a man than live a vampire, and as he said, I declare before God, I would rather be the unfortunate animal crucified on the torture trough than I would be the vivisector standing at its side.’48 In a 1909 sermon in the Abbey, Wilberforce stated ‘no greater cruelty is perpetuated on this earth than that which is committed in the name of science in some physiological laboratories’ and that the anti-vivisection cause was ‘no fanatical protest based on ignorant sentimentality, but a claim of simple justice based not only on the transcendent truths of the immanence of the divine will, but also the irrefutable logic of ascertained fact’.49 John Ruskin set out his own Christian objections to vivisection in a speech to a meeting in Oxford in 1884, reported in the anti-vivisection magazine Zoophilist in 1885: H. N. Oxenham, ‘Moral and Religious Estimate of Vivisection’, The Gentleman’s Magazine 243:1776 (1878), 723. Chien-hui Li quotes the same passage from a different edition in ‘Mobilizing Christianity’, 147. 47  Church Anti-Vivisection League, Man’s Relation to the Lower Animals, Viewed from the Christian Standpoint: A Lecture (London: author, n.d.), quoted in Li, ‘Mobilizing Christianity’, 147. 48  Church Anti-Vivisection League, ‘Report of Lecture by William Wilberforce’, Zoophilist 21 (1901), quoted in Li, ‘Mobilizing Christianity’, 148. 49  J. Wynne-Tyson, The Extended Circle: A Commonplace Book of Animal Rights (New York: Paragon, 1989), 400–1. The passage is quoted in Preece, Animal Sensibility, 123. 46 

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It was not the question whether experiments taught them more or less of science. It was not the question whether animals had a right to this or that in the inferiority they were placed in to mankind. It was a question – What relation had they to God, what relations mankind had to God, and what was the true sense of feeling as taught to them by Christ the Physician? The primary head and front of all the offending against the principles of mercy in men and the will of the Creator of these creatures was the ignoring of that will in higher matters, and these scientific pursuits were now defiantly, provokingly, insultingly separated from the science of religion; they were all carried on in defiance of what had hitherto been held to be compassion and pity, and of the great link which bound together the whole of creation, from its Maker to the lowest creature.50

Ruskin resigned his chair as the first Slade Professor of Art at Oxford when the university senate voted to institute a laboratory where vivisection could be performed, saying ‘I cannot lecture in the next room to a shrieking cat nor address myself to the men who have been – there’s no word for it.’51 Henry Edward Manning, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, agreed that the status of non-human animals in relation to human beings was not the most important question. He noted that the animals do not qualify as moral agents in Kantian terms, but observed that this was irrelevant because ‘We owe to ourselves the duty not to be brutal and cruel; and we owe to God the duty of treating all His creatures according to His own perfections of love and mercy.’52 In an 1882 speech he stated: Vivisection is a detestable practice … Nothing can justify, no claim of science, no conjectural result, no hope for discovery such horrors as these. Also it must be remembered that where these torments, refined and indescribable, are certain, the result is altogether conjectural … Everything about the result is uncertain but the certain infraction of the first laws of mercy and humanity.53

In a 1956 article in the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine L. G. Stevenson identified the centre of opposition to vivisection with Christianity in Britain, noting that the movement coincided with an evangelical revival and that evangelicals held prominent

J. Ruskin, E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (eds), The Works of John Ruskin (London: George Allen, 1908), vol. 34, 643–4. The speech is quoted in Preece, Animal Sensibility, 120. 51  J. Abse, John Ruskin, the Passionate Moralist (London: Quartet Books, 1982), 311. The passage is quoted in Preece, Animal Sensibility, 120. 52  H. S. Salt, Animal Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1894), 131 n. 1, quoted in Preece, Animal Sensibility, 122. 53  1882 speech quoted in Wynne-Tyson, Extended Circle, 196. The passage is quoted in Preece, Animal Sensibility, 121. 50 

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positions in many of the anti-vivisectionist societies.54 There is no doubt that Christian concerns were prominent in the anti-vivisection societies. Chien-hui Li observes that, at the inaugural meeting of the Glasgow Branch of the Scottish Society for the Total Suppression of Vivisection, hearty applause accompanied the declaration that the group ‘took their stand on religious grounds, believing that the Almighty had decreed that all his creatures should be treated with mercy and kindness’. Applause also greeted the Bishop of Manchester’s words at the Annual Meeting of the Manchester Branch of the [Victoria Street Society] in 1896, when he stated that vivisection ‘is an abuse of power … contrary to the will of God [and] atrociously wrong’. Cries of ‘hear, hear’ roared out at the annual meeting of the Manchester Anti-Vivisection Society in 1897, when the chairman proclaimed that the ‘great aim’ of their committee was ‘the glory of God and the good of man’.55

Li also notes that presentations at the meetings sometimes had the character of evangelical exhortations, citing the example of a speech given by Mrs Henry Lee at a public demonstration of the London Antivivisection Society in 1899: Pure humanitarianism alone can never avail effectually to stem the tide of misery and wrong. Ah! doubt it not … there stands one in our midst to-night Whose form is like the Son of God, and He pleads with us to persevere in this mighty warfare against the powers of evil. If we would succeed in this work of mercy, the Saviour of the world must ever be the central figure on our platform. See to it, friends, that we fight this great battle in His strength, ever looking to him for help and guidance, always remembering that by His cross alone this evil, like all other evils, shall finally be overthrown. (Loud applause.)56

Mrs Lee’s speech was followed by the singing of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, after which ‘long and prolonged cheering erupted’.57 In addition to reviewing the arguments made by Christians against vivisection in this period, it is also instructive to note the character of their disagreement with their opponents. Vivisection was clearly positioned as a key issue in an antagonistic relationship between science and religion at the time. Charles Darwin condemned vivisection just for ‘mere damnable and detestable curiosity’, which he said made him ‘sick with horror’, but he conducted painful experiments on pigeons, considered that vivisection was vital to progress in physiology, and saw proposals

L. G. Stevenson, ‘Religious Elements in the Background of the British Anti-Vivisection Movement’, Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 29 (1956), 125–57. 55  Li, ‘Mobilizing Christianity’, 144–5. 56  Li, ‘Mobilizing Christianity’, 145. 57  Li, ‘Mobilizing Christianity’, 145. 54 

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to place limits on what researchers were permitted to do to their experimental subjects as ‘puerile’.58 Darwin’s staunch ally Thomas Henry Huxley also opposed restrictions on vivisection until it became clear that it was politically preferable to advocate instead for the weakest possible bill, justified by his judgement that despite the lack of any ‘absolute structural line of demarcation’ between humans and other animals, ‘no one is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between civilized man and the brutes; or is more certain than I am that whether from them or not, he is assuredly not one of them’.59 Christians saw vivisection as the quest for scientific knowledge at any cost: But now, behold, a new horror has arisen upon us – Cruelty in the garb and pretensions of Science! Science was going to set Religion right. She held up her torch to illuminate the deformities of superstition, and display the wickedness of Religion … yet now Science has become a rival of the tortures of the Inquisition, and by increase of knowledge has learnt to torment still more ingeniously.60

In the British nineteenth-century debate concerning vivisection, therefore, it was largely Christians that recognized and opposed the cruelty of experimentation on living non-human animals. Charles Darwin and his followers sided with those who wished researchers to be free to inflict any procedures on non-human animals without legal restraint. As Rod Preece observes, it is not the case that there were just two simple camps: many Christians accepted evolutionary theory and some of those who developed evolutionary theory were adamant anti-vivisectionists, such as Alfred Russel Wallace.61 Given that campaigns concerning animal welfare have in recent decades been dominated by secular groups, however, with Christianity sometimes identified as an obstacle to progress, it is notable that it was Christianity rather than secular Darwinism that provoked and sustained concern for nonhuman animals on this issue in this period.62 Christian concern about vivisection continued well into the twentieth century. C. S. Lewis was a strong opponent of the practice. In a short essay on vivisection he argues that it ‘can only be defended by showing it to be right that one species should suffer in order that another species should be happier’.63 He notes that Christians might be inclined to defend this claim on the basis that non-human animals have no souls, but observes that this is open to question, and if it means that animals Preece, ‘Darwinism, Christianity, and the Great Vivisection Debate’, 402, 412–13. Quoted in Preece, ‘Darwinism, Christianity, and the Great Vivisection Debate’, 414. 60  F. W. Newman, quoted in Li, ‘Mobilizing Christianity’, 151. 61  Preece, ‘Darwinism, Christianity, and the Great Vivisection Debate’, 419. 62  I discuss Peter Singer’s critique of Christianity in relation to animals in D. Clough, ‘How to Respect Other Animals: Lessons for Theology from Peter Singer, and Vice Versa’, in God, the Good, and Utilitarianism: Perspectives on Peter Singer, ed. J. Perry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 63  C. S. Lewis, ‘Vivisection’, in God in the Dock, ed. W. Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 225. 58  59 

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have neither moral responsibility nor immortality it makes vivisection harder to justify, because ‘it means that animals cannot deserve pain, nor profit morally by the discipline of pain, nor be recompensed by happiness in another life for suffering in this’.64 Therefore, in so far as the non-possession of a soul is relevant at all, he argues, it is an argument against vivisection. Instead, Lewis argues that a Christian justification of vivisection would have to depend on divine authorization for sacrificing inferior creatures for the benefit of their human superiors, but he notes the difficulty of this position: We may fail to see how a benevolent Deity could wish us to draw such conclusions from the hierarchical order He has created. We may find it difficult to formulate a human right of tormenting beasts in terms that would not equally imply an angelic right of tormenting men. And we may feel that though objective superiority is rightly claimed for man, yet that very superiority ought partly to consist in not behaving like a vivisector: that we ought to prove ourselves better than the beasts by the fact of acknowledging duties to them which they do not acknowledge to us.65

Lewis concedes that a Christian could believe it right to vivisect on the basis of divinely ordained human superiority, and would then do so with scrupulous care to avoid the least unnecessary pain, with ‘trembling awe’ at the responsibility assumed over other animals and the responsibility for living a human life that justifies such a sacrifice. He does not take this view, but notes that in the absence of such a metaphysical justification, Darwinians are reduced merely to species loyalty as to justify vivisection, which has problematic consequences well beyond vivisecting animals: Once the old Christian idea of a total difference in kind between man and beast has been abandoned, then no argument for experiments on animals can be found which is not also an argument for experiments on inferior men. If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons. Indeed, experiments on men have already begun. We all hear that Nazi scientists have done them. We all suspect that our own scientists may begin to do so, in secret, at any moment.66

Michael Gilmour notes that the theme found expression in Lewis’s fiction as well as this essay. In The Magician’s Nephew the children Diggory and Polly are sent by their unpleasant uncle to other worlds after he had experimented first on a guinea pig; in Out of the Silent Planet the evil Professor Weston has killed a dog in his experiments and plans to hand over Ransom, the story’s hero, to aliens for Lewis, ‘Vivisection’, 225. Lewis, ‘Vivisection’, 226. 66  Lewis, ‘Vivisection’, 227. 64  65 

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experimentation; in Perelandra Weston as a demonic figure rips open frog-like creatures and leaves them to die in pain; in That Hideous Strength the evil founders of a new college have a huge vivisection programme and Lewis confronts his readers with their trumpeting, baying, screaming, muttering and whineing.67 It is clear that vivisection represents for Lewis the epitome of cruelty: the exploitation of the weak for the benefit of the strong where the suffering inflicted on the weak counts as nothing against the advantage gained by the strong. The breadth and depth of Christian concerns about the human use of nonhuman animals for research experimentation is striking and seems to have been largely forgotten by Christians. We cannot, of course, rush to the judgement that Christian objections to scientific procedures on non-human animals of a previous era require us to conclude that all current research experimentation should be rejected by Christians. Given this strong tradition of objections to vivisection, however, to show that at least some research experimentation on other animals is justified we would have to show either that the procedures now conducted or the benefits gained are of a different nature than those to which Christians previously objected, or that Christians in earlier times were wrong to be concerned about the practice. Neither of these looks straightforward. On the first count, it is the case that before the second half of the nineteenth century anaesthesia was not widely available so that all vivisection was conducted without anaesthetic, but by the time of the founding of the Victoria Street Society in 1875 anaesthetics were widely used in Britain for experimentation on non-human animals. Given that moderate and severe harms are still inflicted on animals today in these experiments, there seems no reason to think that the experiments have improved so substantially as to make earlier Christian concerns irrelevant, especially given the broad terms in which most of the objections were expressed. On the second count, there seems no obvious reason why we should have become more callous in our attitudes to the suffering of non-human animals than our Christian forebears in the last two centuries, nor that we have developed a stronger sense of a Christian justification for human exploitation of other species for our ends. Perhaps the one area that might have shifted since the nineteenth-century debates is evidence for the scientific value of the knowledge gained through experimentation on animals: Rod Preece suggests that changing attitudes on this point may have led to a decline in Christian concern about the issue.68 Many of those who opposed vivisection might well have done so whatever the likely benefits on the principle that it is wrong for humans to exploit fellow creatures under their power to gain knowledge. For other Christians, a high estimation of the benefits of human research on other animals might lead them to set aside the objections Christians have previously raised. For this reason, we must turn to questions of the necessity and utility of research experimentation on non-human animals. M. J. Gilmour, ‘C. S. Lewis and Animal Experimentation’, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 67:4 (2015), 255–7 See also Gilmour’s Animals in the Writings of C. S. Lewis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 68  Preece, Animal Sensibility, 143. 67 

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Judgements of the Necessity and Utility of Experiments on Other Animals As the review of Dan Lyons’s Imutran case study at the beginning of the chapter made clear, researchers can have interests in pursuing research that is costly to non-human animals and which has little or no demonstrable human benefit. Since research procedures on non-human animals are usually justified in relation to their human benefit it is important to consider the question of this benefit carefully. Before doing so, however, we should give consideration to a stronger claim still, that research experimentation on non-human animals is necessary. As noted in Chapter 2, whenever we encounter a claim of necessity in relation to the use of non-human animals, we should ask ‘Necessary for what?’ The application of this insight is an important corrective in the ethical debate about using nonhuman animals as research subjects. Clearly, such use is not necessary for human survival. Unlike the use of non-human animals for human food, this use of other animals has never been necessary for human survival and there is no context today in which it is. Quite straightforwardly, we do not need to gain the knowledge we seek through experiments on non-human animals. This does not mean, however, that researchers are not able to provide an answer to the ‘Necessary for what?’ question. In the broadest terms, the claim to necessity must be that research experimentation on non-human animals is necessary to gain knowledge that will allow us to improve human welfare. But to state it in this way makes clear that this justification requires further specification. We can improve human welfare in a wide range of ways that do not involve research experimentation on non-human animals: some of the most obvious candidates would be to improve access to clean water and sanitation, to take action in relation to preventable human diseases, and to improve access to education. Specifying the necessity of such research experimentation on other animals more narrowly might lead us to say that it is necessary in order to ensure the safety of chemicals and pharmaceuticals and to improve medical treatment. But there are ways of doing both of these things without experimenting on non-human animals, so our specification would have to be narrower still. One experiment in a research laboratory I visited was inducing cancer in rats and then feeding them a variety of diets in order to assess which, if any, had an impact on survival rates. Red wine was the key additive in the diets given to some of the rats. I did not have the opportunity to discuss the experiment with the scientist in charge of the study, but presumably she would have told me that it was necessary to subject the rats to the suffering involved in the procedure in order to help improve the survival rates of human cancer patients. But this is clearly not the case: we could study the relationship between diet and cancer survival through observational studies on humans. The scientist would presumably tell me that it would be very difficult or impossible to acquire the detailed physiological data about how the dietary changes were affecting the cancers in the rats through human studies: you could not, for example, kill and dissect human research subjects at scheduled points in the progress of the cancer in order to get this useful information. But this makes

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it clear that necessity is not the issue at stake at all, here: the project makes use of the rats not because it is necessary but because it is a convenient methodology for researchers to employ. To take up the Imutran case study again, presumably the scientists involved would argue that given the numbers of people that are dying on transplant waiting lists because of a lack of donor organs, it is very important to investigate the possibility of transplanting organs from pigs to provide an alternative source of supply, and it is necessary to test the viability of such xenotransplantation in non-human primates before beginning human trials. Better to kill 445 monkeys and baboons to find out immunosuppression makes the procedure unviable, they would argue, than to kill 445 humans in order to make the same discovery. But, even here, necessity is not a useful way of framing the ethical question. We could take action to increase the supply of organs in other ways, such as public awareness campaigns, and there are other ways to research the immunological issues in the transplant of organs from pigs to humans. The claim to necessity is only ever valid in relation to a proposed project of conducting research according to a particular methodology – one that uses non-human experimental subjects – and this means any such claim to necessity merely begs the question about whether the research is justifiable given the costs to those subjected to the experiment. Appeals to necessity in this context are therefore irrelevant to the ethical debate: we need to focus instead on whether or not it is justifiable to inflict harms on non-human animals in pursuit of increasing scientific knowledge and potential subsequent human benefits. The question of whether research on non-human animals can be justified in a theological context should not be determined by the outcome of a cost-benefit analysis. In the opening chapter of this volume, I noted that a utilitarian analysis succeeds in drawing attention to some but not all of the morally relevant features of ethical questions concerning other animals. We could undoubtedly improve medical knowledge and human health with an expanded programme of research experimentation on human subjects, in which the experimental subjects were selected randomly from the population. Such a programme would be most effective if these subjects were not required to consent to the experimental procedures, and if experiments that caused suffering and death were permitted. With appropriate research design, it is entirely plausible to think that such a programme could be justified on a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis: we would merely have to demonstrate the probability that the benefits accruing to many from the knowledge gained from the experiments would outweigh the suffering of the small number of humans sacrificed in such a programme. Presumably the Nazi programmes of research on Jews and those with disabilities were justified on a similar basis. If we find such a proposal abhorrent, it is because we do not take a utilitarian view of things: instead, we judge that respecting human persons means that harmful research without consent is unjustifiable, whatever the subsequent benefits that might be gained. The ethics of research on human subjects do not operate merely on a costbenefit analysis: other constraints, including informed consent, prevent research taking place that would be justifiable simply on a cost-benefit calculation. There is

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no reason to think that the structure of our moral thought changes at the species boundary, so that all considerations apart from utilitarian ones fall away. Robert Nozick called this odd structure ‘utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people’ and rejected it.69 Such double-think is no more defensible in a theological scheme than it is in Nozick’s. If we agree that a surplus of benefits is not a sufficient condition for the justifiability of research experimentation on other animals, it is nonetheless plausible to maintain that demonstrating that the benefits outweigh the costs should be a necessary condition for justifying such research. That is, we could be clear that a programme of research was not justifiable if its probable costs outweighed its probable benefits. There might be some quibbles here: some researchers might argue for experiments using non-human animals that were addressing questions of basic science without any obvious human benefit. In response we would have to say that the respect owed to other animals in a theological understanding is incompatible with using them to advance human knowledge, and that other means should be found for advancing the frontiers of knowledge. Others might argue that a species-neutral evaluation of costs and benefits in a utilitarian analysis failed to give sufficient weighting to the greater importance of human over non-human interests, but given that usually all the significant costs are to non-human animals, and all the benefits to humans, it seems that we should at least be able to argue that the costs to non-human animals are less than the benefits to humans. On this basis, then, a cost-benefit analysis of research experimentation on non-human animals is of interest not because it could justify the practice, but because the practice is clearly not justifiable if it cannot be shown that the benefits outweigh the costs. It may seem odd to labour this point, but I do so because it turns out to be much harder than we might expect to show that research experimentation on non-human animals has more benefits than costs. Let us begin with experiments to assess the toxicity of chemicals. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, figures on the numbers of non-human animals used in experimentation are hard to come by, but one estimate is that 5 to 15 per cent of all procedures on non-human animals are conducted for toxicity testing, and both the National Institute of Health in the USA and the European Union have ambitious programmes to test tens of thousands of substances for toxicity using animals.70 In fact, however, the numbers of non-human animals used in such procedures has been falling for very good reasons: the predictive power of the tests is poor, and the process is slow and expensive. Andrew Rowan notes that on average toxicity tests on non-human animals only predict toxicity in humans with 50 to 60 per cent success rate, i.e. only slightly better than the outcome that would be achieved by tossing a coin.71 The European Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) process has identified 30,000 chemicals that R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 39. A. N. Rowan, ‘Ending the Use of Animals in Toxicity Testing and Risk Evaluation’, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 24:4 (October 2015), 455. 71  Rowan, ‘Ending the Use of Animals in Toxicity Testing and Risk Evaluation’, 453. 69  70 

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it would be desirable to test for carcinogenic properties, but laboratories globally have only tested 600 such chemicals using the standard procedures on mice and rats in the past forty years at a current cost of several million dollars per chemical, which means completing the task at this rate would take two millennia and a budget of around $100 billion. In contrast, robotic non-animal testing systems can now test 1,408 chemicals in fifteen different concentrations against 200 non-animal test systems in fourteen days, which means a single such machine could work through the entire REACH database within a year at a tiny fraction of the cost of animal studies.72 For toxicity testing, therefore, even without attending to the significant suffering inflicted on non-human animals poisoned to death or poisoned and then killed for dissection, the obvious costs to non-human animals far outweigh the meagre benefits accruing to humans. Only regulatory conservatism stands in the way of a rapid end to using other animals in this way. A cost-benefit analysis of using non-human animals for medical research is more complex. The costs to the animals used for experimentation is the most certain part of the calculation, and is most straightforward to estimate, though, as the Imutran case study showed, these costs can easily be underestimated. It is clearly much harder to calculate the benefits from particular experimental procedures, or from medical research experimentation on other animals as a whole. Even if we could do so, however, as David DeGrazia and Jeff Sebo observe, we need to include additional factors that are often neglected in the discussion. Evaluating past benefits and harms from research on other animals fully ‘requires consideration of counterfactual past harms and benefits – that is, what, in view of available evidence, would likely have happened if we had conducted less, or more, animal research’. They note in addition that even evidence of past benefits that could only have been achieved by research on non-human animals cannot be used as evidence that similar future benefits can only be obtained in this way, since we now have access to new alternative technologies such as computer modelling and stem cell-based models.73 In addition, we need to attend to the human costs of using non-human animals as research subjects, which are very frequently neglected. DeGrazia and Sebo enumerate these as: (1) false toxicity negatives, in which interventions appear safe for animal test subjects yet prove harmful to humans; (2) false toxicity positives, in which interventions appear unsafe for animal test subjects though they would be safe for humans; (3) false efficacy negatives, in which interventions that fail to work in animal test subjects would work in humans; and (4) false efficacy positives, in which interventions that work in animal test subjects prove useless in humans. Where these costs are known, they are often very high; where they are unknown – as they usually are in (2) and (3) – they invite concerns about possible missed opportunities for medical breakthroughs.74 Rowan, ‘Ending the Use of Animals in Toxicity Testing and Risk Evaluation’, 454. D. DeGrazia and J. Sebo, ‘Necessary Conditions for Morally Responsible Animal Research’, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 24:4 (2015 October), 423. 74  DeGrazia and Sebo, ‘Necessary Conditions’, 423. 72  73 

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Aysha Akhtar notes that a 2004 report of the US Food and Drug Administration estimated that 92 per cent of drugs that pass preclinical trials involving non-human animal trials fail to proceed to the market, and this may have risen to 96 per cent in the years since, with the main causes of failure being problems of effectiveness and safety that the animal trials failed to predict.75 These statistics show that false toxicity negatives and false efficacy positives are very high indeed. With regard to false toxicity positives, there are well-known examples of drugs that would have failed non-human animal trials, such as aspirin and penicillin, because they are toxic to commonly used animal species, though not to humans. A more recent example is the widely used cancer drug tamoxifen, which might well have not reached human clinical trials if it had been known that it caused liver tumours in rats.76 Assessing the benefits and costs of research experimentation on non-human animals is therefore a complex task. It is clear that the common appeal of those advocating continued research on other animals that very many medical advances have been made through using research on other animals is by no means sufficient to make the case: these focus only on select benefits, are not presented in the context of the full range of non-human animal and human costs, and do not demonstrate that we could not make similar advances without using non-human animals as research subjects. It is unnerving that routine appeals are made to the benefits of research on non-human animals without attention to these complexities. Any rigorous examination of the costs and benefits of research on other animals must judge it is very difficult to assess, and that it is not clear that the benefits gained outweigh the human and non-human costs.77 This is a significant conclusion. I noted at the end of the previous question that the only promising reason to take a view of research experimentation on animals at odds with the strong Christian opposition to vivisection in the nineteenth century was that we were now clearer about the human benefits of such research, but this does not seem to be the case. I argued above that a surplus of benefits over costs would be a necessary, though not a sufficient, condition for justifying research on other animals, but it seems that this necessary condition has not been satisfied at this general level.

A. Akhtar, ‘The Flaws and Human Harms of Animal Experimentation’, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 24:4 (2015), 410. A 2014 report on success rates for cancer treatments also reports a success rate of only 8 per cent from animal models; see I. W. Y. Mak, N. Evaniew and M. Ghert, ‘Lost in Translation: Animal Models and Clinical Trials in Cancer Treatment’, American Journal of Translational Research 6:2 (2014), 114–18. 76  Akhtar, ‘Animal Experimentation’, 414. 77  Nathan Nobis sets out the argument against a cost-benefit justification for research on non-human animals in ‘Rational Engagement, Emotional Response, and the Prospects for Moral Progress in Animal Use “Debates”’, in The Ethics of Animal Research: Exploring the Controversy, ed. J. R. Garrett (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 75 

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A Christian Ethical Assessment of Research Experimentation on Other Animals Up to this point in the chapter, I have reviewed statistics and accounts of what is being done to non-human animals in research experimentation, surveyed the history of Christian opposition to vivisection, and argued that it is unclear that using non-human animals for research can be justified on a cost-benefit basis, which is a necessary condition for it to be judged justifiable. I want now to take the opposite approach from the previous section, to ask whether, if it could be shown that research experimentation on non-human animals could demonstrate its worth under a cost-benefit analysis, it would be ethically justifiable in a theological context. In a shocking scene in a 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle, the character Ulysse is shown around a research laboratory. The experimental subjects have had parts of their brains removed in order to allow the investigation of the effects of the surgery. One no longer has any appetite, another can no longer distinguish distance or shape of objects, another has forgotten all his training and even his own name, others have been partially or totally paralysed, others blinded; the surgery on one female has removed all maternal instinct. In another room, electrical stimulation is being applied to different parts of the brains of the subjects, inducing movements in their limbs: Ulysse sees one subject manifest first slow movements of fingers, then more frenzied movements as the current is left on, then her wrist, fore-arm, upper arm and shoulder are also twitching, then her hip, thigh, leg and toes, as well as her face; after ten minutes, the whole of her left side is shaken by convulsive spasms. It is such a dreadful sight that Ulysse shouts ‘Stop it!’ to Helius, his calm and unaffected scientist guide. Helius responds that the experiments seem bloodcurdling when you are not used to them, but that, thanks to them, medicine and surgery have made great progress. All the operations are performed on anaesthetized subjects, Helius tells Ulysse, except where pain is the subject of interest, so that all unnecessary suffering is avoided. Helius asks Ulysse whether they do similar experiments where he comes from: Ulysse responds that they do, but on monkeys, not on the human beings that are the subjects in Helius’s laboratory. Boulle’s novel is The Planet of the Apes; the scientists conducting research on human beings are chimpanzees. On this planet, chimpanzees share advanced rationality with gorillas and orang-utans on the planet, but not with humans, who have reverted to a prelinguistic state.78 The scene in Boulle’s novel and the scenes in the films inspired by it are shocking because they turn the tables on us and force us to confront the question of whether we are prepared to endorse experimentation on those considered inferior when it is humans who are in that position. This is in strong resonance with the Christian objections to vivisection surveyed above: they saw vivisection in stark clarity as the P. Boulle, The Planet of the Apes, trans. Xan Fielding (London: Vintage Classics, 2011), 231–7.

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strong exercising their power over the weak for their own ends, in contradiction to the example of Christ giving up strength and power in order to aid the weak. A cost-benefit analysis will determine whether the strong are accurate in their belief that they will derive benefits from the cruelties they inflict; but according to the perspective of these Christians, that calculation is so far beside the point as to be almost absurd. I suggested above that a scheme of subjecting humans to harmful experimentation against their will seems abhorrent: Christians objecting to vivisection seem to have seen the use of non-human animals for this purpose in similar terms. Helius and his fellow chimpanzee scientists in Boulle’s novel seem clearly to be heartless in failing to empathize with the sufferings of their human subjects. The same heartlessness is evident in C. S. Lewis’s villainous vivisections in That Hideous Strength. The vivisector depicted in Robert Morley’s ‘Christ in the Laboratory’ drawing is similarly lacking in compassion and mercy. These depictions of the cruelty of experimentation on other animals seem to derive from a source deep in the Christian tradition. We have become used to using other animals for food, clothing and labour: in many contexts humans have had to make use of them in this way and we have become habituated to it. The huge growth in the use of other animals in order to gain knowledge was a shocking new development, however, which Christians saw clearly at the time as fundamentally at odds with their faith. This attitude to the use of non-human animals for human experimentation is in strong accord with the implications in this area of human practice of the theological account of the lives of other animals I have developed. If Christians believe other animals to be created, reconciled and redeemed by a God who wills them to flourish and in so doing glorify their Creator, we have noted in previous chapters that this undergirds a Christian responsibility to promote their flourishing wherever possible, and not to act in ways that block this flourishing. It is possible to imagine research studies that were compatible with this vision of the life of fellow animal creatures: we could raise them in conditions in which they could flourish, observe and monitor them in ways that did not cause them distress and suffering, and allow them to live out the full length of their lives. This is far from the situation of the vast majority of animals used for research experimentation, however, many of whom are now genetically modified to make them susceptible to disease or otherwise more useful as research subjects, raised in small enclosures, often made to experience disease, injury, or other distress, and then killed when they are no longer of experimental use. We have good reason to make common cause with our nineteenth-century Christian forbears in objecting to this practice. The case against research experimentation on non-human animals in a theological context seems strong on two grounds. First, it is far from clear that it can be demonstrated that such research achieves a net benefit over its costs to non-human animals and to humans. There are obvious benefits to scientists and institutions pursuing this research, and no doubt some knowledge can be attained more rapidly in this way than in others. Together with an inherent conservatism of scientific and regulatory methodology this explains the enthusiastic pursuit and defence of the practice. That the research provides some benefits to some people is

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not the same as demonstrating that it provides a net benefit all things considered, and this is a first reason for thinking that alternative research methodologies should be pursued instead. Second, even if we could demonstrate that research on other animals was beneficial overall, Christians have reasons to judge it illegitimate to pursue knowledge at the cost of the suffering and death of non-human animals. We restrict what can be done to humans in the pursuit of knowledge and there are good theological grounds for objecting to this exploitation of the weak by the strong. In conversation on this issue, it is often put to me that to be consistent in opposing research experimentation on non-human animals one would have to check whether all the pharmaceuticals and medical procedures offered to oneself or one’s family had been developed using experiments on other animals, and refuse any that had been developed in this way. Given the prevalence of the use of non-human animals this would mean having to forswear most of modern medicine. There seems no reason to me, however, to accept this view. We are heirs to knowledge that has been derived by unethical means in every field of human enquiry: physiology in particular almost certainly depends on knowledge derived from stolen corpses. The ethical question is how we should now conduct medical research, not how to find the parts of our existing knowledge we must pretend not to have learned. The urgent issue here is the prospective one of how many more non-human animals will be subjected to human experimentation. Related uses of non-human animals include using them to produce human medicines directly, such as pigs to produce insulin or dogs to provide blood for haemophiliacs. These uses are distinct from research experimentation in seeking to obtain a product, rather than knowledge, from the animals concerned. The issues here are very similar to those involved in deriving food products from animals discussed in Chapter 2. Such animals may well be cared for better than many of those raised for food, but alternative ways of treating patients that do not require the killing of other animals are clearly preferable. Some universities still make use of non-human animals for training students in physiology, and some medical schools and armed forces still use live animals for surgical training, though this is becoming less common. In both cases, an appropriate regard for non-human animal life will lead to a shift to educational resources and training methods that do not require the suffering and death of non-human animals.79 Following her analysis of the ethics of research experimentation on nonhuman animals in a theological context, Donna Yarri concludes that most experiments conducted on other animals cannot be justified. She argues that See S. G. Gala et al., ‘Use of Animals by Nato Countries in Military Medical Training Exercises: An International Survey’, Military Medicine 177:8 (2012), 907–10; J. Balcombe, ‘Medical Training Using Simulation: Toward Fewer Animals and Safer Patients’, Alternatives to Laboratory Animals 32:S1 (2004), 553–60; L. A. Hansen, ‘Animal Laboratories Are Not Needed to Train Medical Students’, Journal of Surgical Education 71:4 (July–August 2014), 454.

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inflicting serious burdens on non-human animals is never justifiable, but judges that some experimentation could continue on the basis that substantial human benefits could justify moderate burdens on animals.80 Another position that would rule out most current practice is offered by DeGrazia and Sebo, who argue that any proposed procedure should have an expected net benefit, should give the non-human animal subjects a worthwhile life, and to impose no harms on them that are not required by the study itself.81 The fact that very few current studies meet the criteria of either of these moderate proposals is striking in itself, and suggests that almost all of what is currently inflicted on non-human animals in the name of research cannot be justified. Beyond these reformist positions, a Christian view of the lives of fellow animal creatures should be concerned about any procedure where they are caused suffering and death in the pursuit of human knowledge. Such a perspective leads to the judgement that Christians should seek – through peaceful means – to bring an end to any research that imposes significant burdens on non-human animals and is incompatible with their flourishing as creatures of God.

D. Yarri, The Ethics of Animal Experimentation: A Critical Analysis and Constructive Christian Proposal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 146–50. 81  DeGrazia and Sebo, ‘Necessary Conditions’. 80 

Chapter 6 U SI N G O T H E R A N I M A L S F O R S P O RT A N D E N T E RTA I N M E N T In turning from the human use of other animals for food, clothing, labour and research experimentation to the question of the ethics of using non-human animals for sport and entertainment, we are clearly crossing into different moral territory. I argued in the previous chapter that research experimentation was differentiated from using other animals for food, clothing and labour in that the large-scale use of animals for experimentation was a novel phenomenon and was not related to providing basic human necessities. Using other animals for sport and entertainment goes one step further: not only is it clearly not necessary in any sense, but in contrast to research experimentation it is not addressing serious issues of human wellbeing. No doubt leisure activities are significant to the happiness of many human beings, but it is clear that humans can amuse themselves in ways other than by making use of other animals; no doubt the employment such leisure activities provide is important for many people, but it is clear that they could be employed in other ways if this leisure industry did not exist. The implications of the analysis of the previous chapters are therefore clear: the theological account of the lives of non-human animals I have developed is incompatible with using them for sport or entertainment where such use fails to enable them to flourish as creatures of God. Given that our goals in making use of other animals in these areas are essentially frivolous, the moral demands here are far clearer than in the previous chapters. The research scientist who subjects an animal to suffering and death is at least able to suggest a potentially justifying reason in relation to wider benefits derived from the practice, though I have argued in the previous chapter that we have reason to disagree. Those who participate in grouse shoots, where frightened birds are beaten towards their guns, who are clearly subjected to distress and suffering as a result, have no such defence. If they respond that the killing is justified because they derive pleasure from the activity, either they are inattentive to the consequences of their activity for other creatures, or they reckon the suffering and death of other creatures as of little account in relation to their own pleasure. Neither attitude is compatible with the theological account of nonhuman animal creatures for which I have argued in these volumes. There is little in the way of new moral analysis required in this chapter, therefore, but it is important to bring ethical attention to uses of other animals that fall into this category but are rarely regarded as issues of ethical interest in a theological

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context or more widely, such as sport angling or horse and greyhound racing. It is also helpful to recall the long traditions of Jewish and Christian opposition to using other animals for sport which, like the Christian opposition to vivisection surveyed in the previous chapter, does not seem to be well-remembered and is another demonstration that strong lines of concern for fellow animal creatures are deeply rooted in traditions of Christian thought. In approaching the question of using non-human animals in sport and entertainment, it is helpful to pay attention to the term ‘sport’ itself. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that the range of meaning of the term may relate to its association with the Latin lūdus, meaning play, game or amusement, and in plural, public games, chariot races, theatre, gladiatorial combats, and hunting. In English, ‘sport’ originally refers simply to an activity providing diversion or entertainment, was used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries chiefly to refer to hunting, shooting and fishing, and only during the nineteenth century came to refer to the newly organized games of football, rugby, cricket and athletics.1 Adrian Franklin cites a late fifteenth-century account of a sport in which a pike – a large British fish – was tethered to a swan to see which would be dragged out of their element, and identifies the tension and excitement as the core of the sport in such contests.2 Given this range of origin and usage, we should be wary of attempts to distinguish between ‘true sports’ and other entertainments as a tool of ethical analysis, even if one would need to do so for other purposes. It is tempting to claim that the unequal contest between sport hunters in Africa and their prey cannot be called a sport because of its one-sided nature, unlike, for example, a game of football played between two teams of the same numbers according to rules that are fair to both sides. Such a claim misses the point, however, that ideas of fairness are very far from the Roman games or the hunting, shooting and fishing that were the primary sports up to 150 years ago. Reference to an ideal of fairness also risks a false justification of a hunt in which non-human animals are killed only with difficulty, or with some risk to the hunter: these factors may influence how entertaining the hunter finds the activity, just as the Roman crowds enjoyed an even contest between gladiators, but the factor of difficulty has no relation to the ethical question about whether it is appropriate to kill other animals in pursuit of human entertainment. There is something particularly nauseating about shooting penned lions, as is done in some parts of Africa,3 and confinement itself is clearly an additional concern. No doubt many hunters would see such a practice as unattractive and contrary to their sporting ideals. We need to recognize, however,

Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Sport, N.1’, OED Online (2016). A. Franklin, Animals and Modern Cultures: A Sociology of Human-Animal Relations in Modernity (London: Sage, 1999), 19–20. 3 P. Barkham, ‘“Canned Hunting”: The Lions Bred for Slaughter’, The Guardian, 3 June 2013. 1 2

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that such ideals of what makes for good sport – or entertainment – in hunting lions is entirely independent of the question of whether killing lions for entertainment can be justified. Ethically, therefore, uses of non-human animals in sport and entertainment belong together: the relevant question in all cases is whether we are justified in entertaining ourselves by using other animals in these ways.

How Humans Use Other Animals for Sport and Entertainment Humans use other animals for sport and entertainment in a wide range of ways, but numerically recreational angling far outweighs all other uses. A 1994 study estimated that 47 billion fish were caught by recreational anglers each year, with two-thirds being released after capture.4 While the practice of catch and release angling has often been seen as benign, there is now good evidence to the contrary. As discussed in Chapter 2, it is now clear that fish experience pain, showing aversive responses to painful stimuli, seeking analgesia at some cost, and exhibiting other behavioural changes subsequent to the experience. Most fish caught in recreational angling are caught with baited hooks which either pierce their mouth or jaw or are swallowed and lodge in their throat, oesophagus or stomach.5 They are then pulled out of the water, where they experience asphyxiation until they are killed or are returned to the water. In addition to the suffering and distress caused by capture, there are also significant consequences for the future health of the fish. A significant percentage of the fish will die in the short term from their injuries. This varies by species and context, but approaches one-third of fish released in many contexts, and is greater when the hook has been swallowed, causing internal injuries.6 Many fish that do not die in the short term will have their growth or fitness adversely affected, and recreational fishing is sufficiently intensive in some contexts as to threaten the viability of populations of some species.7 Catch and release may be preferable for fish populations in some

S. J. Cooke and I. G. Cowx, ‘The Role of Recreational Fishing in Global Fish Crises’, Bioscience 54 (2004), 857–9. 5 E. D. Prince, M. Ortiz and A. Venizelos, ‘A Comparison of Circle Hook and “J” Hook Performance in Recreational Catch-and-Release Fisheries for Billfish’. Paper presented at the American Fisheries Society Symposium, c. 2002. 6 S. J. Cooke and I. G. Cowx, ‘Contrasting Recreational and Commercial Fishing: Searching for Common Issues to Promote Unified Conservation of Fisheries Resources and Aquatic Environments’, Biological Conservation 128:1 (2006), 96–7; M. K. Broadhurst et al., ‘Mortality of Key Fish Species Released by Recreational Anglers in an Australian Estuary’, Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology 321:2 (2005), 171–9. 7 Cooke and Cowx, ‘Contrasting Recreational and Commercial Fishing’. 4

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contexts than killing fish after capture, but it subjects individual fish to substantial distress, sometimes on a repeated basis. Whether or not fish are released after capture, therefore, recreational angling inflicts significant suffering and harms on fish.8 After fish, the next biggest use of non-human animals for sport and entertainment may well be shooting birds. I have not been able to quantify the scale of the practice globally, but in the UK alone, it is estimated that 40 million pheasants and partridges are released for shooting each year, and 700,000 red grouse shot on English and Scottish moors.9 The pheasants and partridges are mostly raised intensively in barren cages, with half the pheasants and 90 per cent of the partridges imported from Europe as hatching eggs or chicks. They do not fall under European Union regulations for farmed animals, and there are no agreed standards for their housing or care.10 A 2008 UK Farm Animal Welfare Council opinion lists welfare concerns for the birds as their confinement in exposed open pens or barren cages, the use of bits and ‘spectacles’ on their beaks to prevent pecking and egg-eating in the confined conditions, the use of ‘braille’ bands around their wings to prevent flight, beak-trimming, transport, and acclimatization before release.11 This is in advance of the distress the birds suffer from being driven by beaters into the air and being shot by inexpert paying customers, with the consequent suffering from non-lethal wounds. In addition to these impacts on the game birds themselves, there are also significant consequences for local populations of wild animals, as a result of attempts to protect the game birds from predation. The high densities of birds required for the practice of beaters driving them towards stationary guns inevitably attracts predators. Golden eagles, hen harriers and peregrine falcons are illegally shot and poisoned by gamekeepers on estates in the UK, with the result that hen harriers are nearly extinct in England, and large numbers of mountain hares have been killed in Scotland, apparently with the aim of reducing the viability of the golden eagle population, or on the basis of a belief that they spread disease to

The final chapter of J. Balcombe’s What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins (New York: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) provides an accessible account of the harms inflicted on fish by sport fishing, alongside other fishing practices.  9  Farm Animal Welfare Council, Opinion on the Welfare of Farmed Gamebirds (London, 2008), 2; A. Critchlow, ‘Grouse Shooting’s “Glorious Twelfth” Threatened by Few Birds’, The Daily Telegraph, 8 August 2015. A 2011 report for the RSPB suggests that the UK numbers are significantly larger than any other country; see Karen Mustin et al., Biodiversity Impacts of Game Bird Hunting and Associated Management Practices in Europe and North America, RSPB Report (Aberdeen: James Hutton Institute, 2011). 10  Farm Animal Welfare Council, Opinion on the Welfare of Farmed Gamebirds, 1–3. 11  Farm Animal Welfare Council, Opinion on the Welfare of Farmed Gamebirds, 2.  8 

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grouse.12 The League Against Cruel Sports estimates that 1.7 million mammals are snared each year in the UK to protect game bird populations, a form of trapping that inflicts severe suffering on the animals caught, in advance of their deaths.13 Sport hunting of mammals is probably numerically the next biggest use of non-human animals for sport and entertainment. Again, numbers of animals killed in this way are hard to ascertain. The most detailed data on recreational hunting comes from the United States, which publishes regular reports on fishing, hunting and wildlife-associated recreation. From the 2011 report we learn that 72 million people went to watch wildlife in that year, and 37 million fished or hunted. Numbers of male and female wildlife observers are roughly equal; around threequarters of anglers and hunters are male. In total, 554 million days were spent fishing, and 282 million days hunting.14 There are no statistics provided on the numbers of animals killed in these activities, however. In considering this hunting within a chapter on using non-human animals for sport and entertainment, however, we face a boundary question. In his defence of hunting, Lawrence Cahoone notes that contemporary US hunting ethics require that prey must be eaten, and he argues that killing an animal without using the dead animal is not hunting at all, on the basis of his definition of American hunting not as sport, but as ‘a neo-traditional trophic practice whereby agro-industrialists elect to approximate the pre-agrarian skill of procuring meat by taking individual prey’.15 I discussed the ethics of hunting for food in Chapter 2, noting, in agreement with Cahoone, that, at least in the ideal case where a hunted animal is killed immediately, it is likely that killing a wild animal for food will cause less suffering and distress than is inflicted on intensively farmed domesticated animals, and in addition the hunted animal is likely to have enjoyed vastly preferable conditions of life in comparison to intensively reared farmed animals. Where the motive for hunting is food, therefore, and life and death for the hunted animal is preferable to that of the domesticated animal, we should be more concerned about farmed animals than hunting. Where the motive for hunting is sport, however, we should agree with Cahoone that it is illegitimate: killing other animals for entertainment is incompatible with regarding them as fellow creatures of God. The more difficult boundary question is the practice Cahoone points to where hunters are committed to using their prey for food, but are choosing to hunt rather than obtain nutrition

S. Thirgood and S. Redpath, ‘Hen Harriers and Red Grouse: Science, Politics and HumanWildlife Conflict’, Journal of Applied Ecology 45:5 (2008), 1550–54; P. S. Thompson et al., ‘Environmental Impacts of High‐output Driven Shooting of Red Grouse Lagopus Lagopus Scotica’, Ibis 158:2 (2016), 446–52. 13  League Against Cruel Sports, The Case against Bird Shooting (Godalming, Surrey: 2016). 14  US Department of the Interior et al., National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and WildlifeAssociated Recreation (Washington, DC, 2011), 4, 15, 41, 48, 61. 15  L. Cahoone, ‘Hunting as a Moral Good’, Environmental Values 18:1 (2009), 72–3; original emphasis. 12 

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in other ways because they enjoy the activity or have cultural reasons to appreciate it. Hunting on these terms is intermediate between the hunting for food and sport dichotomy. As discussed in Chapter 2, however, Christians have reason to avoid killing animals for food at all where it is not necessary to do so. Big game hunting presents no such boundary questions. Here the motivation is killing animals considered to be high-status, obtaining body parts as ‘trophies’ from them, and accumulating points within various scoring systems, usually based on the dimensions of the animal killed. Safari Club International, for example, whose members are responsible for the killing of approximately 30,000 animals each year, produces score sheets for hunters to complete and submit in order to maintain records of their cumulative score. Members are admitted to different, increasingly elite, circles of membership as their cumulative score increases.16 The Safari Club International form for rhinoceroses, for example, which can be found online together with forms particular to many other species, asks for the name of the hunter as they want it recorded in the record book, their membership number, address and phone numbers. They are asked to self-certify that they ‘took this animal without violating the wildlife laws or ethical hunting practices’ in the area where they hunted, and to indicate whether the animal was ‘free-ranging’ (as opposed to captive). They are asked to include a photograph and credit card details, paying $35 as a record book processing fee, $55 for a medallion award in the form of a walnut plaque, or $80 for both. Then follows the details of the animal: kind, date killed, location, name of guide, name of hunting company, and whether the rhinoceros was killed with a rifle, handgun, muzzleloader, bow, crossbow, just picked up from the ground, or darted. Finally, the dimensions of the rhinoceros’s horns are requested, at 60 days after the kill: the length of the front and rear horns and their base circumference. The score for killing the rhinoceros is derived from dividing each of these four measurements by eight, and adding them together. At the bottom of the form an ‘official measurer’ records their authorization of the measurements.17 My aim in this section was to provide a survey account of practice in advance of offering a theological and ethical assessment of it in the following section, but in typing the details for the previous paragraph, I experience nausea and the warm prickling in my eyes that is the precursor to tears. The idea of an entertainment that reduces the killing of other animals to points in a competition, in which prizes and honours awarded for success in this pointless massacre is, I think, the clearest example in this book of the pursuit of human interests in reckless disregard for the lives of fellow animal creatures of God, a tyrannical anthropocentrism which, instead of recognizing the ways in which these creatures are called to glorify God, delights in their destruction. A response of utter disgust to this practice is a proper

M. Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 58. 17  Safari Club International, ‘Method 8 Entry Form: For Rhinoceros Horns’ (2016). 16 

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moral response in the context of a theological account of animals. We are close here to the Satanic associations evoked in the C. S. Lewis Out of the Silent Planet trilogy discussed in the previous chapter: actions towards animal creatures that represent direct rebellion against God’s creative, providential and redemptive purposes. Attending to the historical roots of big game hunting in Africa raises the level of nausea still further, in demonstrating the strong intersection between sport hunting, colonialism and racism in the nineteenth century. I warn readers that the block quotation later in this paragraph contains grossly offensive racist language, which I have opted to reproduce in order to demonstrate the extremity of the racism of white game hunters in this period and to avoid sanitizing their language. Killing large animals in Africa was a key part of the imperial project during the period in which European nations were establishing and maintaining empires in Africa, an expression of white power over black Africa and black Africans. In nineteenth-century London, game hunters gave popular talks in London about their sporting success. Harriet Ritvo notes that one such celebrity, Frederick Courteney Selous, was introduced at a talk in the Great Hall of the Imperial Institute by the Duke of Fife, who predicted that he would be ‘known as one of those who had advanced the cause of civilization and helped to extend the British Empire’, after which Selous told stories of perilous encounters with lions, elephants – and hostile natives.18 Ritvo comments that ‘[t]he connection between triumphing over a dangerous animal and subduing unwilling natives was direct and obvious’ and argues that the most important factor in the popularity of literature describing hunting expeditions ‘was the fact that the imperialist adventure, in which Britain appropriated exotic territories and subjugated alien peoples, allowed even humble citizens to engage, at least by proxy, in a kind of metaphoric reenactment of conquest that had previously been confined to the privileged classes’.19 Still more appalling is the gross racism in this report by Frederick Jackson of an encounter with the Hungarian Count Teleki: On his return after he had discovered both a lake and a mountain, we met at Mombasa on board ship, he on his way to Zanzibar, I on arrival, on appointment to the I.B.E.A. Company; and he gave me a short but graphic account of his journey, including the shooting of 35 elephants and 300 ‘niggers’. When he came to the end of that part where he lost so many of his men from starvation, he said: ‘It was very sad. You know I do not like the black man, I regard him as one big monkey, but when I did see my men dying on the road, sometimes three or four, sometimes six in a day, then I did begin to pity them’.20 H. Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 251. 19  Ritvo, Animal Estate, 254, 257. 20  F. Jackson, Early Days in East Africa (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1930), 127, partly quoted in J. M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 161. 18 

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Very clearly, Teleki’s extreme racist disregard for the lives of black Africans he boasts of slaughtering is strongly connected with his supposed conquest both of territory and his elephant victims. His identification of black Africans with nonhuman animals is part of what enables his callous cruelty. Jackson, later Governor of Uganda, who notes that the meeting with Teleki took place on Jackson’s joining the Imperial British East India Company, identifies Teleki’s attitude as ‘brutal’, but makes no further comment on the massacre Teleki reports to him. In the foreword to Jackson’s book, in which killing animals as sport is a major focus, Lord Cranworth praises Jackson as a fine sportsman, celebrates his contribution to ‘the amazing achievement that has been accomplished by our fellow-countrymen on behalf of the native races for whose control and advancement we have become responsible’, and memorializes him as ‘The Whitest Gentleman who ever crossed the shores of Africa’.21 John MacKenzie notes that Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scout movement, invoked St George as the patron saint of ‘pig-sticking’ – hunting wild boar with spears – making him ‘an emblem of the moral force of imperialism, vanquishing the darker forces of an outer world’.22 MacKenzie also records a further intersection between game hunting and brutal imperialism: as numbers of game animals were reduced by unrestricted sport hunting by whites, Africans were not allowed to kill them for meat, causing some to starve to death in the cause of marking the transition to advanced culture as ‘the transformation of subsistence hunting into the elite sporting Hunt’.23 The nexus between racism, imperialism and big game hunting could not be demonstrated more clearly, and the modern practice of game hunting in Africa and elsewhere cannot be detached from this legacy.24 A further major human use of other animals for sport and entertainment is in racing them, primarily for the purpose of gambling on the outcome. The animals most commonly used for this purpose are thoroughbred horses and greyhounds, although other species are also used, such as camels in Arabian Gulf states and buffalo in India.25 The numbers of animals affected are small in comparison with those killed in fishing or hunting. One estimate for horse-racing is that 110,000 Jackson, Early Days in East Africa, viii, x. MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, 189. 23  MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, 163–4. 24  Intersectionality between racism and abuse of non-human animals has been widely explored. See, for example: G. Elder, J. Wolch and J. Emel, ‘Race, Place, and the Bounds of Humanity’, Society & Animals 6:2 (1998), 183–202, D. Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), and M. DeMello, Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), ch. 13. 25  S. Khalaf, ‘Camel Racing in the Gulf: Notes on the Evolution of a Traditional Cultural Sport’, Anthropos 94:1 (1999), 85–106; P. Kathiravan et al., ‘Survey and Characterization of South Kanara Buffaloes in India’, Animal Genetic Resources Information 43 (2008), 67–77. 21  22 

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thoroughbred foals are born each year, and around 160,000 races are held annually in 47 countries.26 I have not succeeded in locating global figures for greyhound racing, but in the USA 50,000 to 60,000 dogs are raced annually, and the sport is also conducted in a number of other countries including the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and Spain. The cultural prominence of these races, together with the way in which harms done to the animals raced are usually hidden from race spectators, suggest that the practice of racing animals merits careful ethical attention. The horses in the racing stable I visited were by some distance the most carefully looked after of any of the non-human animals I encountered. The reason was clear: owners were paying £20,000 per year for them to be stabled, and the purchase prices of each horse were posted on the door to their stalls: 60,000; 80,000; 105,000. The currency is guineas, a gold coin that was last legal currency in 1817, now reckoned as £1.05: one of a multitude of markers that horse-racing in the UK is a distinct subculture, detailed in Rebecca Cassidy’s anthropology of Newmarket, the centre of UK horse-racing.27 For the fifty or so horses in the stables, there was a big staff of stable lads (male and female), an on-site vet, farriers in daily attendance, automated exercise wheels for making horses walk or trot in circles at specified speeds, and even a swimming pool to help with rehabilitation after injury, all operating under the careful scrutiny of the trainer. The horses were magnificent creatures: large, strong and elegant, and fearful in their power as they thundered past on the training gallop. As I sat with the assistant trainer and watched them walk around a ring to assess their health and readiness to run from their gait, I was struck by the combination of their power and speed with the thinness of their legs and ankles, the latter no bigger than a human adult, and the implications of this for their risk of injury while racing. It did not seem to me that the resources devoted to the intensive care the horses were receiving succeeded in enabling a good life for them, however: any activity outside their stable carried a risk of injury that would be a great cause of concern to their owners, and as a result, horses were frequently kept in their stable stalls except for their prescribed periods of exercise, which usually meant being confined for up to twenty-three hours each day. It was hard to find a time to visit the stables when the trainer would be present because of his frequent foreign trips: I was surprised to learn he had flown out from the UK to Dubai with horses from the stable a few days before my visit, which alerted me both to the stresses of international air travel for the horses, and to the astonishing sums of money devoted to racing as an international enterprise. Horse-racing is risky both for the jockeys and the horses. A UK study showed that jockeys suffer falls in around 0.4 per cent of flat races but 6.8 per cent of jump P. McManus, G. Albrecht and R. Graham, The Global Horseracing Industry: Social, Economic, Environmental, and Ethical Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 1. 27  R. Cassidy, The Sport of Kings: Kinship, Class and Thoroughbred Breeding in Newmarket (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 26 

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races, and that fatality figures make it the most dangerous sport, close to twice as dangerous as climbing and mountaineering, which is the next most dangerous in terms of fatalities per days of activity.28 In the UK between 1976 and 2000, there were four deaths of jockeys in flat racing and five in jump racing, which represented 0.013–0.015 deaths per 1,000 days of participation or 0.0042–0.0065 deaths per thousand race starts. Racing is very much more dangerous for horses, however. A study in the UK in 2000–2001 found that there were 6.3 horse fatalities per 1,000 starts in this period,29 indicating that, on the basis of these figures, horses are 420–485 times more likely to die on any day of racing than jockeys, and 970– 1,500 times more likely to die in a particular race. These figures of deaths during races represent only a small proportion of the overall fatality rates for racing horses, since in addition they may suffer accidents in training, or sustain injuries or demonstrate temperaments incompatible with success in racing that cause their owners to send them for slaughter. A cohort study of the 1,022 thoroughbred foals born in the UK in 1999 showed that 82 of them (8 per cent) had died or been killed by the age of four years, with 60 of these fatalities before the foals were two years old.30 Some of these deaths may be caused by breeding practices that have focused on speed increases in isolation from the wider health of the horses. One interviewee in a North American research study commented, the horses that we have, are riddled, the whole industry is riddled, with conformational issues, which are being covered up all the time, and we’re sort of pretending they’re not there. I mean, every time babies are born, you find all sorts of crooked knees and club feet and that sort of thing, which is, it’s been bred into the group, and it’s like, covered up … it’s a fundamental flaw which is now endemic in the breed.31

The trend to racing younger horses has been identified as particularly problematic, with one veterinarian commenting that ‘Pushing these immature two-yearold horses for speed before they have reached physical and mental maturity is recklessly dangerous and systematically dangerous for the animal’.32 The practice of greyhound racing in which dogs race to chase a mechanical lure was introduced in the early twentieth century as a humane alternative to

M. Turner, ‘Injuries in Professional Horse Racing in Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland During 1992–2000’, British Journal of Sports Medicine 36:6 (2002), 408. 29  G. L. Pinchbeck et al., ‘Horse Injuries and Racing Practices in National Hunt Racehorses in the UK: The Results of a Prospective Cohort Study’, The Veterinary Journal 167:1 (2004), 49. 30  S. Wilsher, W. R. Allen and J. L. N. Wood, ‘Factors Associated with Failure of Thoroughbred Horses to Train and Race’, Equine Veterinary Journal 38:2 (2006), 116. 31  McManus, Albrecht and Graham, Global Horseracing Industry, 148. 32  P. McManus, G. Albrecht and R. Graham, The Global Horseracing Industry: Social, Economic, Environmental, and Ethical Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 151. 28 

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hare coursing: setting dogs on a live hare.33 This is clearly better for the hares that would otherwise be chased and killed, though there is evidence that live animals are still used illegally by some greyhound breeders in the USA for training dogs.34 It is the welfare of the dogs that is the primary concern, however, in modern greyhound racing. A review by Michael Atkinson and Kevin Young of greyhound racing in the USA identifies four key areas of concern: breeding, training and racing, housing, and release. At the breeding stage, dogs that are unsuitable for racing are killed by breeders, by drowning or other methods, with perhaps 10 per cent of dogs killed for this reason. Dogs may also be badly housed and badly treated during transport by breeders.35 When being raced, dogs may be exhausted and stressed from racing up to six to seven times per week, resulting in pain and injuries, are often kept in batteries of stacked barren cages holding up to 1,000 dogs without exercise outside racing, and are sometimes fed unfit meat and injected with steroids or cocaine to enhance performance and mask pain. Dogs that become unfit for racing may be shot, starved, bludgeoned, hanged, abandoned, decapitated, electrocuted, sold to anglers or hunters for bait, or sold to medical laboratories. Sites of mass killing of greyhounds have been discovered in the USA and Europe.36 Some charities seek to rehome greyhounds as companion animals in order to prevent them being killed in these ways. Such efforts are clearly a benefit to the dogs rescued, but equally clearly address only a very small part of the overall abuse of dogs in this sport. The use of non-human animals for racing is closely associated with gambling. In Europe, 65 per cent of the financing of horse-racing comes from gambling, and in the UK, the Horserace Betting Levy Board is explicit in seeking to ensure that the racing fixture list is optimized to maximize income from gambling, which contributed £57 million in 2014/15.37 This economic reality means that these races are being staged primarily in order to provide opportunities for gambling. It is possible to imagine an interest in racing horses, dogs, or other animals from participants, or as a spectator sport, merely for the interest in the competition, and clearly the excitement of seeing horses run fast is part of the appeal, but the finances make clear that this is not what currently drives the staging of races. The funding indicates that the entertainment value of these sports is primarily the entertainment derived from staking money on a spectacle with an uncertain outcome. In the UK, gambling on the outcome of horse races remains the most popular form of gambling, representing 53 per cent of off-course betting

M. Atkinson, ‘Reservoir Dogs: Greyhound Racing, Mimesis and Sports-Related Violence’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport 40:3 (2005), 336. 34  Atkinson, ‘Reservoir Dogs’, 346. 35  Atkinson, ‘Reservoir Dogs’, 346–7. 36  Atkinson, ‘Reservoir Dogs’, 347–51. 37  European Pari Mutuel Association, Economic and Social Contribution of Horse Racing in Europe (2009), 6; Horserace Betting Levy Board, ‘Annual Report and Accounts 2014/15’ (2015), 11. 33 

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turnover.38 Concerns about the dominant influence of gambling over horse-racing were already being expressed in 1975, when Phil Bull, ‘one of the great racing minds’, commented ‘what is so sad and alarming regarding the future of racing is the refusal to admit the obvious, that the vital audience for the sport is no longer on the course but in the betting shops … This is, above all, an entertainment industry and it is the audience that matters.’39 It is worth noting, however, that with expanded opportunities for other kinds of betting in the UK, the popularity of betting on horse-racing is in decline, with horse-racing declining from 60 per cent of UK bookmaking revenues to below 30 per cent between 1994 and 2011.40 If this trend continues, given the dependence of the industry on gambling revenue, it is likely to lead to fewer horse races in the UK. There are, of course, independent reasons for concern about gambling in the context of Christian ethics, and a long history of church opposition to gambling as such, especially among non-conformist denominations.41 The strong association between some sports involving non-human animals and gambling on the outcome of the events is therefore an additional reason for Christian ethical concern. There are other uses of non-human animals for entertainment where the cruelty and torment of the animals are much more evident and central to the activity. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the practice of bull-fighting, where bulls are wounded and baited in an arena in order to stimulate them to attack the matadors, and then subjected to wounding attacks before being killed before the crowd. Many accounts make clear the complex and deeply embedded cultural practice represented by the bullfight,42 and some defences of the practice have appealed to its artistic, and cultural, significance.43 Until they are subjected to the fight, the bulls are reared extensively and probably have a better life than many intensively reared farmed animals. None of this detracts from the obvious judgement that subjecting non-human animals to a tormented and painful death in this way is incompatible with respecting them and willing their flourishing as

Gambling Commission, ‘Gambling Industry Statistics April 2008 – March 2015’ (2015). R. Cassidy, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Horseracing, ed. R. Cassidy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 6. 40  M. Davies, ‘Global Markets, Changing Technology: The Future of the Betting Industry’, in The Cambridge Companion to Horseracing, ed. R. Cassidy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 181. 41  D. W. Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics, 1870–1914 (London; Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1982), 51–3. 42  See, for example, A. Shubert, Death and Money in the Afternoon: A History of the Spanish Bullfight (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); A. L. Kennedy, On Bullfighting (London: Yellow Jersey Press, 1999). 43  See survey in K. O. Beilin, ‘Bullfighting and the War on Terror: Debates on Culture and Torture in Spain, 2004–11’, International Journal of Iberian Studies 25:1 (2012), 63. 38  39 

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fellow animal creatures of God. While bull-fighting is currently legal in much of Spain, Portugal, southern France, Mexico, Venezuela, Columbia and Peru, there are also widespread illegal uses of animals for sport. A 2005 report found that dog-fighting had reached epidemic proportions in the United States, where it is prohibited in all fifty states, and that it is growing in popularity in Europe.44 There is evidence that badger-baiting – setting dogs on badgers – is still widely practised in the UK, despite its illegality.45 Clearly, there is still interest in many quarters in the most flagrant kinds of abuse of animals for entertainment. A further category of human use of non-human animals for entertainment is the staging of performances involving animals where sporting contest is not the primary aim. The Roman circus gave its name to travelling circus shows involving animal performances, with the three-ring circus originating in England in the late eighteenth century. Shortly afterwards, circuses began in the United States, and flourished in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.46 In recent years, opposition to circuses using non-domesticated animals has grown, with many countries now prohibiting this entirely, and circuses elsewhere encountering opposition to their use of animals, symbolized by the announcement in January 2017 that the most prominent circus operators in the United States, Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey, would close after 146 years of operations.47 This shift in attitudes is supported by good evidence that travelling circuses are unable to provide adequate welfare for wild animals, as well as regular reports of particular cases of ill-treatment of animals by their handlers.48 The careful accounts of particular examples of relationships between trainers and non-human animal performers in Peta Tait’s Wild and Dangerous Performances make clear both that some such relationships were based on respect and mutuality, and that the skill and intelligence of the non-human animals should not be overlooked.49 This use of animals could have been included instead in Chapter 4 in relation to the use

H. Gibson, ‘Detailed Discussion of Dog Fighting’, Animal Legal and Historical Center, Michigan State University College of Law, USA (2005). 45  A. Nurse, Animal Harm: Perspectives on Why People Harm and Kill Animals (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 115. 46  J. Urbanik, Placing Animals: An Introduction to the Geography of Human-Animal Relations (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 80–1; M. Bekoff and C. A. Meaney, Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998), 107. 47  A. B. Wang, ‘Animal Activists Finally Have Something to Applaud at Ringling Bros. Circus: Its Closure’, Washington Post, 15 January 2017. 48  G. Iossa, C. D. Soulsbury and S. Harris, ‘Are Wild Animals Suited to a Travelling Circus Life?’, Animal Welfare 18:2 (2009), 335–52; H. Stoddart, Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 75. 49  P. Tait, Wild and Dangerous Performances: Animals, Emotions, Circus (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 44 

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of non-human animals for labour: they are clearly working alongside human labourers in the entertainment industry and one could conceive of environments where domesticated animals could flourish in particular modes of performance. In general, however, it is clear that non-human animals have not fared well in being used to entertain circus audiences, and that Christians should welcome the apparent ending of an era in which this was considered acceptable. Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s 2013 documentary film Blackfish makes a compelling case that the use of orcas and dolphins in public shows, and their being kept in captivity at all, are not conducive to their wellbeing.50 While the use of non-human animals for human entertainment in circuses and other shows seems to be waning, they are still widely used in theatre, film and television. There is evidence that animals were widely used in the English mystery plays, including a speaking part for Balaam’s ass in Balam and Balak and a trick with doves in Noah in the Chester plays, and trained apes, dogs, cats, horses, hawks, chickens, in scripted and unscripted roles in the sixteenth century.51 One notable and horrific moment in the representation of animals in film is Electrocuting an Elephant made by Thomas Edison in 1903. In 1887, Edison had killed hundreds of non-human animals by electrocution in public demonstrations aimed at showing that alternating current was more dangerous than his own direct current system for electricity distribution. Edison’s demonstrations inspired the New York State legislature to adopt the electric chair as a means of executing human criminals. The 1903 film portrays the killing of an elephant named Topsy as a punishment execution. She had been kept in a park and had killed three men.52 The non-human animal subjects of films today are usually used to help depict other dramas, and concerns about death and injury caused to them have resulted in the American Humane Association (AHA) being given the responsibility to ensure humane treatment of non-human animals used in film productions. The AHA is the only organization that can certify that ‘No animals were harmed’ in a production and allow the statement to appear in the credits. It requires that no sentient creature, defined as including birds, fish, reptiles and insects, should be killed or injured for the sake of a film production, and no animal should be treated inhumanely in order to elicit a performance.53 While the AHA programme may have done a great deal to reduce suffering caused to animals, it is clear that it has not ensured that no non-human animals are in fact harmed in film productions, even when films receive AHA certification. A 2013 article in the Hollywood Reporter collected evidence that the tiger in Ang Lee’s Life of Pi was almost drowned when he became disorientated and was unable to reach the side of the tank, and that during the filming of Peter Jackson’s The G. Cowperthwaite, Blackfish (2013). L. B. Wright, ‘Animal Actors on the English Stage before 1642’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 42:3 (1927), 656–69. 52  A. M. Lippit, ‘The Death of an Animal’, Film Quarterly 56:1 (2002), 9–22. 53  American Humane Association, Guidelines for the Safe Use of Animals in Filmed Media (Studio City, CA: American Humane Association, 2015). 50  51 

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Hobbit, twenty-seven animals died from dehydration, exhaustion and drowning after being neglected in the farm where they were being housed and trained.54 In both cases, the film credits stated that ‘No animals were harmed’. The article also reported that a husky dog had been punched repeatedly during the filming of the 2006 Disney film Eight Below, and dozens of dead fish and squid were washed up during the filming of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl after special effect explosions had been detonated without precautions to protect marine life.55 In January 2017, the premiere of Universal’s A Dog’s Purpose was cancelled after video footage circulated showing a panicked German Shepherd being forced into turbulent water and scrabbling desperately at the bank in order to resist being pushed into the water.56 Since the stories that become public are likely to be only a small sample of death, injury and inhumane treatment of non-human animals in film-making, the conclusion that the system of AHA certification is insufficient to prevent widespread suffering being inflicted on non-human animals used for filming seems unavoidable. The practice of keeping non-human animals in captivity in zoos represents a categorical challenge in terms of the chapter structure of this book: the display of captive exotic animals for human entertainment is clearly deeply rooted in the historical origins of zoos, and all zoos work on the basis that visitors are prepared to pay to see their animal attractions. This would suggest that consideration of the ethics of zoos belongs in this chapter. Many zoos would argue that their primary aim is not displaying their animals for public entertainment, however, but public education and research – in which case zoos should perhaps have been considered in the previous chapter. Zoos also frequently undertake or support conservation projects promoting the wellbeing of animals in the wild. In order to avoid considering zoos only as using wild animals as entertainment, and to reflect on their practice in the light of wider human impacts on wild animals, I will discuss them in Chapter 8.

Christian Thinking about Using Other Animals for Sport As Laura Hobgood-Oster notes, early Christians had good reason for being sympathetic to the situation of non-human animals used for sport, because Christian human animals were used alongside non-human animals in the gladiatorial arena.57 Hobgood-Oster quotes the scene from the apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla in which Paul’s companion Thecla is thrown to the lions and bears:

G. Baum, ‘Animals Were Harmed’, Hollywood Reporter, 25 November 2013. Baum, ‘Animals Were Harmed’. 56  C. Shoard, ‘A Dog’s Purpose Premiere Cancelled after Video of Stunt Dog “in Distress”’, The Guardian, 20 January 2017. 57  L. Hobgood-Oster, The Friends We Keep: Unleashing Christianity’s Compassion for Animals (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010), 50. 54  55 

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And Thecla … was stripped and received a girdle and was thrown into the arena. And lions and bears were let loose upon her. And a fierce lioness ran up and lay down at her feet. And the multitude of the women cried aloud. And a bear ran upon her, but the lioness went to meet it and tore the bear to pieces. And again a lion that had been trained to fight against men, which belonged to Alexander, ran upon her. And the lioness, encountering the lion, was killed along with it. And the women cried the more since the lioness, her protector was dead.58

Later in the same work, a lion is set upon Paul, but the lion recognizes him as the one who baptized him, and instead of attacking him, prays with him instead.59 Christians and other animals being the common objects of Roman sport clearly created some uncommon alliances and sympathies. While they sometimes shared the same plight in the Roman arena, non-human animals were very much more commonly its victims, with the scale of destruction becoming an imperial status symbol. In 58 BC Marcus Scaurus put on a ‘venatio’, or hunting game, in the arena, in which 150 leopards, a hippopotamus, and five crocodiles were put to death. Three years later, Pompey’s games ‘included the slaughter of 20 elephants, 600 lions, 410 leopards, various apes, the first north-European lynx to be seen at Rome, and the first rhinoceros’ with some chroniclers criticizing the crowd for protesting about the killing of the elephants, while Cicero observed that ‘the whole affair was attended by a sort of pity, and a feeling that these huge animals have something in common with humankind’.60 In 46 BC Julius Caesar killed elephants, 400 lions, Thessalian bulls, and a giraffe. Augustus boasted that he had killed a cumulative total of 3,500 African animals to entertain the Roman people. At the inauguration of the Colosseum under Titus, 9,000 animals were slaughtered, and to celebrate Trajan’s triumph after the second Dacian war in 107 AD, 11,000 animals were put to death.61 Some of the arenas had originally been built as stadia to stage foot and horse races, and were adapted with large walls to protect the spectators from the violence enacted before them.62 There is broad evidence of disapproval by the church of hunting wild animals. In the fourth century, Cyril of Jerusalem identifies hunting and horse races with J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 370, quoted in Hobgood-Oster, Friends We Keep, 51. 59  T. Adamik, ‘The Baptized Lion in the Acts of Paul’, in The Apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla, vol. 2, ed. J. N. Bremmer (Kampen, the Netherlands: Kok Pharos, 1996), 61–2. 60  Th. E. J. Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators (London: Routledge, 2002), 60; M. Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 41–2. 61  Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators, 60–1, cited in Hobgood-Oster, Friends We Keep, 53. 62  L. L. Thompson, ‘The Martyrdom of Polycarp: Death in the Roman Games’, Journal of Religion 82:1 (2002), 29–30. 58 

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the ‘pomp of the devil’, from which the holy man prays to be delivered.63 Church orders prohibiting the clergy from owning hawks or hunting dogs date from the sixth century, and in the twelfth century Canon IX of Gratian’s Decretum notes that Scripture says nothing good about hunters, and observes that ‘Esau was a hunter because he was a sinner’.64 Esau and Nimrod are commonly identified together as biblical hunters of whom God disapproved, discussed in the rabbinic interpretation of Ps. 91.3: ‘Surely he shall deliver you from the snare of the fowler’.65 Martin Luther recorded his dislike of hunting, and even tried unsuccessfully to save a rabbit from hounds by hiding it in the sleeve of his cloak.66 Christian opposition to hunting seems to have been influential in persuading even Ivan the Terrible to refrain from hunting on faith grounds in the sixteenth century.67 In the seventeenth century, William Hinde addressed the question of whether hunting and hawking is sinful and unlawful, and responded that ‘I think it utterly unlawful for any man to take pleasure in the pain and torture of any creature, or delight himself in the tyranny, which the creatures exercise one over another, or to make a recreation of their brutish cruelty which they practise one upon another’.68 In the eighteenth century, Thomas Young reaches the same conclusion: We may be allowed therefore, to enquire of all who hunt, shoot, or fish, for sport, upon what scriptural grant they found their right to take away the lives of animals in the course of those diversions: and since it is impossible for them to produce any such grant, we are warranted in pronouncing hunting, shooting, and fishing for sport, to be unlawful, cruel, and sinful.69

Christian opposition to hunting also finds expression in many stories of Christian saints. In the Legend of St Eustace, recognized by the church in Rome since Cyril of Jerusalem, ‘Five Catechetical Lectures to the Newly Baptized’, in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Second Series, vol. 7 (1997), Lecture XIX, ch. 6. 64  M. Thiébaux, ‘The Mediaeval Chase’, Speculum 42:2 (1967), 263–4. 65  Thiébaux, ‘The Mediaeval Chase’, 264. 66  M. Luther, Luther’s Works, ed. H. T. Lehmann and J. Pelikan (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1958–67), vol. 48, 295, discussed with other examples of Luther’s concerns about hunting in D. Clough, ‘The Anxiety of the Human Animal: Martin Luther on NonHuman Animals and Human Animality’, in Creaturely Theology: On God, Humans and Other Animals, ed. C. Deane-Drummond and D. Clough (London: SCM, 2009), 53–5. 67  C. J. Halperin, ‘Royal Recreation: Ivan the Terrible Goes Hunting’, Journal of Early Modern History 14:4 (2010), 293–316. 68  W. Hinde, A Faithfull Remonstrance of the Holy Life and Happy Death of John Bruen (London: Philemon Stephens and Christopher Meredith, 1641), ch. IX, 31–2. 69  T. Young, An Essay on Humanity to Animals (London: T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1798), 75–6. 63 

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the sixth century, Placidus, who is a great hunter, is led away from his hunting companions by a stag to the edge of a rocky abyss. Placidus sees a sparkling cross with a picture of Jesus Christ between the stag’s antlers, and the stag then says to him, ‘Placidus, why pursuest thou me? I am Christ whom thou worshipest without knowing it. Go back to the city and be baptized’.70 Placidus is baptized that night with the name ‘Eustachius’. Stags are responsible for the conversion of other saints, such as Hubert, Julian, Fantinus, and Felix of Valois.71 Gustave Flaubert retells the legend of St Julian drawing on a number of sources, including a French prose tale version emphasizing Julian’s unreasonable urge to hunt. In Flaubert’s version, Julian’s killing reaches a mythic scale, before he is confronted by a stag who curses him with the prophecy that he will kill his father and mother, which later comes to pass. In other stories, saints protect animals from hunters. St Giles is sustained in his life in the forest by a doe who visits him to give him milk, and miraculously saves the doe from the king’s hunting party three times. On the third occasion, the hunters shoot an arrow at the doe but hit St Giles instead, wounding him seriously, after which the king begs for the saint’s forgiveness.72 St Godric protects a stag being pursued by a hunting party led by Rainulf, Bishop of Durham. The stag arrives exhausted at Godric’s hermitage and seems by his cries to ask for Godric’s help. Godric is moved by pity and lets the stag into his hut, where the stag drops at his feet. Godric feels the hunt is coming near and comes out of the hut, shutting the door behind him. The hunters ask Godric where the stag is, to which he replies ‘God knows where he may be’, after which the hunters fall before the beauty of his countenance and ask him to pardon their intrusion. The stag stays with Godric until the evening, but for years afterwards visits him to show his gratitude.73 These stories of encounters with deer gain a greater weight when we recognize that deer can be understood as standing for a wider category of animals. Matt Cartmill notes that around AD 1000, the words for animal or wild animal in English, German, French and Irish narrowed in meaning to name deer in particular, so that deer became ‘paragons of the human condition’.74 Stories of encounters between saints and deer, therefore, the religious significance of these meetings, and the valuing of compassion for animals evident in the stories, could be understood as representing a sphere of human encounter with animals well beyond the particular context of hunting deer.

R. Garbe, ‘Contributions of Buddhism to Christianity’, The Monist 21:4 (1911), 538–9. Garbe, ‘Contributions of Buddhism to Christianity’, 539. 72  E. C. Jones, Saint Gilles: Essay D’histoire Litteraire, Librarie Ancienne Honoré Champion, ed. Édouard Champion (Paris, 1914), 13–14. 73  H. Waddell, Beasts and Saints (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1995), 90–1. 74  Cartmill, View to a Death in the Morning, 67. 70 

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A Christian Ethical Assessment of the Use of Other Animals for Sport and Entertainment More clearly than any of the other human uses of non-human animals surveyed in the book, Christians have strong reasons derived from a theological understanding of animal life to object to any use of other animals for human sport or entertainment that fails to enable their full flourishing as fellow creatures of God. Christian compassion towards the animal victims of bloodsports can be understood as deeply rooted in the times when Christian human animals were being killed in sporting arenas alongside non-human animals to entertain the crowd. This solidarity in being the objects of sport provides Christians with a lens that acutely focuses on the wrongness of taking any kind of pleasure in the destruction of the lives of God’s creatures. The radical compassion towards other animals evident in the stories of the saints we have noted above, and their transformative encounters with hunted animals, align with this focused judgement, and lead to the clear conclusion that Christians should have no part in entertainments that cause death and injury to non-human animals. Hunting for food is a different issue, as discussed in Chapter 2, where I also discuss the middle ground where hunting animals is chosen as a means of providing food where there are other readily available sources of nutrition. There are very many cases, however, including the organized shooting of birds, the game hunting discussed earlier in this chapter, and much recreational angling, where killing and maiming other animals is very clearly the object of the entertainment, to which the only adequate Christian response is disgust and protest. Beyond the rejection of sports where the object is killing non-human animals, however, Christians also have reason to be concerned about uses of other animals for sport and entertainment where death, injury or distress are by-products of the activity. To subject fellow animal creatures of God to lives in which they are unable to flourish merely in order to provide entertainment for humans must be considered a more egregious wrong than when animals suffer similar treatment when used to provide food, clothing, labour, or even scientific knowledge. Many of the uses of non-human animals in this category are common and go unquestioned by Christians. Greyhound racing seems to be declining in popularity as its audiences come to appreciate the cruelties inflicted on dogs in order to create the spectacle. Horse-racing as currently practised also clearly inflicts death and injury on horses, and subjects them to long periods of close confinement, merely to provide excitement for wealthy horse owners and an opportunity for stakes to be placed on an event with an uncertain outcome. Horse-racing must therefore be considered incompatible with a Christian understanding of human responsibilities towards other animals, and Christians should hope that public attitudes towards it shift the way they have already done for greyhound racing and circuses. It is clear from the cases above of maltreatment of non-human animals in the production of films that standards for ensuring the humane treatment of non-human animal actors in film and television would have to be very much more reliably practised and enforced before we could be confident that using other animals to entertain

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ourselves in this way could be justified. Even where other animals are not obviously caused suffering or distress by their use for sport and entertainment, Christians might judge that it is contrary to an appropriate regard for their dignity as fellow creatures to use them in such ways. One could imagine a domesticated relationship between a horse and human rider that was respectful of the horse and exhibited a mutuality in which the horse could flourish. This is clearly not the case in the modern practice of horse-racing, but might be an example of human/non-human companionship, which we should consider in a very different way than the uses humans make of other animals for food, clothing, labour, research experimentation, and sport and entertainment considered up to this point. The next chapter turns to this question of what a Christian understanding of animal life means for the ethical evaluation for humans keeping other animals as companions and pets.

Chapter 7 O T H E R A N I M A L S A S C OM PA N IO N S A N D P E T S In approaching the ethics of human relationships with companion non-human animals, often known as ‘pets’, it is clear that we are engaging with a different kind of relationship than those we have surveyed in the previous chapters. It is the case that some of those caring for non-human animals used for labour and entertainment have close long-term relationships with them, such as those who use guide dogs or the police dog handlers discussed in Chapter 4, or some who work with nonhuman animal performers, discussed in Chapter 6. In some cases, humans might claim that they establish strong relationships with non-human animals being raised for food, clothing, or even research experimentation. The difference when we turn to companion animals as such, however, is that these relationships are often characterized as ones in which there is no ulterior motive in keeping animals as companions beyond the companionship itself. There will be a fuzzy area of overlap, of course, such as when someone has decided to keep a dog as a companion partly to deter intruders, but in most cases we could recognize a difference in kind between humans making use of non-human animals for some particular task, and humans keeping non-human animals because they enjoy living with them. The difference is such that to have called this chapter ‘Using Other Animals as Companions’ would seem already to have adopted a position in opposition to that of most owners of companion animals, who would be likely to protest that they are not merely ‘using’ animals at all, any more than they are merely ‘using’ human members of their families. Companion animal relationships are distinguished by high levels of care and concern for the animals concerned, an intimacy often derived from sharing a home and daily activities with the companion animals, and often a sense of mutuality. These relationships are often harmonious and peaceable, in which non-human animals are able to flourish and show obvious signs of wellbeing and enjoyment. The terminology of ‘pet’ to describe non-human companion animals is so widespread as to be almost unavoidable in discussing this relationship. The earliest use of the term recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1539 and describes a lamb or other domesticated – probably meaning farmed – animal raised by hand. The earliest use of the term to mean a companion animal recorded by the dictionary is from 1710, with reference to dogs, monkeys, squirrels and parrots,1 though we should recognize the middle ground between farmed animals Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Pet, N.2 and Adj.’, OED Online (2016).

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and companion animals represented in the nursery rhyme ‘Mary had a little lamb’ and E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web among very many other examples.2 The term ‘pet’ may be used of humans, and conveys affection and endearment, but also potential over-indulgence and subordination, such as identifying a school child as a ‘teacher’s pet’. The much more recently coined term ‘companion animal’ seems better to name a kind of relationship without such overtones, though is by no means perfect. It seems more appropriate for a dog or cat, than tropical fish or stick insects kept in a tank in one’s home. For some human keeping of dogs or cats, ‘pet’ may in fact be a better description because of the attitudes of their owners to the non-human animals with which they share their home. I will also consider horses kept for leisure in this chapter, because in many cases such relationships seem closer to companion animal relationships than to the use of non-human animals for entertainment, discussed in the previous chapter, though again, the boundaries here are porous. One additional marker that companion animal relationships belong in a different category to that of the uses made of animals discussed in previous chapters is the very different way we think about the non-human animals kept as companions. For example, non-human animals used for food and those kept as companion animals seem to belong in different categories, so that the idea of eating a companion animal provokes disgust, while eating animals with similar cognitive capacities customarily used for food is widely accepted. This difference in attitudes is not merely related to individual non-human animals, but to the species to which they belong, so that in the United Kingdom and the United States among other countries, for example, dogs are kept as companion animals and pigs are eaten, rather than the other way around, and animal rights groups trade on the difference between these attitudes to run campaigns in the UK and the USA against the raising of dogs for food in Korea and China. The practice of keeping non-human animals as companions therefore seems strongly correlated with a very different set of moral attitudes towards them in comparison to animals kept for other uses. The observance of a difference between non-human animals raised for food and kept as companions is by no means absolute, however: rabbits in the UK are kept for both purposes, dogs and cats are both kept as pets and eaten in South Korea,3 and we have seen that the keeping of ‘pet’ farmed animals was probably the origin of the term. There seems good reason, therefore, for judging there to be a significant difference between the ethics of human relationships between companion animals and animals used for other purposes. This does not mean, however, that many of the ethical issues relating to the human practice of keeping non-human animals as companions do not overlap from the concerns of previous chapters. As we shall see, the poor conditions in which many animals being raised for sale as companion E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952). A. L. Podberscek, ‘Good to Pet and Eat: The Keeping and Consuming of Dogs and Cats in South Korea’, Journal of Social Issues 65:3 (2009), 615–32.

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animals are kept has much in common with the poor treatment suffered by many dogs raised to be guard dogs, police dogs or racing dogs, and even the conditions in which some farmed animals are raised. The fact that most owners of companion animals understand their relationship with these animals very differently from other uses of animals does not mean, therefore, that the treatment of animals in this context is ethically unproblematic. The fact that owners of companion animals value the relationships highly and may believe they are treating their non-human animal companions well is no guarantee that these animals are flourishing in these contexts, or that the wider context of how they are bred, and what happens when they are no longer wanted by their owners, does not raise serious ethical questions. As discussed later in this chapter, many have argued against keeping non-human animals as companions because the practice is bad for the non-humans; others have argued against it because they consider it bad for the humans. The task of this chapter, therefore, is to examine the question of whether and under what conditions it could be compatible with a Christian understanding of non-human animals to keep non-human animals as companions.

Encounters with Companion Animals Our cat Mitsy gets hungry in the mornings. She prowls outside our bedroom doors listening for who will be first to stir. Once she has detected that one of us is awake – which may be simply moving in bed – she allows the few minutes she considers reasonable for us to make it to the door, and then requests that we feed her by scratching lightly on the door. If I am the first up, she will bolt downstairs as soon as I open the door, and by the time I reach the kitchen, will be sprawled out on her back, expecting me to stroke her tummy. In part this is because there is nothing she likes better, but in part, it is one aspect of her particular behavioural communication to me that she wants to be fed: she never goes directly to her food bowl without having stopped me to stroke her first. At other times of day, she is in an eyes-closed, legs-stretched, claws-extended ecstasy of enjoyment at such stroking for as long as I continue it, and when I stop, she looks at me with surprise and reproach. But in the morning, and before she has been fed, hunger prevails after a minute or so, and she leads me to her bowl to have it filled. A couple of weeks ago I found accommodation for a weekend stay in a converted stable room opposite a farmhouse. On my arrival I was greeted by a border collie I later learned was called Moss. After Moss had alerted the house to my arrival with a loud series of barks, we made friends and over the weekend he kept bringing me a stick to throw for him to fetch. He would bring the well-chewed stick and lay it before me. I would throw it as far as I could. He would run to fetch it and bring it back to me. I had time on my hands, and felt his bringing the stick to me was a request that I did not have good reason to turn down. And so we played together. He would fetch it ten times or so before stopping for a rest and a further chew. Maurice Hamington recounts a similar familiar story:

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My dog friend, Bella, growls as we play a game of tug of war with a rope and a plush toy disk. If I had confronted a growling animal in another context, I might be concerned for my safety. However, Bella and I know this is play. Bella is wagging her tail. Her mouth is open. She is breathing hard and making quick darting motions. We have a lot of physical contact with one another, and it is all in good fun. If she wanted to, Bella could hurt me, and I could hurt Bella in this rough-housing, but neither of us will, except by accident, and we both know it. We are in a zone of playful comfort that anyone who lives with dogs recognizes. Bella is clearly enjoying herself. The activity is not instrumental. We are not using the play to get any future benefit or reward but simply enjoying the moment. Bella belongs to a different species than I do, but we have an understanding. We do not share a common narrative language, and yet we communicate. This common understanding was developed over time until we have come to trust and respect one another. This respect prevents each of us from harming the other. There is a context of care.4

These are very ordinary encounters for those used to living in proximity to domesticated cats and dogs, but when I stop to think about them, they seem small miracles of human/non-human animal communication, cooperation, trust and play. In my dealings with both Mitsy and Moss, and Hamington’s play fights with Bella, all parties know the rules of encounter. There are expectations and etiquette for our dealings with each other. It would be rude of me and confusing for Mitsy if I walked past her when she has rolled on her back expecting a tummy rub. I would be grumpy if after hearing her scratch at the bedroom door, I got out of bed to come downstairs but did not find her waiting. It would be rude of Moss not to let go of the stick when he brings it to me – at least if we are playing fetch rather than tug of war. It would be rude of him to leave it across the yard from me, rather than bringing it to my feet. And when I decided that I needed to busy myself with something other than our game of fetch, it was clear to me that I needed to apologize to him for having to cut our game short. Hamington makes clear the rules of his play with Bella, clearly understood on both sides. Marc Bekoff ’s research into play among coyotes demonstrates that the understanding of play as rule-based is already present among wild dogs, so that play between humans and dogs is meeting on common ground, rather than dogs being trained in a practice that was previously unique to humans.5 Dog agility training takes this play further, and into a realm that overlaps with the previous chapter on using non-human animals for sport. In When Species Meet, Donna Haraway provides a detailed description of the agility training she undertakes with Cayenne, her Australian Shepherd. Haraway’s account

M. Hamington, ‘Care, Moral Progress, and Companion Animals’, in Pets and People: The Ethics of Our Relationships with Companion Animals, ed. C. Overall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 49. 5 See, for example, M. Bekoff and J. Pierce, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 2009), ch. 5, ‘Justice: Honor and Fair Play among Beasts’. 4

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is fascinating, because of the combination of her intense engagement in and enjoyment of the sport, with obvious delight in her relationship with Cayenne, and her acute awareness of the ethical questions this provokes: Agility is a human-designed sport; it is not spontaneous play, although this chapter will return to play soon. I think I have good reasons for judging that Cayenne loves to do agility; she plants her bum in front of the gate to the practice yard with fierce intent until I let her in to work patterns with me. On the mornings when we are driving to a trial, she tracks the gear and stays by the car with command in her eye. It’s not just the pleasure of an excursion or access to a play space. We do nothing else in the agility yard but work on the obstacle patterns; that is the yard she wants access to. Spectators comment on the joy Cayenne’s runs make them feel because they feel her whole self thrown into the skilled inventiveness of her course. This dog is easily annoyed by food rewards, for example, when given during her intense sit–stay at the start line before the release word to begin the run, when what she wants is to fly over the course. The run is her chief positive reinforcement. She is a working dog with great focus; her whole mind–body changes when she gains access to her scene of work. However, I would be a liar to claim that agility is a utopia of equality and spontaneous nature. The rules are arbitrary for both species; that is what a sport is; namely, a rule-bound, skilled, comparatively evaluated performance. The dog and the human are ruled by standards that they must submit to but that are not of their own choosing. The courses are designed by human beings; people fill out the entry forms and enter classes. The human decides for the dog what the acceptable criteria of performance will be. But there is a hitch: The human must respond to the authority of the dog’s actual performance. The dog has already responded to the human’s incoherence. The real dog – not the fantasy projection of self – is mundanely present; the invitation to response has been tendered. Fixed by the specter of yellow paint, the human must finally learn to ask a fundamental ontological question, one that puts human and dog together in what philosophers in the Heideggerian tradition called ‘the open’: Who are you, and so who are we? Here we are, and so what are we to become?6

I will return to the ethics of training dogs as companions, drawing on Haraway’s account of the positive reinforcement techniques she uses with Cayenne, later in the chapter. Here, however, I would like to focus on the evident good of the sophisticated canine/human cooperative play she describes, in which both participants delight, and which promotes a depth of relationship that Haraway argues would be absent without attempting to realize excellence in this way together. There is obvious overlap between some of the intense human/canine working relationships discussed in Chapter 4: agility training was originally designed as an exhibition of the skills of sheep herding dogs. Here is an arena where hybrid human/canine play is worked at seriously, perhaps as it is in non-hybrid human spheres such as D. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2008), 220–21.

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Sunday football leagues, or any number of other recreational sporting activities. There is overlap, too, with the uses of non-human animals for sport discussed in Chapter 6, but there seems to me a very clear divide between this kind of sporting activity compatible with regarding a dog as a companion, and the ways in which horses or greyhounds are treated when they are raced professionally. My play with Mitsy and Moss, Hamington’s play fighting with Bella, Haraway’s agility training with Cayenne, and the myriad other ordinary human/companion animal relationships they represent, seem to me to be sites of remarkable interspecies encounter. The fact that we largely take for granted the possibility of such playful interaction with companion animals demonstrates that unreflectively we understand ourselves as fundamentally able to exist in significant relationships with other animals. Later in the chapter we will have to engage seriously with the ways in which the raising of non-human animals as companions or pets very frequently subjects them to cruelty and neglect, and with the arguments of some ethicists that the practice of keeping pets is intrinsically problematic because of the asymmetry in power between the actors. It is important to weigh the merits of these arguments carefully, but it seems to me that we cannot begin an exploration of the ways in which we engage with companion animals without a recognition of the elements of such relationships that seem to be glimpses into the kind of harmonious dealings with other animals we can imagine of Adam and Eve in Eden, or the kinds of relationships that will come into being under the peaceable Messianic reign prophesied in Isaiah 11, or the ways in which creatures will coexist when released from their groaning as envisioned in Romans 8.

Companion Animals and Pets in Historical Perspective In Chapter 4, I considered a possible origin of the domestication of dogs as a mutually beneficial collaboration between certain wolves and humans in hunting other animals, originating on multiple occasions in different ways. In some places, wolves may have become accustomed to living in proximity to human settlements, and perhaps opportunistically feeding on food scraps, with humans becoming tolerant to their presence. This may have been motivated in some circumstances by a lack of alternative sources of food, so that association with humans became preferable to staying ‘wild’. Sometimes wolf cubs may have been adopted and raised by humans.7 In all of these cases we could reasonably suggest that various forms of companion animal relationships – modes of peaceable proximate human/ non-human animal coexistence – were a necessary preliminary step to canine domestication. Since the domestication of dogs is very likely to have predated J. Clutton-Brock, ‘Origins of the Domestic Dog: Domestication and Early History’, in The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behaviour and Interactions with People, ed. J. Serpell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); D. Morey, Dogs: Domestication and the Development of a Social Bond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ch. 4.

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all other human domestication of other animals, dating from at least 16,000 BC and possibly much earlier,8 we could think of human/canine companion animal relationships as the beginning of all the forms of human relationships with nonhuman animals surveyed in the book thus far. By 3000 BC in Mesopotamia, there is evidence for dog breeds as different as mastiffs and greyhounds or salukis, dogs have been found in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs dating from 2000 BC, and in the fourth century BC Alexander the Great hand-reared his favourite dog, Peritas.9 Small dogs were popular with Roman ladies: Pliny suggested that keeping them on their stomachs helped alleviate period pains.10 Roman invaders of Britain in the first century AD described dogs similar to mastiffs, and dogs were also popular with Chinese emperors such as Ling Ti, in the second century AD.11 In ninthcentury Britain, King Alfred’s laws included fines for owners of dogs that maimed or killed people.12 Cats were domesticated more recently than dogs: the first evidence of fully domesticated cats is from Egypt in around 2000 BC, in the form of a pictorial representation of a cat confronting a mouse in the tomb of the noble Baket III.13 Cats were slow to spread beyond Egypt because the export of cats was prohibited, and the Romans were probably responsible for introducing cats to Northern Europe in the first centuries AD. In the famous ninth-century Irish poem ‘Pangur Ban’, a writer compares his work hunting words with his white cat’s work of hunting mice.14 Seeing Pangur Ban ‘Full and fierce and sharp and sly’ and ‘perfect in his trade’ brings the author merriment and gladness. We may not agree with the poem that Pangur Ban’s task is plied in peace, but there is no doubt that the poem exhibits a relationship of deep affection and respect, an appreciation of a commonality between human writer and cat hunter, and a recognition of the individuality of Pangur Ban that is familiar to those who live with cats today.

J. D. Vigne, ‘The Origins of Animal Domestication and Husbandry: A Major Change in the History of Humanity and the Biosphere.’, Comptes Rendus Biologies 334:3 (2011), 171–81; Morey, Dogs; N. D. Ovodov et al., ‘A 33,000-year-old Incipient Dog from the Altai Mountains of Siberia: Evidence of the Earliest Domestication Disrupted by the Last Glacial Maximum.’, PLoS One 6:7 (2011), e22821.  9  Yi-Fu Tuan, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 103, 110, 112. 10  Tuan, Dominance and Affection, 110. 11  H. Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 85; Tuan, Dominance and Affection, 110. 12  Ritvo, Animal Estate, 85. 13  J. A. Serpell, ‘Domestication and History of the Cat’, in The Domestic Cat: The Biology of Its Behaviour, ed. D. C. Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 185. 14  J. L. Altholz, Selected Documents in Irish History (London; New York: Routledge, 2015), 11–12.  8 

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Fish were kept by the Romans for ornamental reasons, sometimes with additional ornamentation added to them. It was said of the fabulously wealthy Roman Crassus, that he adorned his pet murenas (lampreys) with earrings and a jewelled necklace, and Pliny reports that Caligula’s mother Antonia also attached earrings to her murena.15 Ancient evidence of other animals kept as companions or pets is less clear. Greylag geese and rock doves were domesticated in southwest Asia by 3000 BC, with red junglefowl and the mallard duck some centuries later. The aims behind these domestications are not clear, but are likely to have been a combination of using them for food and other products, and keeping them for aesthetic reasons.16 In the Medieval period, some companion animals were viewed with suspicion by the church, with cats the most common victims. Pope Gregory IX issued the Papal Bull Vox in Rama in 1233, which claimed that the rituals of a Satanic cult included reverence of a large black cat whose rear was kissed by participants.17 As a result, a series of mass slaughters of cats took place throughout Europe, significantly depleting the cat population, and contributing to the ease with which rats could spread the Black Death pandemic in the middle of the fourteenth century. Because of their association with the devil, cats were often killed in merciless ways, such as burning them alive in wicker baskets. Association with witchcraft often meant those who kept cats were also killed, with most victims being older women.18 This association between cats and the devil, and the associated cruelty, continued into the seventeenth century with horrific consequences: cats were roasted alive in Ely Cathedral in 1638, hunted by hounds in Lichfield Cathedral a few years later, and when popes were burned in effigy during the reign of Charles II, cats were stuffed inside so that their screams would add to the effect.19 Nonetheless, cats were also appreciated as companions and pets during the seventeenth century: Keith Thomas records that in the 1630s the Leeds merchant John Harrison had holes cut in the doors of his house to give the cats access to every room, and recalls Daniel Defoe’s claim in the same period that few London families were without them, ‘some having several, sometimes five or six in a house’.20 Tuan, Dominance and Affection, 75. R. Sosinka, ‘Domestication in Birds’, in Avian Biology, Volume 6, ed. D. S. Farner, J. R. King and K. C. Parkes (New York: Academic Press, 1982), 376–7. 17  A. C. Kors and E. Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700: A Documentary History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 114–15; D. W. Engels, Classical Cats: The Rise and Fall of the Sacred Cat (London; New York: Routledge, 1999), 184–85, discussed in L. Hobgood-Oster, The Friends We Keep: Unleashing Christianity’s Compassion for Animals (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010), 22. 18  Engels, Classical Cats, 160. 19  K. Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London; New York: Penguin, 1984), 109–10. 20  Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 109, quoting R. Thoresby, Ducatus Leodiensis (1715), 11, 615, and D. Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year (New York: New American Library, 1960), 123. 15 

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Medieval church authorities had concerns about the keeping of companion animals that went beyond the association with witchcraft and Satanism: there are many examples of prohibitions issued to monks and nuns about keeping companion animals, which had become fashionable among wealthy families in the Middle Ages.21 In around 1225, the author of The Ancren Riwle instructed anchoresses that ‘Ye shall not possess any beast, my dear sisters, except only a cat’.22 Later in the same century Eude Rigaud, the Archbishop of Rouen, ordered that little dogs, birds and squirrels, kept by the Benedictine nuns at St Sauveur, Evreux, be removed.23 Even the Franciscans decided that keeping companion animals should not be permitted, with the General Chapter of Narbonne declaring in their Rule in 1260 that ‘no animal be kept, for any brother or any convent, except cats and certain birds for the removal of unclean things’.24 In 1345, Hugo de Seton, archdeacon of Ely, wrote to the abbess of Chatteris that We forbid, therefore, dogs or birds, both great and small, being kept by an abbess or any nun within the walls of the runner or beneath the chair, especially during divine service.25

In 1378, William of Wykeham also became concerned at how companion animals were distracting nuns from their worship, and wrote to the houses of Romsey, Wherwell and St Mary’s Winchester: Item – whereas we have convinced ourselves by clear proofs that some of the nuns of your house bring with them to church birds, rabbits, hounds and such like frivolous things, whereunto they give more heed than to the offices of the church, with frequent hindrance to their own psalmody and that of their fellownuns, and to the grievous peril of their souls – therefore we strictly forbid you, all and several, in virtue of the obedience due to Us, that ye presume henceforth to bring to church no birds, hounds, rabbits or other frivolous things that promote indiscipline.26

Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 110. J. Morton (ed.), The Ancren Riwle (London: Camden Soc., 1843), 417, quoted in D. Harwood, Love for Animals and How It Developed in Great Britain (Lewiston, NY; Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), 24. 23  Harwood, Love for Animals, 24. 24  J. A. Serpell, In the Company of Animals, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 48. 25  ‘Visitatio Monalium de Chateris’, AD 1345, in W. Dugdale, J. Caley, H. Ellis and B. Bandinel (eds), Monasticon Anglicanum (London, 1817–30), quoted in Harwood, Love for Animals, 23. 26  G. C. Coulton, Social Life in Britain (Cambridge, 1918), 397, quoted in Harwood, Love for Animals, 23–4, and Serpell, In the Company of Animals, 48. 21  22 

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It was not just monks and nuns that caused such problems: one nun complained that Lady Audley who boards here has a great abundance of dogs, insomuch that whenever she comes to church, there follow her twelve dogs, who make a great uproar in the church, hindering the nuns in their psalmody, and terrifying them.27

The problem does not seem to have been resolved, however: two centuries later bishops were exhorting their congregations to leave their dogs, hawks and monkeys behind when they came to church, and a proclamation under Edward VI noted that it had become common to bring horses and mules into church.28 The reluctance of people to part with their animal companions when attending church speaks to close and affectionate relationships with their animals, with separation from them being unwelcome. Keith Thomas concludes that the keeping of pets became established as a normal feature of middle-class households in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with ‘all the symptoms of obsessive petkeeping in evidence’ by 1700.29 Animals chosen as companions included monkeys, tortoises, otters, rabbits and squirrels – of squirrels ‘Topsell remarked that, apart from their tendency to devour woollen garments, they were “sweet, sportful beasts and … very pleasant playfellows in a house”’.30 When a dog tax was introduced in 1796, it was said that ‘there was scarce a villager who has not his dog’ and the dog population was estimated at one million, most of which were kept for pleasure rather than for need.31 Keeping companion animals and pets was by no means restricted to Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. James Serpell notes that explorers who encountered indigenous peoples in South America and Polynesia found them living with an astonishing variety of animals, for which they had affection and never used for food, including raccoons, parrots, poultry, pigs and peccaries, dogs, cats and margays, ducks, cormorants, sloths, tapir, ocelots, bats, lizards and eels, among others, with one nineteenth-century explorer recording twentytwo different quadruped species living in encampments of tribes in the Amazon valley.32 Serpell quotes the eighteenth-century Spanish explorers Juan and Uloma who brutally ignored the status accorded by their hosts to these companion animals: C. I. A. Ritchie, The British Dog: Its History from Earliest Times (London: Robert Hale, 1981), 64, quoted in Serpell, In the Company of Animals, 49. 28  Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 112–13. 29  Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 117. 30  Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 110, quoting Edward Topsell, The Historie of FoureFooted Beastes (1607), 658. 31  Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 105. 32  Serpell, In the Company of Animals, 60–4. 27 

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Though the Indian women breed fowl and other domestic animals in their cottages, they never eat them: and even conceive of such a fondness for them, that they will not sell them, much less kill them with their own hands. So that if a stranger who is obliged to pass the night in one of their cottages, offers ever so much for a fowl, they refuse to part with it, and he finds himself under the necessity of killing the fowl himself. At this his landlady shrieks, dissolves into tears, and wrings her hands, as if it had been an only son.33

This profound failure to understand the way indigenous peoples understood their relationships to the other animals they lived among is evident much more widely in anthropological literature, and has clear racist connotations. Jonathan Z. Smith’s 1972 article ‘I Am a Parrot (Red)’ illustrates this by recounting the engagement between anthropologists and the Bororo people of Brazil, who made the eponymous statement, identifying themselves as red parrots to their interlocutors. A series of prominent theorists, including J. G. Frazer and Claude Lévi-Strauss, used this as an example of a ‘primitive’ inability to make distinctions – in this case the distinction between human and non-human the theorists considered fundamental.34 It is striking that it was beliefs about companion animal relationships that were used as material for the racist distinction between ‘advanced’ and ‘primitive’ peoples, and we should be alert to enduring elements of this legacy in discussion of different practices in relation to companion animals today. It is also important to note that patterns of relationship between humans and other animals are specific to particular contexts and cultures. In the same period as colonial explorers encountered the astonishing diversity of companion animals in South America, very different patterns of relationship were evident further north. North American Indians held their horses and dogs in very high regard, cared for them carefully and with affection, and were sometimes buried with them, but did not usually keep other animals as companions or pets.35 G. Juan and A. De Ulloa, Voyage to South America, vol. 1 (London, 1760), 426, quoted in Serpell, In the Company of Animals, 62. 34  J. Z. Smith, ‘I Am a Parrot (Red)’, History of Religions 11:4 (1972), 391–413. Aaron Gross provides an illuminating discussion of the article in A. Gross, The Question of the Animal and Religion: Theoretical Stakes, Practical Implications (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 84–90. 35  J. E. Kerber, ‘Native American Treatment of Dogs in Northeastern North America: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Perspectives’, Archaeology of Eastern North America 25 (1997), 81–95; J. D. Hughes, North American Indian Ecology, 2nd edn (El Paso, TX: Texas Western Press, 1996), 43–4; M. Schwartz, A History of Dogs in the Early Americas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); W. R. West, ‘Foreword: Horse Nation’, in Song for the Horse Nation: Horses in Native American Cultures, ed. G. P. Horse Capture and E. Her Many Horses (Washington, DC and Golden, CO: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, and Fulcrum Publishing, 2006); E. Wallace and E. A. Hoebel, The Comanches: Lords of the South Plains (Norman, OK; London: 33 

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By the mid-nineteenth century Harriet Ritvo observes that in England ‘the Victorian cult of pets was firmly established’, with the magazine Punch frequently satirizing foolish dog-lovers, ransoms of up to £50 paid to professional dogsnatchers, the first dog show being held in Newcastle in 1859, followed by the first cat show in Crystal Palace in 1871, and champion dogs fetching prices of up to £1,000 by 1891.36 The popularity of such shows was astonishing, with 380 dog shows held in 1899.37 Working dogs such as greyhounds, foxhounds and shooting dogs were judged on performance, but for other dogs ‘many breeds were judged according to standards set simply for the sake of making distinctions’ with qualities often ‘valued only because they were unusual or difficult to produce’.38 Ritvo concludes that ‘[t]he prizewinning pedigreed dogs of the late nineteenth century seemed to symbolize simply the power to manipulate and the power to purchase – they were ultimately destabilizing emblems of status and rank as pure commodities’.39 The enthusiasm about dogs and cats also gave rise to widespread concern about rabies in the nineteenth century, however, with the Metropolitan Streets Act of 1867 requiring all dogs not on leads to be muzzled, and unmuzzled dogs being beaten to death on the spot in Nottingham in 1886–7.40 The keeping of pets was firmly established in the United States by the nineteenth century, with funerals for pets dating from 1800.41 Katherine Grier’s history recognizes that this did not mean the owners of pets were always sentimental about pet death: ‘Even fond pet owners dealt with litters of kittens and puppies by drowning all but one of the newborns, which the mother would be allowed to keep and nurse.’42 By 1870, Grier judges that the range of pets kept in US households was similar to today, and by the early twentieth century, canaries, budgerigars, other University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 36, 50; D. C. Talayesva, Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian, ed. L. W. Simmons (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1942), 62– 63; R. K. Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 23, 118, 189–91; W. B. Baker, Healing Power of Horses: Lessons from the Lakota Indians (Irvine, CA: Bowtie Press, 2004), 23–4; B. Johnston, Honour Earth Mother (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 116–19. I am grateful to Dave Aftandilian for directing me to these sources. Wallace and Hoebel make clear that Serpell is badly wrong in claiming that the Comanche treated their horses merely as utilitarian objects (Serpell, In the Company of Animals, 70–1), noting that Comanche men tended, petted and adored their horses, sometimes loving them more than their wives and children (Wallace and Hoebel, The Comanches, 36). 36  Ritvo, Animal Estate, 86–116. 37  Ritvo, Animal Estate, 98. 38  Ritvo, Animal Estate, 105, 106. 39  Ritvo, Animal Estate, 106. 40  Ritvo, Animal Estate, 190–1. 41  K. C. Grier, Pets in America: A History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 106. 42  Grier, Pets in America: A History, 10.

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birds, and goldfish were being raised for sale as pets in California and Florida.43 At the turn of the century, US animal welfare groups began to address the problem of stray animals with adoption and culling programmes.44

How Humans Treat Other Animals as Companion Animals and Pets I have not found sources documenting changes in the keeping of companion animals and pets during the first half of the twentieth century, but Adrian Franklin reports that the dog population in Britain rose by 66 per cent between 1963 and 1991, from 4.3 to 7.3 million, with a similar rise in cats between 1963 and 1995 of 75 per cent from 4 to 7 million.45 A recent study suggests that in 2011 the populations were 11.5 million dogs and 10 million cats, though others propose lower figures.46 One estimate is that over £7 billion was spent on pet products in the UK in 2015, up 25 per cent since 2010.47 Globally, it is study that 57 per cent of households included a companion animal or pet in 2016, with numbers highest in Argentina and Mexico (80 per cent), Brazil (75 per cent), Russia (73 per cent), and the USA (70 per cent). The same survey found that Asian countries have the lowest percentages of households keeping a pet, with South Korea (31 per cent), Hong Kong (35 per cent), and Japan (37 per cent), at the bottom of the international list.48 The American Veterinary Association estimates that in 2012 there were 70 million dogs, 74 million cats and 58 million fish in the United States, and the American Pet Products Association reports that in 2016 $67 billion was spent on pets in the US: $16 billion on veterinary care, $15 billion on supplies and over-the-counter medicine, $6 billion on pet grooming and boarding, and $2 billion on live animal purchases.49 The Australian Veterinary Association reports that in 2016 there were 24 million pets in Australia, finding a place in 63 per cent of households, and that A$12.2 billion is spent annually on pet products.50 Grier, Pets in America: A History, 12, 15–16. Grier, Pets in America: A History, 217. 45  A. Franklin, Animals and Modern Cultures: A Sociology of Human-Animal Relations in Modernity (London: Sage, 1999), 89. 46  J. K. Murray et al., ‘Assessing Changes in the UK Pet Cat and Dog Populations: Numbers and Household Ownership’, Veterinary Record 177:10 (10 September 2015), 259. The Pet Food Manufacturers’ Association estimates the dog population in 2017 to be 8.5 million and the cat population to be 8 million (Pet Food Manufacturers’ Association, ‘Pet Population 2017’ (2017). 47  Pet Business World, ‘How Much Are Brits Spending on Pets?’ (2016). 48  GfK, ‘Pet-Owners Dominate in Latin America, Russia and USA’ (2016). 49  American Veterinary Medical Association, ‘U.S. Pet Ownership Statistics’ (2012); American Pet Products Association, ‘Pet Industry Market Size & Ownership Statistics’ (2017). 50  Australian Veterinary Association, ‘Pet Ownership Statistics’ (2016). 43  44 

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Statistics also indicate the scale of the problem of unwanted pets: particularly cats and dogs. In the UK, no statistics are collected at a national level on the numbers of companion animals admitted to shelters, or the numbers killed because they cannot be rehomed or accommodated on a long-term basis. The Dogs Trust estimates that 81,050 stray dogs were collected by local authorities in the year 2015–2016. Of these, 9,000 were reunited with owners, and 3,400 killed.51 It is worth pausing at this point to consider the language used to describe the killing of animals in this context. The UK Dogs Trust uses the euphemism ‘put to sleep’ instead of killing; the term most commonly used by shelters is ‘euthanansia’. In a human context, the term ‘euthanasia’ has a very broad range of reference, from programmes of the systematic extermination of particular groups of persons, such as that practised in Nazi Germany against Jewish people and other minority groups, to the practice of allowing doctors to end the life of their patients at the request of their patients or because their patients are unable to give consent and relatives or doctors believe death to be in their best interest.52 The former is (almost) universally deplored, of course; the latter is a matter of ethical controversy, but is clearly recognized as different from the former, in that the death is considered to be in the patient’s best interests. As discussed later in the chapter, there is a strong argument that this latter sense of euthanasia is applicable to and appropriate for companion animals who are undergoing significant suffering with no realistic chance of recovery. For some animals killed in shelters, this is the case and such deaths could therefore be appropriately described as ‘euthanasia’. Most of the dogs and cats killed in shelters are not killed for this reason, however. Instead, they are killed because there is judged to be no reasonable prospect of finding appropriate new homes for them, and it is judged to be unfeasible to continue to accommodate them in the shelter. A policy of killing animals that cannot be housed is clearly not the same as deciding that the state of health of an individual dog or cat means death is in his or her best interests. It is not analogous to the Nazi euthanasia of deliberately seeking to kill human persons with particular characteristics, but it would be analogous to social programmes of killing humans as a response to shortages of food or housing that would be considered ethically objectionable. Those defending the policy of killing animals that cannot be rehomed or housed in the shelter – and of using the term ‘euthanasia’ to describe this policy – might argue that death in these cases is in the best interests of the individual animals, because the alternatives of housing them in inadequate conditions would be worse. The alternative is worse, however, only because as a society we are not prepared to devote sufficient resources to providing an environment for them that would enable them to live lives that would be worth living. In making this point, I do not primarily mean to be critical of shelters that have policies of killing animals which they are unable to rehome and for which they are unable to provide accommodation they consider to be appropriate, though it Dogs Trust, Annual Report and Accounts 2016 (London, 2017), 14. M. A. Kuiper et al., ‘Euthanasia: A Word No Longer to be Used or Abused’, Intensive Care Medicine 33:3 (2007), 549–50.

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seems that adopting best practice may reduce the rates of killing very substantially.53 Instead, I am criticizing the euphemistic use of ‘euthanasia’ to describe a policy of killing cats and dogs judged unfeasible to accommodate. Such deaths are not in the interests of the animals concerned – except where alternatives are considered very narrowly – and therefore killing in such circumstances should be described as such, in order to avoid masking the scandal of the large-scale destruction of dogs and cats as a side-effect of our practices in relation to companion animals. For that reason, in this chapter I use the term ‘killing’ rather than ‘euthanasia’ to describe the destruction of animals that shelters judge they cannot rehome or continue to accommodate.54 The Dogs Trust report does not include the dogs sent directly by members of the public to charities, and there are no national statistics on this. Media investigations of Battersea Dogs and Cats Home report that around a third of the animals they accept under their open intake policy are killed.55 Their 2015 annual report records an intake of 4,643 dogs, which suggests that around 1,500 were killed in that year.56 That this is a plausible statistic from a single institution suggests the number of dogs that are killed each year in the UK is very much greater than the Dogs Trust report. One estimate is that around 130,000 dogs and 130,000 cats entered UK animal shelters in 2009.57 A separate study surveyed UK animal shelters in 2010 and found that 9,000 dogs and 13,000 cats were killed by shelters that responded. The authors estimate that the true figure could be 16,000 dogs when dogs killed by local authorities are included, and while they do not provide an estimate for cats, it is likely that this would be still higher.58 If the reported rates for the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home were nationally representative, the numbers would be very substantially higher. In the United States, the Shelter Animals Count project is a recent initiative attempting to provide reliable data on the numbers of animals admitted to shelters and what happens to them, with support from major charities involved in the work. Their first report, for 2016, based on data submitted from 2,255 Organizations such as Maddie’s Fund (http://www.maddiesfund.org) provide resources to improve shelter practice. 54  This point overlaps with Tom Regan’s argument that the term ‘euthanasia’ should be restricted to cases where killing is ‘preference-respecting’, so that we are clear that the preference of the animal would be to have their life ended (T. Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, 2nd edn (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 114). 55  ‘BBC Press Office, ‘Panorama: “Enough is Enough” Says Battersea Dogs & Cats Home as it Has to Put Down a Record Number of Dogs’ (2010); N. Craven, ‘We Put Down Too Many Healthy Dogs just because They Are Anxious, Battersea Whistleblower Reveals’, Mail on Sunday, 2 January 2016. 56  Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, Annual Review 2015 (London, 2016), 20. 57  C. C. Clark, T. Gruffydd-Jones and J. K. Murray, ‘Number of Cats and Dogs in UK Welfare Organisations’, Veterinary Record 170:19 (15 May 2012), 259. 58  J. Stavisky et al., ‘Demographics and Economic Burden of Un-Owned Cats and Dogs in the UK: Results of a 2010 Census’, BMC Veterinary Research 8:1 (2012), 6–7. 53 

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organizations, records an intake of 1.4 million dogs and 1.3 million cats.59 54 per cent of these animals were adopted, with a further 28 per cent returned to owners, transferred to another agency, ‘returned to field’ (usually for stray or feral cats neutered and released), or experiencing other miscellaneous ‘live outcomes’. 15 per cent of animals are killed by shelters, with 17 per cent of these having been admitted to shelters by owners with the intention that they would be killed. The Shelter Animals Count annual data for 2016 records a total of 176,528 dogs and 234,306 cats killed in shelters submitting data to the project. Recent estimates of the total US national figures are much larger. Numbers of animals killed seem to be coming down, perhaps from around 23 million in 1970, to 5.7 million in 1992, and around 4 million in 2000.60 Without knowing the coverage of the Shelter Animals Count data, however, it is hard to know whether further progress in reducing the numbers of animals killed has been made since 2000. Those who work in animal shelters where animals are killed often find the situation of being involved in the killing of the animals for whom they wanted to care highly stressful. A 2005 report on stress suffered by such workers quoted one: I think it’s [animal euthanasia] made me an angry person. I want to be alone most of the time. I drink sometimes to numb the stress of the day. I eat and sleep more than I feel I need. I used to feel that my work was helping ‘save’ the world. Not anymore. It doesn’t seem to end. Although I believe that euthanasia isn’t the worst thing that can happen to an animal, it’s taking a toll on my life!61

J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace provides an empathetic description of one character’s attempts to preserve the dignity of the dogs killed at the shelter at which he volunteers, refusing to allow their corpses to be incinerated with refuse by workers who do not treat the bodies with respect.62 Kathy Rudy calls shelter work ‘the toughest job on the planet when it comes to companion animals’, observes that workers suffer compassion fatigue and lose empathy for the animals in their care, and concludes that ‘the shelter situation today is in crisis’.63 The unhappy situation Shelter Animals Count, ‘Animal Data Summary’ (2016). E. A. Clancy and Andrew N. Rowan, ‘Companion Animal Demographics in the United States: A Historical Perspective’, in The State of the Animals II: 2003, ed. D. J. Salem and A. N. Rowan (Washington, DC: Humane Society Press, 2003), 20. 61  C. L. Reeve et al., ‘The Caring‐Killing Paradox: Euthanasia‐related Strain among Animal‐ shelter Workers’, Journal of Applied Social Psychology 35:1 (2005), 119–20. For an account of how those who surrender animals and shelter workers deal with the guilt they experience in their respective roles, see S. S. Frommer and A. Arluke, ‘Loving Them to Death: Blame-Displacing Strategies of Animal Shelter Workers and Surrenderers’, Society & Animals 7:1 (1999), 1–16. 62  J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage Books, 2000), 80–5, 142–6. 63  K. Rudy, Loving Animals: Toward a New Animal Advocacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 62–6. 59  60 

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of shelter workers forced to kill animals by the ways in which companion animals are bred and abandoned makes clear a deep problem with current practices in relation to companion animals. The problem of dogs and cats being abandoned or relinquished to shelters in large numbers is an important reason to be concerned about how current practices of keeping companion animals are problematic beyond the context of a particular non-human animal living in a human household. A second clear cause of concern is how animals are bred in order to supply the demand for companion animals or pets. Many breeders have taken advantage of the growth in popularity of keeping companion animals by breeding them in large numbers in inadequate conditions. In relation to dogs, facilities where such irresponsible breeding is carried out are popularly referred to as ‘puppy mills’. The US Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association characterized a puppy mill as a breeding facility where quantity of animals is emphasized rather than quality, where breeding is indiscriminate, where there is a lack of human contact and environmental enrichment, where there is poor sanitation, food and water, and where veterinary care is minimal. They report that being bred in these conditions has significant impacts on dog health, including behavioural and mental health issues, increased susceptibility to disease, other illness and injury, and a range of harms arising from wire flooring.64 The 2016 BBC Panorama documentary ‘Britain’s Puppy Dealers Exposed’ included shocking footage from an Irish farm in which dogs were in effect being battery farmed: raised in tiny cages in buildings without adequate lighting, ventilation, sanitation, veterinary care, socialization, nutrition, or even access to water. The programme showed puppies exported to England and sold from residential addresses to try to give the appearance that the puppies had been raised in a family home.65 A report into puppy mills in Missouri, where it is estimated that 33–40 per cent of US dog breeders are located, and one million puppies born each year, concluded that regulation is so poor that commercial breeders ‘have little, if any, incentive to comply with state statutes or to correct violations, and canines are vulnerable to inadequate care’.66 A state ballot initiative to improve regulation of puppy breeding passed by voters in 2010 was subsequently stripped of the most significant welfare provisions by the state legislature.67 It is striking that large numbers of puppies are being bred on farms, where it seems that lessons from the intensive farming of poultry and pigs are being applied to the rearing of dogs, with breeders seeing little reason to differentiate between raising animals for food and selling them as companions or Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association, Veterinary Report on Puppy Mills (Gaithersburg, MD, 2013), 1–2, 5–7. 65  Panorama, ‘Britain’s Puppy Dealers Exposed’ (2016). 66  Office of the State Auditor of MO, Report No. 2001–09: Audit of Animal Care Facilities Inspection Program 2 (Jefferson City, MO, 2001), quoted in K. A. Burger, ‘Solving the Problem of Puppy Mills: Why the Animal Welfare Movement’s Bark is Stronger than Its Bite’, Washington University Journal of Law & Policy 43 (2013), 265. 67  Burger, ‘Solving the Problem of Puppy Mills’, 273, 276. 64 

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pets. Scale is not the only factor, however: dogs can also be raised without adequate care by unscrupulous small-scale breeders operating from their homes. The demand for cats of particular breeds is lower than for dogs, but irresponsible large-scale breeding of kittens from caged cats is also a significant concern, together with other species kept as pets such as ferrets, rabbits, birds, gerbils, hamsters, guinea pigs and reptiles.68 Given the inadequacy of regulation about the breeding of pets, where the source of animals is unknown, it is very likely that any animals sold as pets are likely to have been raised in conditions that are problematic for their welfare. While it is straightforward to recognize the problematic nature of the intensive and large-scale breeding of dogs, cats, and other companion animals, in pet mills, there are additional concerns with the breeding of pedigree dogs and cats. Some time after buying a pedigree terrier, Reggie, from a breeder they knew, friends discovered that he suffered from a heart murmur, which a vet advised could be problematic for his health. Concerned that the problem might be an issue for others of the breeder’s dogs, my friends contacted him to explain the problem. The breeder responded that they could return Reggie for a refund, after which he would shoot him, as useless for any other purpose. My friends were appalled: they were concerned for Reggie and the wellbeing of his relatives; the idea of having him killed in exchange for a refund was unthinkable. The fact that the breeder thought this might be an appropriate resolution of the issue – or that he was prepared to make this threat in order to avoid returning the purchase price – was a shocking and ugly insight into the breeder’s view of the dogs he sold. There was also no indication that he was surprised or concerned that the issue had arisen among the dogs he was breeding, or that he planned to review his breeding practice as a result. Reggie’s informative certificate of pedigree showed numerous instances of inbreeding, including matings between half-siblings, uncles and nieces, and grandparents and grandchildren. Such breeding practices are very likely to have increased the risk of serious genetic defects such as Reggie’s heart murmur, together with other health conditions that were discovered subsequently: dry eye, skin disease, and severe hip dysplasia on both sides that required major surgery. Many of the breeder’s dogs are likely to suffer similar serious threats to their health. Others are likely to have been shot because they failed to exhibit specified pedigree characteristics, or because they showed more obvious health problems that made them unsaleable. My friends suffered the great sadness of losing Reggie’s half-brother to pancreatitis as a result of suspected copper toxicosis, a known health condition that should be tested for by breeders but was not. Reggie was subsequently tested and had a positive result for one of the two genes that have to be passed down from each parents for the disease to manifest. The experience of my friends highlight the potential vast gulf between how breeders regard the dogs they sell, and the relationship that the purchasers of the dogs seek with their

Humane Society of the United States, ‘Pet Mills Churn Out More than Puppies’ (n.d.).

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companions, as well as the deeply problematic breeding practices that result in premature death and serious suffering among pedigree dogs. A 2009 report commissioned by the RSPCA states that there can be no doubt that numerous pedigree dogs of many different breeds now experience compromised welfare due to the direct and indirect effects of selective breeding practices … Many breeds have high rates of heritable disorders or diseases and some have physical conformations which can result in disability, behavioural problems, or pain, and therefore unnecessary suffering.69

The authors report that veterinarians have become desensitized to the welfare issues arising from anatomically deformed dogs, and give examples of welfare problems such as English bulldogs with heads too large to birth naturally, Newfoundland dogs that have heart attack risks of eighty-eight times the general population, and English bulldogs, pugs, and Boston terriers with faces so flat that they cannot breathe or exercise normally.70 The report notes that cross-bred dogs have longer life expectancies than pure-bred dogs and are less likely to suffer compromised welfare, and that the efforts of breed societies and kennel clubs have been ineffective in protecting welfare.71 The report focuses on dogs, but notes that a 2006 report from the Companion Animal Welfare Council (CAWC) identifies similar issues in relation to the selective breeding of ornamental fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, cats, horses, rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs, rats, and farmed animals as pets.72 The CAWC report comments that given the strict regulation of animal welfare in other contexts, it is strange that ‘an almost unquestioning acceptance continues to prevail regarding the selection and breeding of companion animals for arbitrary traits, despite the great potential for very serious welfare consequences’.73 One further issue concerning the sourcing of non-human animals as companions or pets is the impact this can have on wild animal populations. A 2005 paper found that the volume of amphibians and reptiles taken from the wild for the US market alone is large enough to exterminate populations or species. Most of these are sold as pets. Since the USA is likely to represent only 12–15 per cent of the global market, the impacts of keeping amphibians and reptiles as pets N. Rooney and D. Sargan, Pedigree Dog Breeding in the UK: A Major Welfare Concern? (Horsham, West Sussex: Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 2009), 7. 70  Rooney and Sargan, Pedigree Dog Breeding in the UK, 7. 71  Rooney and Sargan, Pedigree Dog Breeding in the UK, 7. 72  Companion Animal Welfare Council, Breeding and Welfare in Companion Animals: The Companion Animal Welfare Council’s Report on Welfare Aspects of Modifications, through Selective Breeding or Biotechnological Methods, to the Form, Function or Behaviour of Companion Animals (Sidmouth, Devon: CAWC, 2006), cited in Rooney and Sargan, Pedigree Dog Breeding in the UK, 5. 73  Companion Animal Welfare Council, Breeding and Welfare in Companion Animals, 8. 69 

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globally is very likely to be compromising the viability of the wild populations of many species.74 One kind of gecko was extinct in the area it was originally discovered in China by the time it was formally described, probably as a result of collections made for the pet trade.75 Breeding farms set up to relieve the pressure on wild populations of green pythons in Indonesia as a result of the pet trade have been used to ‘launder’ wild-caught snakes.76 Wild terrapin populations have been compromised by the pet trade and over-fishing of ornamental fish species is having a detrimental effect on wild populations, as well as threatening biodiversity through introducing non-native species through escapes after import.77 Keeping companion animals can also impact on wild animals in other ways. The impact of domestic cats on wildlife populations has been widely discussed, and may have been underestimated: a 2003 study based on the numbers of prey items brought home suggested that UK domestic cats could be responsible for killing around 57 million mammals, 27 million birds, and 5 million reptiles and amphibians, but a US study using cat-mounted video cameras found that only 23 per cent of prey items were returned to the household, as well as noting that cats may also have sub-lethal effects on bird populations.78 Keeping cats also has indirect impacts on the wild fish population: it is estimated that 6 per cent of the global wild fish catch is used for canned cat food, some of which could have been used directly for human consumption.79

M. A. Schlaepfer, C. Hoover and C. K. Dodd, ‘Challenges in Evaluating the Impact of the Trade in Amphibians and Reptiles on Wild Populations’, BioScience 55:3 (2005), 263. 75  Schlaepfer, Hoover and Dodd, ‘Challenges in Evaluating the Impact of the Trade in Amphibians and Reptiles’, 257. 76  J. A. Lyons and D. J. D. Natusch, ‘Wildlife Laundering through Breeding Farms: Illegal Harvest, Population Declines and a Means of Regulating the Trade of Green Pythons (Morelia Viridis) from Indonesia’, Biological Conservation 144:12 (2011), 3073–81. 77  C. Warwick, ‘Red-Eared Terrapin Farms and Conservation’, Oryx 20:4 (1986), 237– 40; C. Andrews, ‘The Ornamental Fish Trade and Fish Conservation’, Journal of Fish Biology 37:Supplement A (1990), 53–9; C. L. Gerstner et al., ‘Effects of the Freshwater Aquarium Trade on Wild Fish Populations in Differentially-Fished Areas of the Peruvian Amazon’, Journal of Fish Biology 68:3 (2006), 862–75; R. Raghavan et al., ‘Uncovering an Obscure Trade: Threatened Freshwater Fishes and the Aquarium Pet Markets’, Biological Conservation 164 (2013), 158–69; I. Papavlasopoulou et al., ‘Ornamental Fish in Pet Stores in Greece: A Threat to Biodiversity’, Mediterranean Marine Science 15:1 (2013), 126–34. 78  M. Woods, R. A. McDonald and S. Harris, ‘Predation of Wildlife by Domestic Cats Felis Catus in Great Britain’, Mammal Review 33:2 (2003), 174–88; K. A. T. Loyd et al., ‘Quantifying Free-Roaming Domestic Cat Predation Using Animal-Borne Video Cameras’, Biological Conservation 160 (2013), 183–9. 79  S. S. De Silva and G. M. Turchini, ‘Towards Understanding the Impacts of the Pet Food Industry on World Fish and Seafood Supplies’, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 21:5 (2008), 462, 465. 74 

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As noted at the beginning of this chapter, the practice of keeping of horses in many contexts fails to fit neatly into my chapter categorizations of using nonhuman animals for work, or entertainment, or keeping them as companions. Horses are these days usually not companions in the sense of sharing domestic space with humans, but the depth of relationship may be considered at least as significant as that with other companion animals by those who keep horses, who may consider them part of the family.80 In the UK, horses kept for leisure activities or as companions far outweigh the populations kept for other reasons: estimates suggest that there are between 840,000 and 1.3 million horses in total.81 In 2003, there were only 122,000 thoroughbred horses across the UK, Ireland, France, Italy and Germany,82 so it is clear that the vast majority of horses are not being kept for reasons related to their use for sport. In the United States, the horse population was estimated at 9.2 million in 2003, of which only approximately 10 per cent were thoroughbred. A 1998 survey suggested 66 per cent of horses were kept for leisure, 15 per cent on farms or ranches, 7 per cent for showing or competition, 6 per cent for breeding, and 2 per cent for racing.83 Research indicates that horses kept for leisure often experience poor welfare as a result of neglect by their owners or their ignorance about how to look after their horses, with problems resulting from poor diet, confinement, social isolation, and inadequate veterinary care.84 This brief and incomplete survey of the human keeping of companion animals and pets indicates that the practice has a very long history, is now more widespread and popular than ever, and while many companion animals are well-loved by the humans who take care of them, the ways such animals are bred, sold and abandoned means the practice raises significant ethical concerns.

Engaging Ethically with Other Animals as Companions It is striking that there is a long tradition of objecting to the keeping of companion animals or pets not out of concern for the animals, but because the practice was thought to be bad for the humans concerned. James Serpell collects a wide range L. M. Hemsworth, E. Jongman and G. J. Coleman, ‘Recreational Horse Welfare: The Relationships between Recreational Horse Owner Attributes and Recreational Horse Welfare’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science 165 (2015), 11. 81  L. A. Boden et al., ‘Summary of Current Knowledge of the Size and Spatial Distribution of the Horse Population within Great Britain’, BMC Veterinary Research 8 (2012), 43. 82  S. J. G. Hall, ‘The Horse in Human Society’, in The Domestic Horse: The Origins, Development and Management of Its Behaviour, ed. D. S. Mills and S. M. McDonnell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 30. 83  E. R. Kilby, ‘The Demographics of the US Equine Population’, in The State of the Animals, ed. D. J. Salem and A. N. Rowan (Washington, DC: Humane Society Press, 2007), 175, 183, 195. 84  Kilby, ‘Demographics of the US Equine Population’. 80 

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of such criticisms, beginning with Plutarch’s report that when Julius Caesar once saw wealthy foreigners in Rome embracing puppies and monkeys in their bosoms, ‘he asked whether the women in their country were not used to bear children’. Plutarch comments that in this reprimand Caesar was ‘gravely reflecting upon persons who spend and lavish upon brute beasts that affect and kindness which nature has implanted in us to be bestowed on those of our own kind’.85 The theme of affection for companion animals being a problematic displacement of affection for humans is remarkably constant between Plutarch’s time and our own. The ecclesial concern in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries with monks and nuns keeping companion animals discussed above may have had some relationship to this. In Johannus Caius’s 1576 book Of English Dogges, he expresses a similar concern to Plutarch’s at greater length: These dogs are little, pretty, proper, and fine, and sought for to satisfy the delicateness of dainty dames, and wanton women’s wills, instruments of folly for them to play and dally withal, to trifle away the treasure of time, to withdraw their minds from more commendable exercises, and to content their corrupted concupiscences with vain disport … These puppies the smaller they be, the more pleasure they provoke, as more meet play fellows for mincing mistresses to bear in their bosoms, to keep company withal in their chambers, to succour with sleep in bed, and nourish with meat at table, to lay in their laps, and lick their lips as they ride in their wagons, and good reason it should be so, for coarseness with fineness has no fellowship, but elegance with neatness has neighbourhood enough. That plausible proverb proved true in relation to a tyrant, namely that he loved his sow better then his son, may well be applied to these kinds of people, who delight more in dogs that are deprived of all possibility of reason, then they do in children that be capable of wisdom and judgement. But this abuse perhaps reigns where there has been long lack of issue, or else where barrenness is the best blossom of beauty.86

Seventeenth-century preachers complained that fashionable women neglected their children in preferring to embrace their puppies.87 In Mansfield Park, published in 1814, Jane Austen disapproves of Lady Bertram for ‘thinking more of her pug than her children’.88 Jean-Paul Sartre records with approval an American friend’s

Plutarch, ‘The Life of Pericles’, in The Parallel Lives, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 3 (London; Cambridge, MA: Heinemann; Harvard University Press, 1916), 1.1, quoted in Serpell, In the Company of Animals, 24. 86  J. Caius, Of English Dogges, trans. A. Fleming (London, 1576), 20–1, English modernized. 87  Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 108. 88  J. Austen, Mansfield Park: An Annotated Edition, ed. D. S. Lynch (Cambridge, MA; London: Belknap Press, 2016), 59, discussed in S. B. Palmer, ‘Slipping the Leash: Lady Bertram’s Lapdog’, Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal On-Line 25:1 (2004). I am grateful to Rachel Muers for this reference. 85 

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violent anger in kicking a statue of a dog in a dogs’ cemetery, this time identifying companion animals with children: ‘He was right: when one loves children and animals too much, one loves them against human beings.’89 Adrian Franklin’s sociological study of human relationships with other animals concludes that the changes in the practice of keeping companion animals since the 1960s correspond with the notion that ‘pets are required to play surrogate roles for humans whose ontological security has been diminished’.90 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari dismiss all companion animal relationships on the basis that such relationships with them are oedipal invitations to regress into narcissistic contemplation with substitute parents, so that ‘anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool’.91 As recently as 2014, Pope Francis warned married couples that preferring the convenience of keeping cats or dogs to having children will lead to loneliness in old age.92 Others see in-principle reasons against the keeping of companion animals or pets on the grounds that it is contrary to the dignity or rights of the non-human animals. Some authors reject out of hand any ethical possibility of human/nonhuman companion animal relationships. For Yi-Fu Tuan, keeping pets is inevitably a relationship of dominance, which may be affectionate but is the affection of patronage and condescension, where the animals exist only for human pleasure and convenience. He observes that exercising power over another being ‘is demonstrably firm and perversely delicious when it is exercised for no particular purpose and when submission to it goes against the victim’s own strong desires and nature’, citing as an example training a hungry dog not to eat food until given permission.93 Gary Francione is similarly clear that keeping companion animals is in principle wrong: The recognition that animals have a right not to be treated as the property of humans would most certainly mean that we should stop bringing domesticated nonhumans into existence, and this would include dogs and cats. Although some humans treat their nonhuman companions well, many do not. Again, although bad treatment is worse than good treatment, the focus on treatment misses the point. However well we treat our nonhuman companion animals, they are completely dependent on humans for every aspect of their existence, and the best of living situations still involve what is a very unnatural situation for these animals.94 J.-P. Sartre, Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1964), 30. 90  Franklin, Animals and Modern Cultures, 89. 91  G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 2004), 240, criticized in Haraway, When Species Meet, 28. 92  L. Davies, ‘Pope Tells Married Couples: Have Children, Not Pets’, The Guardian, 3 June 2014. 93  Tuan, Dominance and Affection, 5, 88, 107. 94  G. L. Francione and R. Garner, The Animal Rights Debate (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 79. 89 

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It is clear from empirical studies that for some pet owners the motivation to express the dominance Tuan diagnoses is clearly present. One study divides pet owners into ‘those valuing the pet as an individual being and those seeking to own the pet as part of a personal identity project’.95 The illustrations of the latter category are deeply concerning: buying dogs to dress up as props for a first novel; citing cuteness as the key criterion for purchase; and preferring small dogs to bigger ones because ‘they’re like a little toy’, can be controlled, and are seen as vulnerable and in need of protection.96 It is important to acknowledge the degree of control that humans exercise over non-human animals as companions or pets, including over fundamental features of their lives such as preventing them having offspring, forcing them to breed with particular other animals, or making other bodily interventions such as declawing cats to prevent the scratching of furnishings, or clipping ears or tails for cosmetic reasons. Haraway points out that playing the role of being a companion animal is not a straightforward task: Being a pet seems to me to be a demanding job for a dog, requiring self-control and canine emotional and cognitive skills matching those of good working dogs. Very many pets and pet people deserve respect.97

Haraway does not gloss over the training required for the sophisticated play between her and Cayenne, described above. She notes that she and everyone else she knows involved in the sport use only positive reinforcement methods, which ignore behaviours that are not wanted and reward those that are, so that ‘time outs’ are used rather than restraint, coercion or punishment.98 For Haraway, however, that includes stopping a high-profile competition run in the middle after Cayenne made a mistake by not making contact with a yellow painted zone on an A-frame, and returning Cayenne to her crate ‘with no word of encouragement, food treat, or even glance’.99 The intervention was effective: Haraway reports that Cayenne ran the next event with three perfect A-frame contacts, after which Cayenne ‘glowed’ with delight in her success ‘for heaps of treats and face-to-face smiles’.100 The training is clearly coercive, in that Haraway’s training techniques are effective in encouraging Cayenne to behave in particular ways, but it seems plausible that this form of coercion is the only way in which the good of complex human–canine play could be achieved. M. B. Beverland, F. Farrelly and E. Ai Ching Lim, ‘Exploring the Dark Side of Pet Ownership: Status- and Control-Based Pet Consumption’, Journal of Business Research 61:5 (2008), 491.  96  Beverland, Farrelly and Lim, ‘Exploring the Dark Side’, 493–5.  97  D. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 38.  98  Haraway, When Species Meet, 211.  99  Haraway, When Species Meet, 214–5. 100  Haraway, When Species Meet, 215.  95 

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I have just been called away from my desk by my wife Lucy, who has noticed that there is blood on the fur of Lola, one of the three gerbils who have been sharing a large tank in our kitchen for the past eighteen months. Our daughter Anna successfully made a case that we should give them a home after discovering their owner could no longer accommodate them. Lucy is much better at handling Lola than I am, and as she holds her we discover two small wounds on Lola’s body. We wash the injuries, leaving her looking decidedly bedraggled, and administer antiseptic, before returning her to the tank. Our best guess is that one of her companions has bitten her, though this would be the first instance of conflict we are aware of between them. If she is injured again, we are likely to have to separate them, perhaps permanently, and any such isolation is likely to make Lola less happy. The interruption is a reminder of the complexities of ensuring the wellbeing of non-human companions. The key difference between Haraway’s endorsement of the complexity of her relationship with Cayenne, and Tuan and Francione’s disapproval of such relationships, is whether the inevitable exercise of power by humans over companion animals in this context is a sufficient reason to judge the practice ethically unacceptable. In Haraway’s view, there is no escape from recognizing ourselves to be companion species alongside other species, and the loving relationship between her and Cayenne is just a special case of our inescapable situation of becoming ourselves among non-human companions.101 Tuan and Francione might recognize that we live alongside other species, but in place of the interspecies contact zones Haraway narrates, would prefer non-contact zones in which humans seek insofar as possible to leave all non-human animals alone to live in contexts where they are not subject to human control. This is a foundational difference of view about whether companion animal relationships are ethically defensible, and leads us to consider whether a Christian ethical framework requires us to side with one view or the other.

A Christian Ethical Assessment of Keeping Companion Animals and Pets The primal discussion of non-human animal companions for Christians is the story of Adam’s search for companionship in the creation narrative of Genesis 2. God declares that ‘It is not good that [Adam] should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner’ (v. 18). In this creation story, unlike the preceding seven-day account of Genesis 1, the need for Adam to have companionship is the reason God formed ‘every animal of the field and every bird of the air’ (v. 19). God brings the animals to Adam ‘to see what he would call them’, and Adam gives names ‘to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field’ (vv. 19-20). None of the animals are judged suitable as ‘a helper as his partner’ (v. 20), at which point God elects to form a woman from Adam’s rib instead (vv. 21-22). Adam gives his reason for preferring the woman as ‘this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh’ (v. 23), suggesting that the other animals were unsuitable companions because their bones and flesh were different from Adam’s. Haraway, When Species Meet, 301.

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What is striking in this story is the non-economic relationship between Adam, Eve, and the other animal inhabitants of Eden. In contrast to the practices treated in previous chapters of this volume, Adam and Eve are not making use of other animals for food, clothing or labour, let alone for experimentation or entertainment. Instead, Adam, Eve, and the other animals are dwelling peaceably together without any ulterior motive. Perhaps humans and other animals are not companions in the literal sense of sharing bread, but, as Luther notes in his commentary on Genesis, they share a common table in the plants provided for them as food, and sleep and rest alongside one another.102 Here we have an ideal representation of creaturely coexistence, where each animal creature, human and non-human, lives out the fullness of their own mode of life, glorifying God in their particular pattern of flourishing, living in community with other creaturely kinds without contest or conflict. Isaiah looks forward to the time of the Messianic reign when such peaceable relations will be restored (Isa. 11.6-9; 65.25-6), and this looks like an important component of the release of creatures from groaning bondage prophesied in Romans 8, as well (Rom. 8.18-23). Christians took up such visions of peaceful companionship between humans and other animals in stories of the saints. Laura Hobgood-Oster recalls the robin who ate from the hand and perched on the shoulder of St Servan of northern Scotland, and whom St Kentigern resurrected when the robin was wounded and died; the boar who was St Kieran of Ireland’s principal attendant; the dogs that were St Patrick’s faithful companions in guarding the sheep in his care; the many animals associated with St Birgit of Ireland; the dog who became companion to St Roch of France and Italy after curing him of the plague by licking his sores; the stray dogs and cats cared for by St Martín of Peru in the early seventeenth century; the lion who became St Jerome’s companion after Jerome removed a thorn from his paw; St Gertrude of Nivelle who became the patron saint of cats; St Hilda of England, who befriended snakes; and St Agatha, sometimes known as St Gato or St Cat.103 Many more examples could be added to this brief survey.104 Such stories suggest that Christians retained a sense that the restoring of the Edenic vision of peaceable companionship with other animals was a mark of Christian holiness. In the light of the biblical narratives of harmonious relationships between humans and other animals, and the way these visions were received in hagiographical narratives, it seems possible in a Christian context to interpret companion animal relationships at their best as nothing less than partial anticipations of the in-breaking Messianic reign of God. This is not to prejudge the ethical question of the permissibility of keeping companion animals. All actual human/non-human companion relationships will fall short of this ideal vision, of course, just as all actual human/human relationships do. Adam and Eve M. Luther, Luther’s Works, ed. H. T. Lehmann and J. Pelikan (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1958–67), vol. 1, 136. 103  Hobgood-Oster, Friends We Keep, 26–30. 104  One wonderful source of tales of saints and animals is H. Waddell, Beasts and Saints (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1995). 102 

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were clearly not keeping pets in Eden, but living alongside other animal creatures, each flourishing in their own particular mode of life. It might be that attempts to anticipate a peaceable coexistence between humans and other animals turn out to be demonstrably bad for non-human animals, and that we will therefore have to exercise patience and forego their companionship here and now. The visions of Eden, of Isaiah, and of Romans, however, seem to me to be of relevance to Christian ethical thinking in this sphere because they suggest that ideal nonhuman animal life is life alongside other creatures, including human ones. For Tuan and Francione, the ideal seems to be isolation of non-humans from humans as the only way in which non-human animals can be properly themselves. Christian ethics must take very seriously the many and various ways in which humans can fail adequately to respect the flourishing of non-human animals in the context of companion animal and pet relationships, but should not reject in principle the possibility of mutual flourishing in relationships between human and non-human companions. This resonates with one simple interpretation of the human practice of keeping companion animals and pets: for many people, living in a mono-species household is unattractive. Given the history of human domestication of other animals across the categories represented in the chapters of this book, and especially their use for labour, food and companionship, the times when humans have lived domestically without other animals may be comparatively rare. Keith Thomas reports that the sixteenth-century English were proud of no longer living with their livestock under the same roof, but this change in practice may be related to a growth in keeping companion animals in that the exclusion of non-humans from the household left an uncomfortable gap.105 Perhaps many humans are keen to keep non-human companions because we find it hard to live without them. Perhaps even after the creation of Eve, it would not have been good for human beings to be alone in Eden, and we retain a widespread sense that it is not good for us either. In contrast to Pope Francis’s concern that keeping companion animals is detrimental to humans, many studies indicate an association between keeping pets and companion animals and benefits to human health and wellbeing.106 As a starting point in assessing the Christian ethics of the practice of keeping pets and companion animals, the wild capture of non-human animals as a source of companions or pets should be recognized as illegitimate. To remove nondomesticated animals from their own environment, subject them to the stress of capture and transport, and then keep them in an environment likely to be less well-suited to them and much more restrictive of their movement will almost always be disadvantageous to the animals concerned, and therefore unjustifiable Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 94. Rebecca Utz references a wide range of such studies, though her own research project does not provide additional evidence for a causal relationship between pet ownership and beneficial behavioural changes. See R. L. Utz, ‘Walking the Dog: The Effect of Pet Ownership on Human Health and Health Behaviors’, Social Indicators Research 116:2 (2014), 327–39.

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merely to provide human amusement. Those considering purchasing or keeping animals that might have originated in the wild, including reptiles, amphibians, fish and birds, have a very serious obligation to ensure that they are not supporting the practice of wild capture. Where animals are bred for sale as companion animals or pets, conditions should permit their flourishing as creatures of God. This will rule out large-scale facilities such as the puppy mills described above, but small-scale is no guarantee that the animals are being sufficiently well treated. Those purchasing pets or companion animals should take responsibility for ensuring they are well-informed about how the animals have been bred. This will usually rule out purchases through retail operations such as pet shops. It may well be that there is no source of many commonly kept companion animals and pets in which the animals are appropriately treated. For those animals where a surplus of unwanted animals requires animals to be killed, such as is the case for dogs and cats in many countries, it is hard to justify the sale or purchase of such animals as companions at all. The current patterns of purchase, abandonment, and relinquishing animals to shelters, which result in the need to kill millions of healthy animals annually, is an appalling contradiction of the loving relationships sought by most of those acquiring companion animals. To breed for sale or purchase animals in such circumstances contributes directly to the over-supply of companion animals, and therefore indirectly to the need for unhappy shelter workers reluctantly to decide to put animals to death. Perhaps it could be justifiable even in the context of this mass killing to breed small numbers of particular breeds to avoid them becoming extinct, though this would have to avoid the problems of inbreeding discussed below. Opting instead to provide a home for a dog, cat, or other companion animal from an animal shelter contributes directly to reducing the need for unwanted animals to be killed, and therefore seems preferable to other sources for companion animals in almost every respect. Selective breeding strategies for particular traits that impact negatively on animal health and welfare are incompatible with a Christian concern to promote the flourishing of fellow animal creatures. Non-human animals are not mere plastic material available to be reshaped according to human whim and to their detriment. They have their own modes of life and flourishing, and Christians have reason to respect them as such. These seem like obvious statements, so it is shocking that it would mean the end to all pedigree dog and cat breeding, as well as the selective breeding of other species to shape and reshape them according to human preferences rather than the wellbeing of the animals. As noted above, many of the physical traits bred for are directly or indirectly harmful to the animals, such as the flattened faces that cause breathing difficulties. Even where the selectedfor characteristics are not harmful in themselves, however, the inbreeding of near relatives necessary to breed for those characteristics results in genetic risks that impair the health of the animal populations that result. Ending pedigree breeding would not mean the end to variation between different breeds of dog, but the outbreeding required to ensure the physical and genetic health of animals would

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mean that the characteristics of particular breeds would become less extreme, as they were in previous centuries. It would mean the end to pet shows in which animals are judged in relation to their conformance with arbitrary breed standards: such events rewarding the competitive reshaping of animal bodies according to human preference are a focal part of the motivation for pedigree breeding and the marketing of its animal products. We could imagine a different kind of competition in which the health and wellbeing of animals was part of the central focus – perhaps even the agility training events Haraway recounts could satisfy relevant criteria with appropriate regulation – but events in their current form are fundamentally incompatible with a Christian respect for other animals. It goes without saying that killing animals on the basis of their mismatch with bred-for characteristics is also incompatible with such respect.107 The boundaries drawn thus far concern the sourcing and breeding of companion animals and pets, but clearly there are other important ethical issues concerning how they are cared for subsequently. Many pets and companion animals are kept in environments that fail to allow for their flourishing. The keeping of birds and small mammals in small cages, or reptiles, amphibians and fish in small tanks, or fish in small pools, subjects them to a monotonous environment that prevents the interaction with their surroundings that their flourishing requires. Burrowing is obviously fundamental to a rabbit’s particular mode of life, for example, so keeping a rabbit in a small wooden hutch seems morally proximate to rearing caged hens for their eggs. Similarly, keeping birds in spaces where flight is not possible or highly restricted clearly prevents a particular mode of what constitutes flourishing for them. There may be situations, of course, where particular animals are in need of rehoming and it is not possible to provide an ideal environment for them, but where the decision is made deliberately to purchase or otherwise acquire a pet or companion animal, a great deal of consideration should be given to whether it will be possible – and domestically tolerable – to provide an environment in which the particular animal can truly flourish. Much standard practice in relation to enclosures commonly used to keep many kinds of pets in domestic contexts seems clearly to fail the test of providing such an environment, and it may well be that many animals commonly kept as pets or companions cannot be accommodated appropriately at all in most domestic contexts. The practice of declawing cats, and other surgical interventions to benefit the owner rather than the animal, such as ear-cropping and tail-docking, should be seen as serious mutilations often causing significant distress and pain, and serving the end only of manipulating other animals to serve human ends more conveniently. Declawing cats in fact involves the amputation of part or all of the Gary Varner proposes that a ‘Certified Companion-Bred’ system could be introduced for dogs bred for health measures, trainability and lack of aggression. (G. E. Varner, ‘A Two-Level Utilitarian Analysis of Relationships With Pets’, in Pets and People: The Ethics of Our Relationships With Companion Animals, ed. C. Overall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 74).

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cat’s toe bones, and results in acute and chronic pain, with some cats suffering long-term lameness. The practice is illegal in the European Union unless required for veterinary medical reasons, though a quarter of cats in the United States are still subjected to the practice.108 Declawing may be more prevalent in the USA because of the numbers of cats that are kept entirely indoors. The American Veterinary Association encourages veterinarians to inform their clients and the public about the risks to cats and to wildlife of allowing cats to roam freely outside, and advises that keeping cats confined can minimize risks to the cats.109 Many US shelters require adopters of cats to keep their cats inside.110 The animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) agrees, stating that every cat should be an indoor cat on the basis of the risks of exposure to diseases such as feline AIDS, attacks by dogs or other cats, and the threat of capture by criminals.111 The ethicist Bernard Rollin takes a different view, however, arguing that the telos of a cat is to stalk and hunt, so that keeping a cat indoors aborts her ‘catness’ just as keeping a sow in a stall aborts the pigness of a pig, and that by such curtailments ‘one transforms a genuine animal life into protoplasmic endurance’.112 Peter Sandøe, Sandra Corr and Clare Palmer provide an excellent overview of the disagreement, noting that there are advantages and disadvantages to the cat on both sides, and demonstrating that disagreement about how these are evaluated is rooted in a difference of ethical theory concerning what constitutes good animal welfare.113 The Christian framework I have proposed emphasizes the importance of allowing fellow animal creatures to flourish in their particular modes of creaturely being, and on this basis takes Rollin’s concerns seriously. There is nevertheless a difficult balance to be struck here, reflecting the inevitable compromises required to keep non-human animals in domesticated contexts, weighing up the risks to the cat’s wellbeing from road traffic accidents, exposure to disease, or conflict with other cats, against the desirability of allowing a cat to live out their ‘catness’. Where there are high risks to cats in the outdoor environment, that seems a good reason not to keep cats, or to keep them inside, preferably with access to a protected outdoor

American Veterinary Medical Association, Literature Review on the Welfare Implications of Declawing of Domestic Cats (Schaumberg, IL, 2016). 109  American Veterinary Medical Association, ‘Policy Statement on Free-Roaming Owned Cats’ (2017). 110  I. Rochlitz, ‘A Review of the Housing Requirements of Domestic Cats (Felis Silvestris Catus) Kept in the Home’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science 93:1-2 (2005), 100. 111  People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, ‘Why All Cats Should be Indoor Cats’, (2017). 112  B. E. Rollin, ‘Ethical Question of the Month: October 2008’, Canadian Veterinary Journal 50:1 (2009), 14–15. 113  P. Sandøe, S. Corr and C. Palmer, Companion Animal Ethics, UFAW Animal Welfare Series (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 59–70. 108 

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space. Those keeping cats indoors have an additional responsibility to ensure they provide an environment that is enriched and allows preferred behaviours, such as climbing and scratching, and to spend time each day interacting with them to reduce boredom. Where the outdoor risks are lower, allowing cats the freedom to roam outside is likely to provide them with more opportunities to flourish. The risk outdoor cats pose to wildlife is a harder issue, and is a further good reason against breeding additional cats as companion animals, but if the cats are rehomed from shelters, restricting them to an indoor life on the basis of the risk they pose to other animals seems to impose a very heavy burden on them. A Christian understanding of non-human animals means those who keep companion animals and pets must be prepared to recognize the significant and weighty responsibility they take on for the wellbeing of these animals. They must ensure they have gained a sufficient understanding of the needs of the animal, in relation to nutrition, housing, companionship with conspecifics, veterinary care and, where appropriate, interaction with humans. They should consider seriously whether they are able to provide an environment in which the animal can flourish and enjoy diverse species-specific behaviours. This should be seen as a high bar, which much current and widely accepted practice fails to meet, where animals are confined in small, impoverished cages, tanks and enclosures. Keepers of companion animals should provide as rich and diverse an environment as possible. They should be committed to care for the companion or pet even when it is inconvenient, and for the length of the animal’s life. While spaying and neutering companion animals represents a serious diminishment in their ability to flourish in species-specific ways, where there is an over-supply of animals, as the discussion above has shown is the case for cats and dogs in many places, and where it is uncertain if any animals born will be able to flourish in their turn, such interventions are preferable to increasing the great numbers of companion animals and pets that are killed because no homes can be found for them. Erica Fudge’s wonderful book Pets introduced me to Julie Ann Smith’s account of her own experience and that of other members of the House Rabbit Society in seeking radically to rethink their homes in order to make them appropriate environments for rabbits.114 Faced with the task of rehoming rabbits from inadequate environments such as outdoor hutches, Smith describes the changes she and other members of the society made to their homes to enable them to be shared with rabbits: furniture to be made of metal to prevent gnawing, electrical cords shielded with hard tubing, carpet replaced with linoleum or abandoned to shredding, litter boxes placed wherever the rabbits chose to urinate, and rabbit toys or furniture introduced to provide a stimulating and manipulable environment. Smith and other members give up control of many parts of their home on the basis of the preferences of their rabbits: she reports that one rabbit is currently J. A. Smith, ‘Beyond Dominance and Affection: Living with Rabbits in Post-Humanist Households’, Society & Animals 11:2 (2003), 181–97, discussed in E. Fudge, Pets (Stocksfield, UK: Acumen Publishing, 2008), 98–105.

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excavating her mattress, and that other members take turns with their partner to sleep on the wet spot on the bed where their rabbit regularly urinates, or put fences around their bed to avoid eyebrows being barbered at night.115 While recognizing that she retains the power in relation to her rabbit cohabitants, Smith describes her practice as living in a ‘post-humanist household’, and enjoys the process of learning what adaptations such a multi-species environment requires.116 Smith compares the environment she is able to provide for her rabbits with that they would enjoy if relocated to an outdoor colony, with associated risks of fighting, injury and predation. One photo in her article shows a hybrid indoor–outdoor environment allowing the rabbits to burrow.117 The degree of adaptation Smith is prepared to undertake to make a space that is conducive to the flourishing of her rabbits may seem extreme, but is an exemplary case of creative rethinking of what it might mean to share a domestic space with non-human companion animals in a way that attends carefully to their flourishing. Given the controversy provoked by Peter Singer’s brief article ‘Heavy Petting’, which argued that the taboo against sex between human and non-human animals was a function of concern to differentiate ourselves from other animals, and referred with approval to mutually satisfying activities that might develop from humans who tolerate their dogs rubbing sexually against their legs, it is perhaps appropriate to consider briefly the ethics of sexual relations between humans and companion animals.118 Chloë Taylor details the phenomenon of dogs being trained to have intercourse with women in order to produce pornographic videos, and notes that it is significant that the consumers of such material and the people choosing to have sex with animals are overwhelmingly white and male. She observes that the apparent willingness of the dogs to participate in such activity is far from demonstrating that the practice is not exploitative, in the wider context of structures of privilege and domination. Taylor argues that the discourses of the clients of sex workers, and users of sex dolls, have similarities to the way that ‘zoophiles’ describe their sexual relationships with animals in valuing, for example, their constant availability for sex. Taylor’s conclusion is that ‘zoophilia – and human-canine sexual relations in particular – is not so much a sexual orientation (as “zoos” claim) or a symptom of a mental disorder (as psychiatrists claim), as it is a part of what feminists have called a rape culture’.119 This account provides very strong grounds for continuing to consider sex acts between humans and other animals to be ethically objectionable: not because human dignity is at stake, but because the – usually male and white – humans initiating such acts are very likely to be both exploitative of the animals they use in this way and self-deceiving about this exploitation. Smith, ‘Beyond Dominance and Affection’, 187–8. Smith, ‘Beyond Dominance and Affection’, 188. 117  Smith, ‘Beyond Dominance and Affection’, 190, 192. 118  P. Singer, ‘Heavy Petting’, Nerve (2001). 119  Taylor, ‘Sex without All the Politics’, 246. ‘Zoos’ here is jargon for ‘zoophiles’, which is how some people who have sex with other animals self-identify. 115  116 

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The last act of care shown to many companion animals is managing the process of their dying. Tom Regan argues that euthanasia is appropriate for non-human animals where it can be construed as preference-respecting, which he considers clear in the case of a conscious animal suffering pain with no prospect of relief.120 Michael Cholbi argues that the optimum life span of a person or animal can be defined as the point at which nothing is gained by living longer, and nothing is lost by dying at that point. While there may be complications in applying this in a human case, he considers it directly applicable to non-human animals because it is highly unlikely that they have the self-conceptions and deliberative insight to distance their lived experience from their immediate circumstances.121 Such a lack of ability to cope with immediate suffering on the basis of a sense of a life that is more than the immediate circumstances would seem to be a relevant difference in comparison to a typical human case, but it is not clear how we could be sure that it was in fact the case for other animals. The degree to which we are confident about this difference would seem to be the grounds for differentiating between the ethics of the euthanasia of non-human companion animals and the ethics of the euthanasia of humans. I am highly sympathetic to the reports of many people who have had loving relationships with companion animals and reluctantly decided that the most loving thing to do at the end of their life is to ask a veterinarian to euthanize them. The aim in such cases must be to attempt to act on the basis of the preferences of the animal rather than those of the owner. Accepting that it is on occasion appropriate to euthanize an animal in response to their suffering and prognosis does not of course mean that owners of companion animals can legitimately ask veterinarians to kill them for reasons not related to the animal’s wellbeing, which veterinarians seem frequently to be asked to do.122 While it is possible in a Christian context to recognize human/companion animal relationships even as prefigurations of the peace between creatures that belongs to the in-breaking Messianic reign, it is very clear that the context in which many animals are captured or bred for the pet industry, the ways in which animal bodies are reshaped through breeding or surgery, the scandal of the numbers of unwanted dogs and cats that require their mass killing, and the inadequate conditions in which many pets are kept, mean that current practice of keeping animals as companions usually fails adequately to respect animals as fellow creatures of God. The breeding, sale and purchase of dogs and cats as such should be recognized as highly problematic in a context where millions are being killed because they cannot be rehomed or accommodated elsewhere. Pedigree breeding and other selective breeding for traits unrelated to animal health should be discontinued. Those who wish to share their homes with other animals that

Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, 113–4. M. Cholbi, ‘The Euthanasia of Companion Animals’, in Pets and People. The Ethics of Our Relationship With Companion Animals, ed. C. Overall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 122  Cholbi, ‘Euthanasia of Companion Animals’, 276. 120  121 

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are available in shelters and would otherwise be killed, can happily acquire animal companions through rescuing them or their fellows from the killing that would otherwise be their fate. Purchasing or acquiring pets or companion animals through other means should be undertaken only after the most careful investigation addressing the full range of issues concerning the ethics of sourcing and breeding surveyed in this chapter. Ethical relationships with pets and companion animals must be characterized by an overriding concern to promote the flourishing of the animal, rather than to reshape and curtail the life of the companion for human convenience.

Chapter 8 H UM A N I M PAC T S O N W I L D A N I M A L S The vast majority of the non-human animals that have been the subjects of the previous chapters of this book have been domesticated. With the exception of wild-caught fish and mammals hunted for food or fur (Chapters 2 and 3), human cooperative work with wild animals (Chapter 4), wild animals caught for research experimentation or for the pet trade (Chapters 5 and 7), and the killing of wild animals in sport hunting (Chapter 6), the human practices surveyed and assessed have concerned non-human animals who are confined or otherwise subject to human control. There are good reasons for focusing, as I have done thus far, on domesticated animals. Firstly, since these animals are entirely dependent on us, and human control over their living conditions is almost total, we have a particular responsibility for the decisions we make concerning their lives. Secondly, there is a statistical reason for attending to domesticated animals. As noted in Chapter 2, it is striking to note that even by 1900, the biomass of domesticated animals was at least three times that of wild land mammals, and by 2000, growth in domesticated animal populations and declines in wild populations meant that this multiple had grown to twenty-four times.1 A 2003 estimate put the global bird population at 87 billion, which set alongside the 66 billion broiler chickens killed in 2011, and the additional 7 billion used to provide eggs, suggest the biomass of domesticated chickens is roughly the same as that of all wild birds.2 These figures do not include wild fish populations, or invertebrates, but it is sobering to recognize that the vast majority of land mammals and birds are now directly subject to human control. While one perspective on the relative numbers of domesticated and wild animals justifies priority attention to the former, however, the progressive elimination of wild animals to their present low numbers shows that it would be a significant V. Smil, ‘Harvesting the Biosphere: The Human Impact’, Population and Development Review 37:4 (2011), 618. 2 K. J. Gaston, T. M. Blackburn and K. Klein Goldewijk, ‘Habitat Conversion and Global Avian Biodiversity Loss’, Proceedings of the Royal Society London B: Biological Sciences 270:1521 (2003), 1293–300; FAO Statistics Division, ‘FAOSTAT’ (2016), discussed in Chapter 2. I could not find data for the average mass of the wild bird population, but if domestic chickens are six times the weight of an average wild bird, and only about 10 per cent of the broiler hens are alive at any point in time (given a time to slaughter of 35–40 days), then the biomass of the two groups would be equivalent. 1

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omission to conclude a work on the Christian ethics of human practices in relation to other animals without considering non-domesticated animals. These are the animals we describe as ‘wild’, a term, as discussed in Volume I, that may have originated in the Teutonic and Norse roots for ‘will’, therefore denoting animals that are wilful, uncontrollable and unruly, living in a ‘wilderness’ that is etymologically the place of wild animals.3 If domesticated animals have a claim on our ethical attention because they are directly under human control, a complementary claim for wild animals is that since human beings are not the only beloved creatures of God, we have an obligation to ensure there is sufficient space for the non-human animals not under our control to flourish. As we shall see in this chapter, a very large part of human practice in relation to wild animals is very far from facilitating such coexistence, and human impacts on the global environment are such that very few non-human animals live in spheres unaffected by human activity. Many of the challenges described in this chapter are global and systemic, rather than particular and direct, and in this respect require different kinds of ethical response than many of the issues discussed in the previous chapters. Addressing the mass cruelties inflicted on farmed animals in intensive systems is clearly a significant challenge, but the change in practice required to address it – reducing human consumption of animal products and moving to higher welfare modes of production – is directly related to what we are doing to the animals. Responding to the challenges of deforestation, or anthropogenic climate change, or human overconsumption of resources, requires a different order of response. This chapter by necessity therefore offers no more than a brief overview of ways in which we need to attend to the impacts of human action on wild animals in different spheres of human activity.

Hunting to Extinction It is sobering to note that the arrival of humans has always been catastrophic for populations of wild animals, and especially of larger ones. That applies to human colonization of the Australian continent around 50,000 years ago, the Americas around 12,000 years ago, and then oceanic islands, right up to those such as Mauritius and the Galapagos only colonized in recent centuries.4 We might speculate that it would have been hard for early humans to appreciate the consequences of their killing, that in some contexts such killing may have been the only way to survive, and that conflict between humans and other predators might often have made coexistence unattractive, but the consistent pattern of

Vol. I, 163, citing R. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 1–7. 4 D. A. Burney and T. F. Flannery, ‘Fifty Millennia of Catastrophic Extinctions after Human Contact.’, Trends Ecol Evol 20:7 (July 2005), 395. 3

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anthropogenic extinctions is remarkable.5 The idea that nature represented limitless abundance seems to have persisted into early modernity, with the famous extinctions of the dodo of Mauritius at the end of the seventeenth century, the Réunion ibis and the Steller’s sea cow in the eighteenth century, and the great auk in 1844.6 The beginnings of the conservation movement can be traced to the nineteenth century, when the popularity of game hunting in colonial Africa quickly resulted in noticeable declines in populations of elephants and other targets of hunters, and to the establishment of the Yellowstone National Park and the Sierra Club in the United States.7 The continuing threat to the African elephant from poaching exemplifies the fact that hunting is still endangering wild animal populations in the twenty-first century. A 2016 estimate of the African elephant population was that there were 415,000 elephants remaining, a drop of over 100,000 from 2007.8 The decline results from the surge in poaching for ivory. Keith Somerville’s recent book Ivory: Power and Poaching in Africa makes clear the colonial roots of the current crisis, with colonial powers criminalizing the hunting of elephants for meat by indigenous peoples while continuing to kill elephants for sport themselves.9 Somerville describes how despite high-profile international action on the issue through CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, there was a surge in hunting following the ban of the ivory trade in 1990, and a further surge following the rise in ivory prices from $200 per kilo in 2004 to $850 in 2006.10 Between 2010 and 2012 alone 100,000 elephants were killed, and the population of forest elephants in central Africa was reduced by 60 per cent in the period between 2002 and 2011.11 Efforts to reduce poaching have been hindered by soaring demand for ivory in China, inadequate funding of policing efforts, wars, corruption, fundamental policy disagreements, and the involvement of groups with links to Islamist terrorism.12 The prospect of a sustainable and enforceable agreement that will prevent further decline in elephant numbers seems remote. In a very different context, the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment specifies over-fishing as the most significant threat to marine ecosystems, with David Burney and Timothy Flannery note that climatic change is likely to have played a contributing role in some of the extinction events, but that the human role is hard to dispute (Burney and Flannery, ‘Fifty Millennia’).  6  W. M. Adams, Against Extinction: The Story of Conservation (London: Earthscan, 2004), 20.  7  Adams, Against Extinction, 22–5.  8  C. R. Thouless et al., African Elephant Status Report 2016: An Update from the African Elephant Database, Occasional Paper Series of the IUCN Species Survival Commission, vol. 60 (Gland, Switzerland: IUCN, 2016).  9  K. Somerville, Ivory: Power and Poaching in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), ch. 3. 10  Somerville, Ivory: Power and Poaching in Africa, 216. 11  Somerville, Ivory: Power and Poaching in Africa, 215. 12  Somerville, Ivory: Power and Poaching in Africa, ch. 7.  5 

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the biomass of some target fish species reduced by 90 per cent compared with levels before the era of industrial fishing, commercially exploited fish stocks at an all-time low, and a quarter of fish stocks being over-exploited with a further half offering no scope for increases in catch.13 By 2013, the proportion of fish stocks being unsustainably over-exploited had risen to over 30 per cent.14 A 2017 report by the Ellen MacArthur foundation estimated that on current usage patterns, there could be more plastic in the oceans than fish by 2050.15

Eradication of Unwanted Species In addition to threatening wild animal populations through hunting of species considered to be of value, humans have also acted to eliminate wild animals that threaten human safety, domestic animals, food crops, or other economic interests. The extinction of large predators such as bears and wolves in the British Isles is one of very many possible examples, with bears probably extinct by Roman times, and wolves probably surviving beyond the thirteenth century only in Scotland, and made extinct there in the late seventeenth century.16 As discussed in Chapter 6, such extermination projects continue in Britain. Recent figures show that hen harriers are on the verge of extinction in England, with the number of breeding pairs reduced from twelve in 2010 to just four in 2016. The UK population of hen harriers as a whole has dropped by 39 per cent since 2004. These declines are very likely to be as a result of illegal killing by those involved in driven grouse shooting.17 A legal route was recently found to pursue the killing of badgers, a protected species, on the basis that they may contribute to the spreading of tuberculosis in cattle. Despite the findings of a ten-year culling trial, which concluded that culling could not make a meaningful contribution to the control of the disease, the UK government proceeded with a culling policy, under which 10,000 badgers were killed in the autumn of 2016 alone.18 These are just two local examples of programmes to kill wild animals considered to be a nuisance to humans.

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Synthesis (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005), 67. 14  FAO, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2016 (Rome: FAO, 2016), 5–6. 15  Ellen MacArthur Foundation, The New Plastics Economy: Catalysing Action (Cowes, Isle of Wight, 2017), 15. 16  D. Yalden, The History of British Mammals (London: Poyser, 1999), 165–68. 17  RSPB, ‘UK Hen Harrier Population Suffers Decline, According to Latest Figures’ (28 June 2017). 18  M. Lodge and K. Matus, ‘Science, Badgers, Politics: Advocacy Coalitions and Policy Change in Bovine Tuberculosis Policy in Britain’, Policy Studies Journal 42:3 (2014), 373; D. Carrington, ‘Badger Cull Kills More than 10,000 Animals in Three Months’, The Guardian, 16 December 2016. 13 

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It is instructive that instances of human–wildlife conflict in Africa and Asia tend to be assessed very differently. JoAnn McGregor documents the history of attitudes to the Nile crocodile in Southern Africa, which was pursued as vermin under colonial rule but protected by CITES as an endangered species in 1973, despite hostility from local populations that saw the crocodiles to be a threat to their safety, and a competitor for fish stocks.19 Her 2001 research among fishermen in the Binga District of Zimbabwe, on the shores of Lake Kariba, showed that they were concerned about the damage to their valuable nets by crocodiles, and that there was a shockingly high death rate on the lake, much of which could be attributed to crocodiles attacking fishermen in unstable dugout canoes. The protected status of the crocodiles left the fishermen feeling that the authorities considered that ‘wildlife is more important than us’.20 Many other wild animal species provoke similar conflicts. In India wild animal species causing problems for local populations include tigers, leopards, wolves, bears, pigs, nilgai (Asian antelope), and elephants. Elephants alone kill 400 people a year and damage crops belonging to 500,000.21 Monica Ogra argues that many of these costs are hidden, such as increased fear, frustration and increased burdens through limitations on movement, and that these burdens fall disproportionately on women.22 A great deal of effort has gone into resolving conflict between humans and elephants in Africa, where crop damage is the major issue. Initiatives have included various kinds of fencing, using bees and chillies to deter elephants, and providing monetary compensation for damage.23 Very frequently, the elimination of predator species leads to the need for humans to kill species that were formerly their prey. An example of this, again from the UK, is the deer population in Scotland, which are thought to be currently at the highest levels at any time in history as a result of altered habitat, changed climate, removal of predators, and possibly landowners shooting fewer of them than previously.24 High deer densities compete with sheep for grazing, make it

J. McGregor, ‘Crocodile Crimes: People versus Wildlife and the Politics of Postcolonial Conservation on Lake Kariba, Zimbabwe’, Geoforum 36:3 (2005), 357. The article is cited in J. Urbanik, Placing Animals: An Introduction to the Geography of Human-Animal Relations (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 171. 20  McGregor, ‘Crocodile Crimes’, 361–5. 21  S. Gubbi et al., ‘An Elephantine Challenge: Human–Elephant Conflict Distribution in the Largest Asian Elephant Population, Southern India’, Biodiversity Conservation 23:3 (2014), 633–47. 22  M. V. Ogra, ‘Human–Wildlife Conflict and Gender in Protected Area Borderlands: A Case Study of Costs, Perceptions, and Vulnerabilities from Uttarakhand (Uttaranchal), India’, Geoforum 39:3 (2008), 1419, discussed in Urbanik, Placing Animals, 172. 23  R. Hoare, ‘Lessons from 20 Years of Human–Elephant Conflict Mitigation in Africa’, Human Dimensions of Wildlife 20:4 (2015), 289–95. 24  D. MacMillan, ‘Tradeable Hunting Obligations – a New Approach to Regulating Red Deer Numbers in the Scottish Highlands’, Journal of Environmental Management 71:3 19 

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harder to reforest areas, and make the environment less hospitable for birds. In this case, therefore, it is not merely human interests in competition with those of wild animals: the World Wildlife Fund and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds have made the case for a drastic reduction in deer numbers.25 There is debate concerning the most significant factors in limiting the deer population, with some arguing that the availability of food is a more significant factor in determining numbers than culling. There are also disagreements about the significance of red deer numbers in the environmental problems identified alongside other causal factors, such as the density of grazing by sheep. These disagreements suggest that there are alternatives to reducing the deer population substantially through an expanded culling policy, such as lower densities of sheep grazing and fencing.26 It is likely, however, that in the absence of other predators, if humans stopped killing deer in Scotland, the consequences for other wild animal and plant species would be severe. One obvious solution would be to reintroduce the wild animals that were the deer’s predators before being exterminated by humans. Serious proposals have been advanced for reintroducing wolves in Scotland, which could reduce deer densities in some areas by more than 50 per cent and could have wider beneficial effects for local ecosystems, based on the experience of reintroducing wolves in Yellowstone National Park.27 In other cases, eradication of wild animals is driven by ecological concern for other species in the absence of any conflict with direct human interests. The most obvious examples of this are the eradication of non-native rats from hundreds of islands in order to protect indigenous species. Rats may have been introduced by humans to Mediterranean islands between 5000 and 3500 BC, and since then have been introduced to most islands in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans.28 The impact of the rats on the plants, invertebrates, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals on these islands has been substantial, affecting at least 170 taxa of plants and animals and leading to at least 50 species extinctions.29 Starting in the (July 2004), 261; D. C. MacMillan and S. Phillip, ‘Can Economic Incentives Resolve Conservation Conflict: The Case of Wild Deer Management and Habitat Conservation in the Scottish Highlands’, Hum Ecol 38:4 (2010), 485. 25  J. F. Hunt, Impacts of Wild Deer in Scotland – How Fares the Public Interest? Report for WWF Scotland and RSPB Scotland (2003), cited in T. H. Clutton-Brock, T. Coulson and J. M. Milner, ‘Red Deer Stocks in the Highlands of Scotland’, Nature 429:6989 (2004), 261–2. 26  Clutton-Brock, Coulson and Milner, ‘Red Deer Stocks’. 27  E. B. Nilsen et al., ‘Wolf Reintroduction to Scotland: Public Attitudes and Consequences for Red Deer Management’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 274:1612 (2007), 995–1003. 28  G. Howald et al., ‘Invasive Rodent Eradication on Islands’, Conservation Biology 21:5 (2007), 3. 29  Howald et al., ‘Invasive Rodent Eradication on Islands’, 3; G. A. Harper and N. Bunbury, ‘Invasive Rats on Tropical Islands: Their Population Biology and Impacts on Native Species’, Global Ecology and Conservation 3 (2015), 607–27.

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1960s, a programme of eradicating rats from these islands has been underway, and by 2007 rats had been eliminated from at least 284 islands. The means used is the distribution of poisoned bait through bait stations, hand broadcasting, or aerial broadcasting from helicopters. Attempts are made to minimize the impact of the poison to other species, sometimes through live capture and holding during the poisoning, though some damage to other species is inevitable.30 While it is difficult to assess the effects of the eradications systematically, there is evidence that the successful eradication of rats, and in some cases mice, has had a beneficial impact on a wide range of indigenous plant and animal species.31 Opponents of the policies have objected and sometimes resisted the eradications on the basis that the evidence of the role of the rats has been overstated and that the policies are motivated by a misplaced aversion to rats.32

Destruction of Habitat While there is much to be lamented in examples of particular wild animals being thoughtlessly hunted to extinction, or eliminated as unwanted nuisances to human activity, the impacts humans have had on wild animals when deliberately targeting them in these ways are dwarfed by the impact of human destruction of habitat that wild animals need to survive. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment concluded in 2005 that the current extinction rate of animal species is currently up to 1,000 times the long-term background average, and projects that it will rise a further ten-fold to 10,000 times the background average.33 The report documents the progressive human monopolization of scarce resources: more land was converted to cropland between 1950 and 1980 than in the 150 years between 1700 and 1850, with cropland now occupying 30 per cent of the earth’s terrestrial surface, and the water impounded in dams quadrupling since 1960 to the point in which three to six times as much water is held in reservoirs as is present in the world’s rivers.34 The rate of species extinction has been one of the factors evaluated in the decision to name the ‘Anthropocene’ as a new geological era during which, on current patterns, we should expect in excess of 75 per cent of species to be lost in the next 300 to 500 years, making the Anthropocene a sixth mass extinction event on the scale of the biggest extinction events in the geological record.35 The most Howald et al., ‘Invasive Rodent Eradication on Islands’. D. R. Towns, I. A. E. Atkinson and C. H. Daugherty, ‘Have the Harmful Effects of Introduced Rats on Islands Been Exaggerated?’, Biological Invasions 8:4 (2006), 886. 32  Towns, Atkinson and Daugherty, ‘Have the Harmful Effects of Introduced Rats on Islands Been Exaggerated?’, 864–5. 33  Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Ecosystems and Human Well-Being, 5. 34  Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Ecosystems and Human Well-Being, 2. 35  C. N. Waters et al., ‘A Stratigraphical Basis for the Anthropocene’, Geological Society, London, Special Publications 395:1 (2014), 4. 30  31 

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prominent causes of the ecosystem changes that are causing these extinctions are deforestation and conversion to cropland, over-fishing, conversion of inland water ecosystems to reservoirs, the introduction of invasive species, excessive nutrient loading from agriculture and poor sanitation, pollution from point sources such as mining, development of coastal systems, and climate change.36 Despite the dramatic figures concerning species loss just noted, one extensive recent survey article suggests that the focus on species extinctions is in danger of underestimating human impacts on wild animals. Gerardo Ceballos, Paul Ehrlich and Rodolfo Dirzo note that the disappearance of populations of animals in particular areas, and rapid decreases in numbers of individuals within populations, are important precursors to extinctions and have not been well assessed. Surveying data on 27,600 vertebrate species, they conclude that a third of all land vertebrate species are experiencing declines of considerable magnitude, with most mammals sampled losing more than 40 per cent of their ranges, and almost half losing 80 per cent of their ranges between 1900 and 2015. The numbers of populations – as opposed to species – of vertebrates that have become extinct depends on the average area occupied by a population, but could be up to one billion population extinctions. The authors conclude that the sixth mass extinction in earth’s history is already here, and describe what humans are currently doing to terrestrial vertebrates as ‘biological annihilation’, with a window for effective action in response of only two or three decades at most.37 The largest-scale and most long-lasting impact humans will have on wild animal populations may well be anthropogenic climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that 20–30 per cent of all living species are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if global temperatures rise by 1.5–2.5°C relative to 1980–99 and if the temperature rise exceeds 3.5°C, this increases to 40–70 per cent of species at increased risk of extinction.38 While some species may be able to migrate sufficiently fast to escape temperature rise, herbaceous plants, rodents and primates are unlikely to be able to move fast enough to escape global warming in medium or high emission scenarios.39 In many cases, climate change Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Ecosystems and Human Well-Being, 67–70; N. S. Sodhi, B. W. Brook and C. J. A. Bradshaw, ‘Causes and Consequences of Species Extinctions’, in The Princeton Guide to Ecology, ed. S. A. Levin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 514. 37  G. Ceballos, P. R. Ehrlich and R. Dirzo, ‘Biological Annihilation via the Ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction Signaled by Vertebrate Population Losses and Declines’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA (2017), 1–8. 38  IPCC, Summary for Policymakers of the Synthesis Report of the IPCC Fourth Assessment (Geneva: IPCC, 2007), 13–14. 39  IPCC, ‘Summary for Policymakers’, in Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. C. B. Field et al. (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 15. 36 

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will combine with other human impacts to amplify the effects on wild animals. To take one prominent example, climate change limits the access of polar bears to their prey through loss of their sea ice habitat, resulting in prolonged periods of fasting and emaciation that in turn increase the concentration of pollutants in the bodies of the bears, which will further increase mortality and decrease their reproductive success.40

Zoos, Safari Parks, and Nature Reserves In the final part of this survey on the impacts of humans on wild animals, I turn to the issue deferred from Chapter 6: the practice of keeping wild animals in zoos, safari parks and nature reserves. The topic arose when discussing the use humans make of other animals for sport and entertainment, because zoos have their historical origins in collections of wild animals that were kept by monarchs and other wealthy individuals to entertain themselves and impress their guests. Modern zoos are still in the business of entertainment – they need to attract and engage their visitors in order to be economically viable – but most now identify a concern for promoting awareness of wild animals and practical action for their protection as prominent aims. Zoos and other parks where wild animals are kept confined for humans to see are therefore another aspect of human practice in relation to other animals that blur the chapter boundaries of this book. As noted in Chapter 6, I decided to consider them here because this avoids assuming their primary function is to use wild animals to provide human entertainment and it allows consideration of their role in the context of the other human impacts on wild animals I have just surveyed. The practice of keeping wild animals in captivity has ancient roots. Archaeological excavations in 2009 of Hierankonpolis, the ancient capital of Egypt, found burials in a site dating from around 3,500 BC of ten dogs, a baby hippo, a hartebeest, a cow and calf, and an elephant. Other burials in the same period included baboons and wildcats, and a total of 112 non-human animals, all buried in the city’s elite cemetery alongside the rulers and their families. The bones of baboons, a wild cat and a hippo show signs of fractures that could only have healed in a captive environment and an elephant was found to have eaten a variety of wild and cultivated plants suggesting he had been fed by humans. The expedition director suggested that the menagerie was a display of power over the animals, which may have been sacrificed at the death of a ruler.41 Later Egyptian sites in the third millennium BC show evidence of more developed menageries.42 B. M. Jenssen et al., ‘Anthropogenic Flank Attack on Polar Bears: Interacting Consequences of Climate Warming and Pollutant Exposure’, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 3 (2015), 1–7. 41  M. Rose, ‘World’s First Zoo’, Archaeology 63:1 (2010), 25. 42  P. G. Patrick and S. D. Tunnicliffe, Zoo Talk (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), 6. 40 

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The Chinese Emperor Wen Wang established a zoological garden called ‘LingYu’, or ‘Garden of Intelligence’ around 1,100 BC, for scientific and educational purposes.43 In the same period, the Old Testament records King Solomon trading wild animals with King Hiram of Tyre: ‘Once every three years the fleet of ships of Tarshish used to come bringing gold, silver, ivory, apes, and tukki’ (1 Kgs 10.22b), the latter term meaning either peacocks or baboons, which were presumably kept by Solomon in some form of menagerie. The Greeks and Romans kept extensive collections of wild animals, vast numbers of which were killed for entertainment, as noted in Chapter 6.44 In the thirteenth century AD, Marco Polo visited the palace of Kublai Khan and reported on a collection of wild animals that included leopards, tigers, lynxes and elephants.45 Dix Harwood provides an account of a wide range of other medieval menageries, including a gift of a giraffe sent in 1257 from the King of Ethiopia to the Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos; a zoo in Córdoba, Spain under Islamic rule; leopards used for hunting in Cyprus; the hunting cheetahs of Emperor Frederick II of Swabia, who also travelled with his collection of elephants, camels, lions, panthers; and the Tiergarten of the grand masters of the Teutonic Knights at Marienburg, which included an aurochs, sea cows, apes and bear; and many other examples.46 He notes that the monastery at St Gallen, Switzerland, kept a Tiergarten that included badgers, marmots and bears, birds were kept by the Ladies of Trinity in Caen, France, and the cathedral chapter of Nôtre Dame in Paris had collection of bears, stags, ravens and monkeys, before such collections were judged incompatible with the rule of St Benedict and abolished by inspectors in the fourteenth century.47 Collections continued to develop in breadth and complexity in the centuries that followed: Matthew Senior’s account of Louis XIV’s menagerie at Versailles built in 1662–4 concludes that the fan-like structure in which the animals were displayed ‘ensured maximum visibility and symbolized the king’s dominion over the natural world’.48 Sally Kohlstedt argues, however, that the golden age of the development of the zoo was the nineteenth century, driven by scientific discovery and new theoretical explanations, expanding European empires providing more opportunity for capturing and transporting wild animals, Patrick and Tunnicliffe, Zoo Talk, 6. Patrick and Tunnicliffe, Zoo Talk, 6–7. 45  R. J. Hoage, A. Roskell and J. Mansour, ‘Menageries and Zoos to 1900’, in New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century, ed. R. J. Hoage and W. A. Deiss (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 12, quoted in Patrick and Tunnicliffe, Zoo Talk, 6. 46  D. Harwood, Love for Animals and How It Developed in Great Britain (Lewiston, NY; Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), 18–20. 47  Harwood, Love for Animals, 20. 48  M. Senior, ‘The Menagerie and the Labyrinthe: Animals at Versailles, 1662–1792’, in Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures, ed. E. Fudge (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 210. 43  44 

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and a concern with establishing and celebrating human authority and control over nature.49 In the United States, she notes, the zoo in the nineteenth century was fundamentally entrepreneurial: ‘a potent capitalistic mixture of promotional advertising and public demand’.50 In her study of Adelaide Zoo in its historical context, the geographer Kay Anderson argues that the fundamental purpose of zoos is identity formation: ‘In the most general terms, western metropolitan zoos are spaces where humans engage in cultural self-definition against a variably constructed and opposed nature. With animals as the medium, they inscribe a cultural sense of distance from that loosely defined realm that has come to be called “nature”’.51 The project of bringing wild animals into the city and converting them into a domestic spectacle, she judges, ‘represented the ultimate triumph of modern man (sic) over nature, of city over country, of reason over nature’s apparent wildness and chaos’.52 In a very different genre, Anthony Browne’s children’s books provoke similarly profound questions about what is taking place in zoos. His book Zoo tells the story of family visiting a zoo but, unnervingly, many of the human visitors have nonhuman characteristics such as horns, beaks, reptilian feet, tails, and faces or heads of dogs or cats, and the similarities between human and non-human behaviour is noted throughout.53 The non-human occupants of the zoo are listless, in dull and sombre enclosures, in contrast to the colourful human visitors, and one image takes the perspective of baboons looking out at the humans. The visit is not a success: the boys are bored and unengaged by the captive animals. In an arresting image at the end of the book, the boy narrator has a nightmare of himself being confined in a cage. His mother concludes that ‘I don’t think the zoo really is for animals … I think it’s for people.’ Zoos also feature in a number of Browne’s other books: in Gorilla, Hannah loves gorillas and one night is taken by a gorilla who appears in her bedroom on a visit to the zoo, where they see caged gorillas and chimpanzees who Hannah thinks are beautiful, but sad.54 In Willy and Hugh, one of many books about Willy, a chimpanzee in a world of gorillas, Willy and his gorilla friend Hugh decide to go to the zoo together, where they see a sad human S. G. Kohlstedt, ‘Reflections on Zoo History’, in New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century, ed. R. J. Hoage and W. A. Deiss (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 3–4. 50  Kohlstedt, ‘Reflections on Zoo History’, 4, reflecting on R. W. Flint, ‘American Showmen and European Dealers: Commerce in Wild Animals in Nineteenth-Century America’, in New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century, ed. R. J. Hoage and W. A. Deiss (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 51  K. Anderson, ‘Culture and Nature at the Adelaide Zoo: At the Frontiers of “Human” Geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (1995), 276. 52  Anderson, ‘Culture and Nature’, 279. ‘Sic’ in original. 53  Anthony Browne, Zoo (London: Julia MacRae, 1992). 54  Anthony Browne, Gorilla (London: Julia MacRae, 1983). 49 

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group in a cage, father and mother sitting on a floral sofa with their son at their feet, looking sad and unnerved, the cage bare except for vegetable remains of food and a solitary tyre hanging from a rope.55 The narrator of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi provides a very different perspective on the lives of zoo animals: Well-meaning but misinformed people think animals in the wild are ‘happy’ because they are ‘free’. These people usually have a large, handsome predator in mind, a lion or a cheetah (the life of a gnu or of an aardvark is rarely exalted). They imagine this wild animal roaming about the savannah on digestive walks after eating a prey that accepted its lot piously, or going for calisthenic runs to stay slim after overindulging. They imagine this animal overseeing its offspring proudly and tenderly, the whole family watching the setting of the sun from the limbs of trees with sighs of pleasure. The life of the wild animal is simple, noble and meaningful, they imagine. Then it is captured by wicked men and thrown into tiny jails. Its ‘happiness’ is dashed. It yearns mightily for ‘freedom’ and does all it can to escape. Being denied its ‘freedom’ for too long, the animal becomes a shadow of itself, its spirit broken. So some people imagine. This is not the way it is. Animals in the wild lead lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social hierarchy in an environment where the supply of fear is high and the supply of food low and where territory must constantly be defended and parasites forever endured. What is the meaning of freedom in such a context? Animals in the wild are, in practice, free neither in space nor in time, nor in their personal relations.56

Mindy Stinner, the Executive Director of the Conservators Center in Burlington, North Carolina, which seeks to provide a permanent home for large cats, expresses a similar sentiment in her interview with Tripp York, reflecting on Tonka, an older male tiger, one of the Center’s residents: He will never roam free in Asian jungles or on Siberian plains. He will never be sick or injured and unaided. He will never race after and catch warm, bleeding eat. He will never den up hungry in winter. He will never fight another male tiger over territory or a female, and will not then kill her offspring to bring her back into estrus. He will not die alone and injured, slowing starving and unable to hunt, or by approaching a village of frightened people because they and their livestock represent easy prey for an aging cat. He will not be killed by a poacher for his bones or coat. When Tonka’s time comes, he will pass from this life here, in human care, possibly by our hand, so that he will not suffer needlessly. A. Browne, Willy and Hugh (London: Julia MacRae, 1991). These and others of Browne’s books are surveyed in J. Doonan, ‘Drawing out Ideas: A Second Decade of the Work of Anthony Browne’, The Lion and the Unicorn 23:1 (1999), 30–56. 56  Y. Martel, Life of Pi (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002), 15–16. 55 

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This is Tonka’s life with us. Is it better than a life lived free, with all the challenges that entails? Only Tonka can answer that question.57

In addition to the in-principle concerns about zoos raised by Anderson and Browne, there are particular questions concerning the adequacy of the environments and care provided for particular species by particular institutions. Zoos and other places keeping wild animals captive for public display vary widely in the ways they keep and treat the animals, within and between countries, with some large and successful zoos investing significant resources in creating enclosures that allow the best possible environments for their animals, and other under-resourced collections of wild animals managed by people with little expertise or interest in caring for their animals. Regulatory regimes governing wild animals in captivity inevitably also vary widely in different countries.58 A 2002 report on the welfare of zoo elephants in Europe found that their life expectancy was 60 per cent below that found in wild populations, and for Asian elephants, below that of elephants used in logging operations. Adults suffer higher mortality than wild populations because of illness; infants suffer higher mortality because of stillbirths, maternal rejection and infanticide; and 40 per cent of the population exhibit stereotypies indicating stress. Most zoos were not keeping elephants in natural social groups, and elephants showed high levels of aggression towards other individuals. Some zoos do much better than others in particular aspects of caring for elephants, but on average the report demonstrated that most of these elephants are having poor lives in captivity.59 Lori Marino cites strong evidence that captivity is devastating for whales and dolphins, causing stress, boredom, frustration, disease, increased mortality, stereotypies, unresponsiveness, excessive submissiveness, hyper sexual behaviour, self-inflicted physical trauma and mutilation, stress-induced vomiting, and excessive aggressiveness, as depicted memorably in Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s documentary film Blackfish.60 Many zoos are also involved in the killing of wild animals that are surplus to their requirements, though they are often reticent about this aspect of their work. The public killing of the giraffe Marius and the feeding of his body to the lions by Copenhagen Zoo in 2014 drew public attention to the issue. Subsequent investigation found that it is likely that members of the European T. York, The End of Captivity?: A Primate’s Reflections on Zoos, Conservation, and Christian Ethics (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015), 58–9. 58  Irus Braverman makes clear that this is a complex issue even within the United States: I. Braverman, Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), chs 5–6. 59  R. Clubb and G. Mason, A Review of the Welfare of Zoo Elephants in Europe: A Report Commissioned by the RSPCA, Animal Behavior Research Group, Department of Zoology, Oxford (Horsham, West Sussex: RSPCA, 2002), 247–8. 60  L. Marino, ‘Cetacean Captivity’, in The Ethics of Captivity, ed. L. Gruen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 32; G. Cowperthwaite, Blackfish (2013). 57 

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Association of Zoos and Aquaria kill 3,000 to 5,000 animals each year.61 The association’s policy on euthanasia states that euthanasia is acceptable as a ‘structural solution for undesired surplus animals’ when they no longer make a breeding contribution; for recently born young animals or animals reaching an age where they would normally leave a family group; hybrid animals or animals of unknown subspecies; animals that are unduly dangerous, or timid, or display other abnormal behaviour; and animals that ‘for some reason cannot otherwise be placed in suitable facilities’.62 It is hard to think of a case of killing that could not be justified within the scope of this policy, and it seems likely that the need for culling could be eliminated or very significantly reduced if zoos adopted policies that accepted responsibility for the care of animals no longer required for breeding or public display.63 Modern zoos commonly justify their existence not merely on the basis that they are able to care for most animals better than the reports on elephants and cetaceans cited above suggest, but that they are making positive contributions to the wellbeing of wild animals. For example, Chester Zoo, across the road from my home, where I can see the gibbon and orang-utan enclosures from the window of my study, states that its vision is ‘for a diverse, thriving and sustainable natural world’, and its mission ‘to be a major force in conserving the living world’.64 Its annual report details initiatives supporting the breeding and reintroduction of rare Mexican fish and amphibians, breeding Socorro doves now extinct in the wild, research on the behaviour of the Andean bear, the first captive breeding of Montserrat tarantulas, giraffe conservation projects in Uganda and South Africa, combatting poaching of rhinoceroses, workshops on human–elephant conflict in India, research on reducing human–tiger conflict in Nepal, work conserving frogs and fish in Madagascar, breeding endangered Moloch gibbons, supporting the rescue of threatened birds in Java, partnering with a local university to research the trade in wild birds in South East Asia, releasing critically endangered ibis in Southern Spain, and supporting the breeding of the Scottish wildcat, among many other projects.65 The zoo’s 2016 report states that field conservation work was 5 per cent of its expenditure, with a further 6 per cent on science and education, while 60 per cent of expenditure was on its animal and botanical collection.66

Hannah Barnes, ‘How Many Healthy Animals Do Zoos Put Down?’ (27 February 2014). European Association of Zoos and Aquaria, Standards for the Accommodation and Care of Animals in Zoos and Aquaria (Amsterdam, 2014), 9. 63  S. Carter and R. Kagan, ‘Management of “Surplus” Animals’, in Wild Mammals in Captivity: Principles and Techniques for Zoo Management, ed. D. G. Kleiman, K. V. Thompson and C. K. Baer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 64  Chester Zoo, ‘Our Vision and Mission’ (2017). 65  Chester Zoo, 2016 Zoo Review (Chester, 2016). 66  Chester Zoo, Trustees’ Report and Financial Statements: Year Ended 31st December, 2016 (Chester, 2016), 7. 61  62 

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Chester is by no means unique in identifying its mission as for the benefit of wild animals: the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA), which lists 300 zoos and many national and regional zoo associations as affiliates, states its vision as ‘A world where all zoos and aquariums maximise their conservation impact’ and its mission as being ‘the voice of a global community of high standard, conservation-based zoos and aquariums and a catalyst for their joint conservation action’.67 One should, of course, recognize that taking such public positions about wild animals is important to ensure that zoos retain public acceptance in a context in which ethical questions about their practice are being raised, and zoos need to be accountable for how far this mission is being realized in practice, but identifying conservation goals as primary in the mission of zoos as WAZA is doing is an important starting point. Such aims are not necessarily representative of most exhibitors of wild animals, however: the US Association of Zoos and Aquariums emphasizes its demanding standards by noting that less than 10 per cent of licensed wildlife exhibitors meet its requirements for certification.68 Clearly it is not necessary to keep wild animals in captivity to contribute to conservation projects for wild animals, but equally clearly the funds that zoos such as Chester direct to this use is valuable in supporting wild animal populations. The contribution zoos make to the breeding of wild animals that are either extinct or endangered in the wild, and the ability to contribute such expertise to conservation projects, however, is not substitutable in the same way, and it seems plausible that the expertise that is developed in many zoos concerning how to keep and breed wild animals in captivity is crucial to many current and future conservation projects. Again, one could theoretically develop such skills without putting the animals on display to the public, but the £27 million in income generated by Chester Zoo from visitors in 2016 would have to be found from another source.69 Zoos argue that getting visitors to come and see wild animals has the additional benefit of educating and enthusing them about wild animals, making them more likely to support conservation efforts, but the evidence is not clear. One recent report co-authored by a Chester Zoo staff member and sponsored by the World Association of Zoos and Aquaria found that ‘positive evidence of biodiversity understanding’ among visitors increased only from 37 per cent to 40 per cent after their visit, which is welcome, but perhaps less significant a change than one would hope.70 A 2005 report on knowledge of gorillas and chimpanzees before and after a zoo visit showed no change at all, and other research has found no evidence of

World Association of Zoos and Aquariums, ‘Vision and Mission’ (2017). Association of Zoos and Aquariums, ‘About Us’ (2017). 69  Chester Zoo, Trustees’ Report, 7. 70  A. Moss, E. Jensen and M. Gusset, ‘Impact of a Global Biodiversity Education Campaign on Zoo and Aquarium Visitors’, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 15:5 (2017), 245. 67  68 

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change of attitudes.71 If Anderson is right that the environment of zoos emphasizes human superiority to other animals, as discussed above, the limited impact on visitor attitudes could be because the experience of seeing wild animals in captivity helps to reinforce, rather than challenge, a strong sense of the separation between humans and other animals. Edward Ludwig’s study of a zoo in Buffalo, New York in 1981 found that visitors most often described the animals they saw as ‘cute, funny-looking, lazy, dirty, weird, strange’ and that they were more likely to be laughing at animals urinating, defecating or regurgitating, than they were to be marvelling at their beauty.72 At the conclusion of this brief review of the work of zoos, it is important to put their work in the context of the earlier parts of this chapter. In Tripp York’s book The End of Captivity?, which is informed by his work for two years as a keeper’s aide in the Virginia Zoological Park, he challenges the naïveté of those who criticize the keeping of African elephants in American zoos on the grounds that they would be better off in Africa: What many well-intentioned people fail to understand is that Africa is doing what she can to put a fence around herself. Much of what passes for the wild is, in reality, a park with borders. Almost everything is managed. In fact, one of the major problems is that the parks are not managed well enough … [Human–elephant] conflict, along with poaching and the destruction of natural habitats, is, in some areas, decimating the elephant population … Such destruction of our earth and its inhabitants means that there is little wild to which the elephants could return … In Africa, their populations are tightly managed in parks – which, again, is how, apart from captivebred elephants, some zoos end up with elephants in the first place. That is to say, some elephants are brought to North America because there is nowhere else for them to go. They might otherwise be killed in the very places, large parks in South Africa, that many zoo opponents falsely imagine to be free from humans.73

The recognition that zoos in the USA are providing sanctuary for elephants for whom there is no place in Africa – together with analogous arguments in relation to myriad other wild animal species – represents a fundamental shift in the ethical debate about zoos and other places keeping wild animals in captivity. Given the ways surveyed earlier in the chapter in which human activity is threatening many or most wild animal populations, we are faced not with the question raised above K. E. Lukas and S. R. Ross, ‘Zoo Visitor Knowledge and Attitudes toward Gorillas and Chimpanzees’, Journal of Environmental Education 36:4 (2005), 36; L. Marino et al., ‘Do Zoos and Aquariums Promote Attitude Change in Visitors? A Critical Evaluation of the American Zoo and Aquarium Study’, Society & Animals 18:2 (2010), 126–38. 72  E. G. Ludwig, ‘People at Zoos: A Sociological Approach’, International Journal for the Study of Animal Problems 2:6 (1981), 314, quoted in D. Jamieson, ‘Against Zoos’, in In Defense of Animals, ed. P. Singer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 43. 73  York, The End of Captivity, 7. 71 

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of whether life for wild animals in captivity is preferable to a life in the wild, but whether a life in captivity is better than no life at all. There may be some who would take the position that an elephant is better off culled in a South African safari park than living out a life in captivity, but given that there is now no environment where elephants are not under human control to some degree, it is hard to see how such an absolute judgement could be maintained. The recognition that our radical encroachment on the habitats of wild animals means there is no place left for many of them apart from humanly managed spaces is by no means a justification of current practices of keeping wild animals in captivity, which are problematic in many regards, but suggests that such practices need reform rather than abolition.

A Christian Ethical Assessment of Human Impacts on Wild Animals In Chapter 2, I noted that the Israelite food laws had the effect of prohibiting the use of virtually all wild animals as food.74 While wild animals were a threat to human safety, and both Isaiah and Hosea looked forward to a time when peace would be enacted between humans and other animals (Isa. 11.6-10, 65.25; Hos. 2.18), the creation theology of the Old Testament recognizes that God’s created order includes appropriate spaces for wild animals, that God exercises providential care for their needs, and delights in their living (e.g. Ps. 104; Job 38–41). The Christian obligation to seek the flourishing of fellow animal creatures, therefore, must include a concern to be aligned with this divine activity in promoting the thriving of wild animals wherever possible. In the discussion of the Christian doctrine of redemption in relation to wild animals in the final chapter of Volume I, I argued that a Christian vision of the redemption of the wilderness could mean neither merely the continuation of non-human animal existence in isolation from humans, nor the bringing of nonhuman animals under human control. Instead, I suggested that ‘we must picture an existence for “wild” animals where they continue to be wild, in the sense that they are the possessors of their own wills and direct their lives unconcerned by threats from humans or other animals’ and imagine a redeemed wilderness where ‘other-than-human animals delight in being themselves before their God, and where redeemed humans … delight in their modes of living without threatening or curtailing them’.75 We cannot, of course, enact this vision of redemption here and now, but we can and should draw upon it to inform our understanding of a Christian ethics in relation to wild animals. These accounts of creation, providence and redemption in relation to wild animals make clear that Christians must lament and repent of the devastating impact human activity has had and is having on wild populations of non-human animals. Humans have deliberately used their progressively increasing power over See Chapter 2, section, ‘Hunting for Food’. Vol. I, 165–6.

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other animals to hunt species for food or commercial gain to extinction and to eliminate species they consider inconvenient. Even larger impacts derive from the destruction of the habitats wild animals need to survive, and from the way that human activity is changing the climate of the planet so rapidly that many species will be unable to adapt and will become extinct. In sum, humans have failed to recognize any limits to their exploitation of wild animals, their habitats, and the fossil fuel resources endangering a substantial part of the planet’s living creatures. The operative ethic has been anthropomonist76 in recognizing no value in life other than human, and therefore no reason to care about the mass destruction of nonhuman animal species that is the consequence of unrestrained pursuit of human ends. In fact, even an enlightened anthropomonism would have been preferable, since much of the human activity that threatens wild animals is also problematic for the sustainability of human life, too. This is not to say that we do not need to acknowledge real conflicts between humans and wild animals. The examples discussed earlier in the chapter make clear what has been obvious to all human beings living alongside dangerous animals, which has been the case for most of human history: wild animals can threaten the safety of human lives both by direct attack and through consumption of human crops or food stores. As discussed in Volume I, Chapter 5, the Christian doctrine of the fall means we cannot expect wholly peaceful coexistence with wild animals this side of the new creation. We should make every effort to negotiate peaceful relationships with non-domesticated animal neighbours, in the recognition that the earth does not belong to humans but is shared with God’s other creatures. The elaborate efforts to discover how elephants can be discouraged from attacking crops in Africa is a very good example of this kind of negotiation in practice, but needs to be replicated in relation to a much wider range of wild animals. Wealthier nations also act in relation to human–wildlife conflict, often in ways that are at odds with what they call on poorer nations to do in relation to much more dangerous animals. In the UK, for example, current policies of culling badgers and failing to prevent the extinction of hen harriers and other predators are in danger of making calls to protect elephants in Africa hypocritical. When I discuss the value of the lives of wild animals in public lectures, I am often asked whether that means we should act to protect wild animals from one another, with the implication that a negative answer to this latter question threatens the consistency of my position. This seems to me to be a bad misunderstanding in several ways. First, given that human activity is both a major threat to virtually every other animal and a threat that exceeds the threat other animals represent by several orders of magnitude, as this chapter has made clear, attending to the harmful impacts we are having on other animals is clearly the most urgent priority. Second, as noted in Volume I, Chapter 2, in the groaning creation in which we find ourselves, animal creatures can only flourish by consuming other creatures, with many making a living by eating other animals. To protect gazelles from lions or flies from spiders in this context would be to cause the deaths of lions and spiders, For a discussion of anthropomonism, see vol. I, xix.

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as well as disturbing intricate and fragile webs of inter-creaturely dependency that would impact on many other creatures too. We do not have the power or the wisdom to bring about the peaceable Messianic reign of God through our own efforts. Instead, our responsibility is to take steps to reduce the manifold ways in which we are destroying the lives of other animals, which are so obviously in egregious and flagrant opposition to God’s providential and redemptive purposes. The chapter has surveyed some projects where humans have sought to reverse damage caused by previous human interventions, such as the introduction of rats and mice to islands with no previous rodents, or culling animals whose numbers were previously controlled by predators we have exterminated, such as red deer in Scotland. Where such hard choices are forced upon us there may be cases where such killing is the least worst option, but frequently it seems that those concerned merely with the restoration of ecological systems have insufficient concern with the individual animals judged to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fred Pearce’s recent book The New Wild suggests we need to be much more careful in imposing a particular ideal of ecological functioning, and that attempts to return nature to a previous state are always doomed to failure.77 The combination of respecting the particular animal lives in any context with greater seriousness as fellow creatures of God, and exercising caution about grand human schemes to restore a previous natural order, combine to indicate that projects in ecological restoration that require the killing of animals should be looked at more critically, and where intervention nonetheless seems appropriate, every alternative to killing should be examined so that killing is an option of last resort. In relation to zoos and other institutions keeping wild animals in captivity, it is hard to disagree with Tripp York’s conclusion that the question is not so much what they were doing last century or even a decade ago, but what are they doing now and what can they do in the future? Can they become the kinds of places that practice hospitality to animals in need? Can they offer something that is quickly becoming absent in the world? That is, can they become a good replacement home for animals who are losing their natural home?78

This does not mean that we should not be very concerned about the conditions in which many wild animals are currently kept. Most individuals and organizations keeping captive wild animals do not aspire to, let alone fulfil, the lofty visions that prioritize conservation discussed earlier in the chapter. In a context, however, where there will be no place in the wild for an increasing number of wild animals, despite any success that is made in responding to the systemic challenges outlined in the first part of this chapter, we are in need of good spaces where wild animals F. Pearce, The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will be Nature’s Salvation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2015). 78  York, The End of Captivity, 10. 77 

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may live in captivity and expert knowledge concerning the care they need in such contexts. Individuals and organizations not capable of keeping wild animals according to current understandings of best practice should cease to do so, but we should appreciate and encourage those institutions capable of evolving to become places of hospitality for wild animals who would otherwise be homeless. I noted at the beginning of this chapter that the challenges of addressing the devastating impacts humans are having on the lives of wild animals are in the main systemic and different in kind from those discussed in previous chapters. Some particular actions are clear and direct: we should stop keeping wild animals in captive environments that are incompatible with their wellbeing, we should strengthen protections for particular wild animals to protect their populations, and we should seek to work to reduce conflicts between humans and wild animals, for example. Responding to the larger-scale human impacts on wild animals, however, will require concerted international cooperation. Successful implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, in which nations committed to actions intended to keep global temperature rises below 2° Celsius would be a major step in reducing the impact of anthropogenic climate change on wild animals, though currently the commitments made do not seem to be sufficient to meet this goal.79 Similar international action is conceivable to address other global challenges, such as the pollution of the oceans with plastic. The root causes of the human mass destruction of the habitats of wild animals run still deeper, however, and would require still greater international action: the human monopolization of basic resources of land and water needed by all terrestrial species. In order for there to continue to be space for nondomesticated animals alongside human beings on earth, humans would need to adopt patterns of consuming less, so that we cease expanding land and water use and depriving wild animals of these resources. E. O. Wilson’s recent proposal that we protect half the earth for non-human species is a bold and imaginative proposal making clear the scale of the challenge, though it needs refining in the light of the careful negotiation of human/non-human interests discussed earlier in the chapter.80 There are deep theological grounds for adopting restraint concerning the resources humans use: the mass eradication of non-human animal species currently underway is the clearest practical expression of the adoption of a tyrannical anthropomonism in place of a theocentric Christian faith. We cannot worship God – the God who creates and delights in all creatures, who acts providentially to sustain them, who takes on flesh to reconcile all things in J. Rogelj et al., ‘Paris Agreement Climate Proposals Need a Boost to Keep Warming Well Below 2 °C’, Nature 534:7609 (2016), 631–9. 80  E. O. Wilson, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (New York: Liveright, 2016). Bram Büscher et al. offer a critique of Wilson’s proposal and argue for the need for other kinds of radical environmental action in Büscher et al., ‘Half-Earth or Whole Earth? Radical Ideas for Conservation, and Their Implications’, Oryx 51:3 (2017), 407–10. 79 

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heaven and earth, who will act to liberate all creation from its groaning bondage, and who calls human beings to be images of this divine love – we cannot profess faith in this God while living in ways that deny our fellow animal creatures of God the resources they need to exist. Human population growth is often cited as the key issue in addressing the human ecological footprint, but defining the problem in this way is misdirection: it places the blame on the reproductive decisions of those who are in the main non-western, poor, female and black, together with their unborn children, for environmental problems that are caused by the ways wealthy and powerful individuals and corporations exploit natural resources for their financial gain.81 There is a long and dishonourable history of eugenic policies aimed at reducing birth rates among those considered to be undesirable.82 We should not be tempted to final solutions to environmental problems through such means. The good news is that since the 1994 Cairo Conference on population and development a broad consensus has developed that initiatives addressing the empowerment of women turn out to have the side-effect of reducing average family size.83 Improving the access of girls to education, addressing gender inequality and women’s reproductive rights, and attending to gender-specific aspects of poverty and economic development are obvious goods in themselves, and addressing them is likely to result in a winwin-win in relation to the position of women, environmental impacts, and the preservation of habitats for wild animals. At the end of this final chapter, it is instructive that one key change of direction required to reverse the human monopolization of resources of land and water to allow the coexistence of wild animals would be to reduce our use of domesticated animals for food. As discussed in Chapter 2, raising livestock requires 78 per cent of all available agricultural land and is responsible for 8 per cent of global human water usage. One significant way of understanding our impact on wild animals is that we have taken over the habitats of wild animals in order to replace them with domesticated animals to produce human food. Here is another clear win-win-win scenario: reducing consumption of farmed animals by moving to a plant-based diet would reduce the cruelties inflicted on farmed animals, free up vast tracts of land that could be returned to wild animals as habitat, and reduce the wider environmental impacts of livestock such as pollution and climate change, with additional benefits for humans and A. Hendrixson, ‘Greening Malthus’, Jacobin (1 July 2015). See M. J. Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); M. Goldberg, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (London: Penguin, 2009). John McKeown shows how, in contrast, some American Christians have drawn on natalist strands in the tradition to endorse their own reproduction without limit; see J. McKeown, God’s Babies: Natalism and Bible Interpretation in Modern America (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2014). 83  S. E. Halfon, The Cairo Consensus: Demographic Surveys, Women’s Empowerment, and Regime Change in Population Policy (Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2007). 81  82 

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wild animals. In the context of other systemic challenges where the levers for change are harder to identify, it is notable that a simple shift towards a plantbased diet may represent one of the most significant ways to enable a space for wild animals alongside humans.

C O N C LU SIO N This volume has argued that the theological account of non-human animals developed in Volume I has a broad range of implications for the Christian ethical evaluation of how humans treat other animals. This Conclusion provides an overview of the argument of the preceding chapters and considers their implications.

Summary of the Previous Chapters The Introduction to the book made the case that non-human animals are a proper and important topic of Christian ethical concern. Non-human animals merit Christian concern as such. The frequent intersections with ethical concern for humans marginalized on grounds of race, gender, migrant status, or poverty, mean that human and non-human interests are by no means always in conflict, and there is no shortage of opportunity to take steps that improve both human and non-human welfare. Christian ethics needs to engage with the complexities of human interactions with other animals: seeking to resolve this complexity by ending it, through separating humans from non-human animals, is both unfeasible and unattractive. Instead, a Christian ethical approach needs to engage with the demanding task of attending to the diverse ways in which human and non-human animal lives are intertwined, with the aim of informing Christian practice towards other animals. Chapter 1 examined some key foundational issues for the project of Christian animal ethics. It argued that the theological account of animals developed in Volume I requires that Christians recognize direct duties towards animals. It explored commonalities and differences between this theological account and approaches to animal ethics from animal rights, utilitarian, virtue ethics, feminist ethics of care, and Martha Nussbaum’s account of capabilities. The chapter concluded that theological ethics could afford to be methodologically pluralistic because the source of its ethical demand was the status of the animal creature in God’s creative, reconciling and redeeming purposes. Acknowledging that Christian animal ethics takes place in the context of a fallen creation means that ethical action in this realm – as well as all others – will be provisional and partial, seeking to act responsibly in relation to animal creatures while recognizing that our relationship with them this side of the new creation will always be broken. The chapter also introduced the idea of what it means for animal creatures to flourish: the fulfilment of the goal of what it means to be that kind of creature before God, recognizing that such flourishing is often compromised within the groaning

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creation we share. Finally, the chapter outlined a range of relational categories under which non-human animals could be considered in a theological context: as fellow covenant partners, neighbours, the poor, and as moral exemplars. Chapters 2 to 8 considered different categories of human use of other animals. Each chapter began with a survey of how other animals are treated by humans in that sphere, and then turned to a Christian ethical assessment of such use. Chapter 2, the longest chapter, surveyed and assessed the ways humans use other animals for food. It showed that such use inflicts very significant harm and suffering on non-human animals and provides very little opportunity for them to flourish in their complex social patterns of life or make use of their sophisticated cognitive capacities. Farmed animals have their lives and bodies entirely reshaped to make them more efficient units of human production, usually to their very great cost. Remarkably, 98–99 per cent of animals killed for human food are fish. The expansion of fishing and adoption of industrial methods have resulted in reduction of wild fish stocks by 90 per cent since 1900. Fish suffer over a long period in the capture process and fishing causes substantial collateral damage for non-target species and the marine environment. About half of fish now derive from intensive fish farms, which raise fish in close confinement and feed them with on average twice as much wild fish, exacerbating the pressure on wild populations through over-fishing. After fish, chickens are used in biggest numbers, with 66 billion killed for food in 2016 and a further 8 billion used for eggs. The vast majority of chickens are raised intensively in broiler sheds or battery cages, bred to maximize their productivity so that broiler hens reach slaughter weight in only five weeks, suffering pain from legs forced to support prematurely heavy bodies. Male chicks from laying breeds are surplus to requirements, so are killed by maceration or suffocation after hatching. Ducks are the next most numerous animal killed for food after chickens, with 3 billion killed annually, most of which are raised intensively in similar conditions to chickens. Pigs are the next most intensively reared animal, with 1.5 billion killed in 2016, most of whom live in bare indoor sheds with very little opportunities for the expression of species-specific behaviours. Nearly 1 billion rabbits are killed each year for food, most of whom are raised in small cages. Most sheep and goats are raised extensively, but moves to intensive indoor production are becoming more common, especially for dairy. Lambs are killed at only a few months of age, and sheep with other livestock are often subjected to the great stress of live export and long journeys by sea and road. Increasingly intensive methods are being used to raise cattle, with animals confined to bare feed lots for ‘finishing’ before slaughter. Growing numbers of dairy cows are kept inside without access to grazing. Virtually all dairy cows have their calves taken from them at birth or shortly afterwards, and are slaughtered for meat when they become unfit for production, which is after three or four lactations in intensive systems. Chapter 2 noted that the systems of food production that inflict such impoverished lives on animals also turn out to be colossally wasteful of resources, using 78 per cent of available agricultural land and one-third of global cereal output, and contributing to human food and water insecurity. Raising livestock

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in these numbers is a significant driver of anthropogenic climate change and creates extensive environmental pollution locally and nationally. The production and consumption of non-human animals also create direct threats to human health through the physically and psychologically dangerous working conditions imposed on a disproportionately female, black, Latinx, and migrant workforce; serious zoonotic disease risks such as swine and bird flu; antibiotic resistance; and growth in rates of heart disease, cancer, diabetes and stroke associated with over-consumption of meat. The chapter argued that the intensive farming of nonhuman animals is fundamentally incompatible with the theological account of other animals developed in On Animals, and that Christians should seek to avoid cooperating with such systems as producers, retailers or consumers. Christians should welcome and support initiatives that seek to improve the welfare of farmed animals and live in ways that allow more expression of their particular modes of creaturely life. In the very many contexts where killing other animals for food is not necessary, however, the chapter argued that Christians have reason to be glad to find they are no longer forced to kill animals to live. Given the killing and mistreatment of farmed animals in their use for the production of dairy and eggs, this means Christian have strong faith-based reasons to adopt a vegan diet. Chapter 3 turned to the ways in which humans use other animals for clothing and textiles, through the use of leather, wool, fur, reptile skins, down feathers, and silk. Some of these products are derived from farmed animals that are also used for food, which means there is significant overlap with the welfare concerns and ethical analysis of Chapter 2, and similar reasons for Christians to seek to avoid such products. Other animals are not used for food and are raised – or trapped or hunted – and killed only to produce textiles, many of which are luxury items such as fur coats or crocodile skin handbags. The novel practice of farming animals for fur or skins subjects wild animals to inappropriate environments, such as bare cages, that are wholly inappropriate for them. The alternative of trapping wild animals frequently results in deaths that are painful and often slow. The chapter argued that for the vast majority of the human population, the use of non-human animals to produce textiles in these ways is not necessary, and is often vain and profligate, so the suffering, confinement and killing of animals for this purpose is unjustified. Chapter 4 considered the human use of other animals for their labour. It described examples of human cooperation with wild animals in obtaining food, and suggestions that the domestication of dogs could have begun over 100,000 years ago in similar mutually beneficial partnerships. The chapter then reviewed modern examples of one-to-one partnerships between humans and other animals, such as the use of dogs in policing, and assistance dogs for persons with visual impairments, restricted mobility, or who suffer from mental illnesses. Many such relationships seem to be ones in which dogs and other animals can flourish, though there are important issues concerning the wellbeing of animals who are not selected for or after training, or who reach the end of their working life. Human use of animals for draught labour is often very different, with evidence that animals are frequently beaten, over-laden, forced to work when sick or injured, and given

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insufficient food. The chapter argued that the examples of mutually beneficial cooperative work with wild animals suggest there is no intrinsic reason that using other animals for labour is problematic, and that partnership between humans and other animals could even be seen as partial anticipation of the harmonious coexistence pictured in Genesis 2 or Isaiah 11. Instead of rejecting all use of nonhuman labour, therefore, it would be helpful to develop norms to assess what might constitute just and unjust labour relations between humans and other animals. Chapter 5 took up the question of the ethics of using non-human animals for research experimentation, medicine, and product safety testing. The numbers of animals used for this purpose is unknown since few countries maintain accurate records, which is a concern in itself, but it seems likely that hundreds of millions of animals are used for experimental procedures each year. Much of this experimentation takes place in context with little regulation or oversight, which is likely to mean the animal research subjects are very poorly treated. The chapter discussed one example of abusive practice in the UK, where research is more regulated than most countries. Genetic technology has enabled the breeding of animals designed to be dysfunctionally susceptible to disease, which is the clearest possible instrumentalization of non-human animal life to human interests without regard for the wellbeing of the animals concerned. Christians in nineteenth-century Britain campaigned against vivisection in opposition to the scientific and medical establishment, on the principle that Christianity taught that the strong did not have the right to exploit the weak for their own ends, and pictured Christ challenging the scientists in an animal laboratory in poetry and art. The chapter argued that it is surprisingly hard to make a convincing case that the benefits derived from experimentation on animals outweigh the costs, which should be a necessary condition of considering the practice legitimate. Even if it were possible to make a cost-benefit case in relation to particular procedures, however, the chapter argued that Christians have reason to follow their nineteenth-century forebears in opposing most research experimentation on animals. We forego opportunities to gain knowledge through stringent restrictions on experimentation on humans; the theological account of non-human animals I propose requires that we must consider similar serious restrictions in our use of other animals as research subjects wherever we inflict suffering or death on them, which is the case in almost all of current research experimentation. Chapter 6 discussed the human use of other animals in sport and entertainment. It considered the practice of recreational angling in the context of recent evidence that fish experience significant pain and suffering from being caught on a hook. It described the entertainment of breeding pheasants and grouse to be driven towards customers waiting with guns to shoot them, and the illegal destruction of endangered wildlife such as golden eagles, peregrine falcons and hen harriers to make the slaughter more profitable. The chapter described organizations such as the Safari Club who award points and prestige to members based on their productivity in killing ‘big game’ animals in Africa and elsewhere, and the strong links with the obscenity of racist white colonial hunters who proudly reported kills of black African humans alongside the killing of elephants and lions. Horses and

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greyhounds are widely raced in order to provide opportunities for gambling, and the chapter considered the suffering and death inflicted on these animals in the pursuit of these sports, as well as in entertainments where the suffering and deaths of animals is more directly the object, such as bull-fighting, dog-fighting and badger-baiting. The chapter also surveyed the use of non-human animals in other entertainments such as circuses and feature films. It is striking that Christians were themselves tortured as sport alongside other animals for the Romans in the gladiatorial arena, which may be part of what led to church opposition to hunting for sport. This legacy gives Christians particular reason to be in solidarity with non-human animals exploited for entertainment today. Subjecting non-human animals to suffering and death merely for the sake of sport and entertainment is perhaps the most blatant and egregious example in the book of disregarding the status of other animals as creatures of God. Chapter 7 turned to the very different context of keeping other animals as companions and pets. It considered examples of interspecies play between humans and other animals as glimpses of the peaceable coexistence pictured in Genesis and Isaiah, as in Chapter 4, above. It reviewed some of the history of humans keeping other animals as companions, including the problems of keeping order in church services from the Middle Ages onwards created by the widespread practice of bringing dogs, birds, monkeys, and even horses and mules to church. The chapter described wide variations between countries as to the numbers of households with pets and the kinds of animals kept. It reviewed the hundreds of thousands of dogs and cats killed because no homes could be found for them, and the compassion fatigue experienced by many people working in animal shelters. Other key welfare issues in relation to companion animals and pets are the genetic problems created by the pedigree breeding of dogs and cats, the breeding of animals in contexts similar to intensive farming, the neglect of horses kept for leisure, and the impact of the pet industry on wild animal populations. The chapter discussed arguments against the keeping of companion animals both on the basis that the practice is bad for humans, and that it is bad for animals. It argued that there is the potential for this kind of association between humans and other animals to be a partial realization of the peaceable reign of God, but that very much of current practice results in the mistreatment and abuse of other animals. The chapter argued that the implications of the theological account of animals developed in this work are that the pedigree breeding of animals should be ended, mutilating practices such as declawing cats should be stopped, pets and companion animals should be sourced from shelters, and attention given to ensuring they are kept in spacious and enriched environments where they can flourish. Finally, Chapter 8 discussed the impacts of humans on wild animals. It noted the widespread pattern of humans hunting other animals to extinction, which is continuing in the present, with current attacks on elephants an obvious example. The chapter surveyed the deliberate eradication of unwanted animals, the negotiation of conflicts between humans and other animals, and attempts to resolve conflicts between different wild animals, such as programmes to eradicate rats from islands where they have been introduced by humans and are

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endangering native animal populations. The chapter also discussed the current mass extinction of wild animals through habitat loss and the very serious new threat presented by anthropogenic climate change. It then considered the keeping of wild animals in zoos, safari parks and nature reserves, noting the serious welfare problems experienced by many animals in these contexts, the contribution made by many zoos to conservation projects, and the reality that the only safe places for many wild animals are those managed by humans. The chapter argued that human practices in relation to wild animals have overwhelmingly failed to respect them as creatures of God and have failed to allow them space to flourish. The Christian animal ethics proposed in this book requires direct actions in relation to wild animals, such as ensuring captive wild animals are kept in appropriate environments, strengthening protections for wild animals, and working to reduce conflicts between humans and other animals. A Christian regard for wild animals also requires attention to the root causes of the mass extinction now underway. Humans must reduce resource consumption to allow space for wild animals and act quickly to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions fuelling global warming. The chapter circles back to Chapter 2 in its recognition that one of the most obvious ways of releasing land for wild animals would be to make substantial reductions in the numbers of farmed animals.

The View from Here This survey of the preceding chapters reveals the abyss separating the ways humans currently treat other animals and the ways of treating other animals that follow from a Christian theological ethics of animals. Of course, it is not a surprise to find that Christians mistreat animals – human and otherwise – and disregard Christian understandings of life; however most Christians recognize the abuse of humans as a cause at least for lament, if not for practical action to redress that abuse. But, on the whole, Christians seem to be unaware of, or unconcerned by, their complicity in the abuse of non-human animals, domestic and wild, on a very large scale. As discussed in Chapter 2 and Chapter 5, Christians in the nineteenth century saw the cruelties inflicted on farmed animals and the animal subjects of research experimentation as a faith issue, and raised their voices in protest with calls for reform. For the most part, however, the much more systematic and extensive mistreatment of non-human animals in the twenty-first century has not been a topic of Christian concern. I appreciate that one unsettling potential explanation of the abyss between what I have argued a Christian ethics of non-human animals requires, and the practice towards other animals generally accepted by Christians, is that the theological and ethical account of other animals set out in these two volumes misses the mark. Given the size of the gulf before us, it would be wise to consider the possibility that it is the theological and ethical framework I have proposed that is in the wrong position, rather than the patterns of practice surveyed in this volume. One response to the recognition that this theological and ethical framework requires

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radical changes to the ways in which we treat other animals is not to embark on those changes, but to critique and revise the theological and ethical analysis I have presented. It is certain that there are many points at which my account is in need of correction, refinement, and supplement. At the end of Volume I, I expressed the hope that the book would provide a stimulus for others to give attention to the place of animals in Christian theology; at the end of this volume I hope that this initial mapping of the ethical territory may encourage others to reflect on the implications of a Christian understanding of animals for the ethics of how we treat them. Each area of human practice surveyed in each chapter would obviously benefit from much more detailed attention than is possible in a work of this length, and no doubt such attention would highlight points at which my analysis is in need of revision. While I am convinced of the need for more and better analysis than I have provided here, I am also convinced that such work will not result in revisions of such magnitude that the abyss visible from the viewpoint we have reached at the end of this volume will be closed up, or even significantly reduced in size. It seems to me that the key drivers of the ethical analysis of this volume are not fine, rarified and disputable points of Christian doctrine, but instead follow directly from the fundamental theological affirmations concerning the status of non-human animals that are set out in Volume I: that they are the good creatures of God, that they are beloved of God, that they praise and delight God in their particular modes of flourishing, that God cares for each of them, that they are participants with us in the groaning of creation, that we in response should love and respect them as fellow creatures beloved of the God we worship and, where possible, seek their flourishing. We can say much more than this, of course, but we may not say less, and to say this much is already to recognize with grave regret the wide abyss between what such an affirmation requires of us, and the ways in which we currently treat other animals. The implications of accepting the theological and ethical analysis of other animals I have presented in these volumes are radical in relation to the changes in practice required of us. I submit, however, that they are radical not because the theological and ethical analysis is extreme, controversial or unpersuasive, but because our practice has departed so far from what should be considered acceptable in a Christian context. We might ask how this abyss between what should be Christian attitudes towards other animals and our current patterns of practice came to be. While it would require much more research to answer that question authoritatively, my hypothesis is that new technologies gave us new and powerful possibilities for the exploitation of non-human animals to their great cost, and that those responsible for deciding to pursue these new technological possibilities judged that the costs to the animals were insignificant in comparison to the benefits to humans that could be gained. No doubt some justified their actions with reference to the noble goals of feeding a growing human population or gaining important new scientific knowledge. These decisions were mostly hidden, and incremental, rather than open to public debate. Perhaps it was hard to recognize the moment at which public

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consent should be sought; perhaps those pursuing the more efficient exploitation of other animals thought the rightness of the path they were following was selfevident; perhaps some believed that it was preferable to keep the public ignorant because objections might be raised. However it happened, it now feels like we have sleep-walked into complicity with systems that were not of our choosing and are very obviously wrong. Changes to the breeding of chickens, discussed in Chapter 2, is a case in point. At some point, someone must have realized that selective breeding to optimize one kind of chicken to produce meat, and another breed to lay eggs, would mean that all the male chicks of the laying hen breed would be redundant. The choice was clear: we could make eggs and chicken meat much cheaper to produce, but it would mean killing all the male chicks of the laying breed after hatching. Most people I speak to are unaware that this is now a universal requirement of commercial egg production. There is an audible gasp in public lectures when I mention that all the male chicks in these systems are dropped live into a grinder, gassed, suffocated, or just left to die. This reaction leads me to think that if the public had been asked whether the killing of all male chicks would be an acceptable cost for cheaper eggs, they might well have said that it was not. But no one was asked, most people do not know, and the egg industry has been operating successfully and profitably on this basis. When we learn that this is what happens, we are jolted into the realization that we are cooperating in a practice taking place on an enormous scale about which we were ignorant, a practice that has been utterly routine for a long time, and is in flagrant opposition to anything that could be considered appropriate for creatures of God, not one of whom is forgotten by God (Lk. 12.6). As noted in Chapter 2, the poultry industry shows the first signs of being prepared to act on this issue, but similar concerns could be raised about many other current practices in relation to other animals, such as the lives inflicted on broiler hens, crated sows, zero-grazing dairy cows, and the mice genetically engineered to be susceptible to cancer. As discussed in Chapter 7, even in the context of having companion animals and pets, where the animals are valued highly and those keeping them would usually say their welfare was a priority, many unwanted animals are killed and many others suffer from health conditions resulting from irresponsible breeding practices. It will be a significant ethical and practical task to negotiate our way out of the current systemic abuse of the animals we use. The temptation will be strong to take the much easier route of dissenting from the theological arguments of Volume I. One might claim that humans have divine authorization for exploiting other animals without regard for their flourishing as fellow creatures of God. Or one might reject the argument made in the Introduction to this volume that it is both possible and necessary for us to attend ethically to other animals alongside our concern for human neighbours. Such arguments have justified and perpetuated the cruel practices surveyed in this volume whenever questions have been raised about them. I have set out as clearly as I can in these volumes why objections to taking ethical concern for non-human animals seriously are implausible and unconvincing for Christians. Many Christians rely on these objections not because

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they are biblically, theologically or ethically convincing, but because they appear to justify the continued – and intensified – exploitation of other animals for human convenience and comfort. My hope is that more and more Christians will engage seriously with the argument of these two volumes that the standard Christian justifications proffered for the abusive exploitation of non-human animals cannot withstand critical scrutiny.

An Agenda for Christian Animal Ethics For those who are persuaded that there is indeed an abyss between the kind of treatment of non-human animals that a theological account of them requires, and our current practice in relation to them as surveyed in this volume, the obvious question is what we should do about it. I appreciate that the scale of the changes in attitudes and practice that seem required are immense, and that the magnitude of the challenge is in danger of being de-moralizing – encouraging us to set aside morals about which we are convicted, rather than confront what they might require of us. But we do not need to be demoralized. There is a way forward. The argument of this book points to an obvious starting point for Christian ethical attention and practical action: the use we make of other animals for food. As noted at the beginning of the Introduction, and in Chapter 8, the most succinct way of telling the story of how our relationship with other animals has changed in the last century or so is that we have replaced the wild animals that lived alongside us with domesticated animals that we raise for food. We had already done this fairly efficiently by 1900, when the biomass of all domesticated animals was 3.5 times that of all wild land mammals. During the course of the twentieth century, however, we expanded our production of livestock four-fold and this was a key factor in halving the wild animal biomass. This meant that the biomass of domesticated animals had risen to twenty-four times that of wild land mammals by 2000.1 Chapter 2 set out the wide implications of this huge shift for the unfortunate farmed animals caught up in new industrial agricultural systems, as well as the associated emptying of the seas of 90 per cent of fish through industrial fishing in the twentieth century. The use of other animals for food is several orders of magnitude greater than any other human use of animals: trillions of animals, with fish included, compared to hundreds of millions for some other uses, such as research experimentation. Chapter 2 also made clear the serious problems the expansion of the human use of other animals for food has created for human food and water security, human health, climate change, and pollution. Chapter 8 highlighted the way habitat loss – of which increased livestock numbers is a major driver – has led to a mass extinction event of wild animals comparable with others in the geological record, and the evidence that anthropogenic climate change – of

See Introduction.

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which increased livestock numbers is a major driver – is very likely to accelerate this rate of extinction. The starting point for a Christian ethics of non-human animals should be the devastation caused by our use of other animals for food, which directly affects farmed animals and wild fish, and indirectly affects the wild animals whose lives are made impossible by habitat loss and climate change. The case for starting here is made stronger by the evidence that this use is also problematic for human wellbeing, particularly for those most at risk from hunger and malnutrition, those in urban food deserts with little access to anything beyond the products of industrialized animal agriculture and junk food, and those who end up as workers in the physically and psychologically dangerous working environments of slaughterhouses and meat processing plants. As noted at many points in this volume, the exploitation of non-human animals intersects with the exploitation and impoverishment of humans who are disproportionately female, black and Latinx, migrant, and poor. Identifying the human use of other animals for food as the most urgent priority issue for Christian animal ethics therefore makes sense in relation to the scale of its impacts on domesticated and wild animals, but also in relation to the many opportunities for win-win-win actions benefiting humans, non-human animals, and the environment. Prioritizing action in relation to the use of non-human animals for food does not mean that opportunities to take action in other areas should not be taken where available. As argued in previous chapters, Christians should oppose the use of fur, reptile skins and other animal products for luxury textiles, and recognize the exploitation involved in using animals for other textile products such as leather and wool (Chapter 3); be concerned about situations where the labour of other animals is unjustly exploited (Chapter 4); recall and act on the legacy of Christian opposition to vivisection (Chapter 5); challenge practices that inflict suffering, death or indignity on non-human animals merely for human sport and entertainment (Chapter 6); work to end patterns of breeding and keeping companion animals and pets that are to their detriment (Chapter 7); and look for wider opportunities to protect and promote the welfare of wild animals (Chapter 8). Work in all these areas is welcome, and much of it will be complementary to action in relation to the food issue, but progress in some of these areas may depend on progress in relation to the use of other animals for food. This is obvious in the case of leather and wool, but less obvious elsewhere, such as where research experimentation is justified on the basis that many animals fare better in such contexts than they do in industrial agriculture. There are two key aspects to the task of engaging with the issue of the human use of other animals for food: first, the need to reduce overall consumption, and second, the need to raise welfare standards for animals used for food. In Chapter 2, I make the argument that both parts of this agenda are essential. On the one hand, while reducing to zero the numbers of non-human animals used for food would obviously negate the need to work for higher welfare standards, this is unlikely to take place in the short term and very many animals will be raised and killed in better or worse ways in the meantime. On the other hand, it is not possible to raise

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farmed animals non-intensively in current numbers, so reducing consumption is necessary to improve welfare standards. In relation to both aspects of the task, additional work by Christian theologians and ethicists is necessary to make and develop the case for this as a pressing issue of Christian concern and to consider relevant issues in more detail, and wider efforts by those within Christian churches and institutions are necessary to gain support for and implement changes in policy and practice.2 One reason against starting a Christian ethics of non-human animals with the human use of other animals for food is that in one sense it is to start at the hardest point. It is much easier to get people to sign a petition calling on other people to act differently, than it is to get them to change their own practice. It would no doubt be easier, therefore, to get wide support for a ban on big game hunting, than to persuade Christians they should reduce their consumption of animal products, move to higher welfare sources, or avoid eating animal products at all. There is also much to be gained, however, through engaging with an issue that relates to everyday practice. In this connection, I am inspired by the invitation offered by Emilie Townes at the conclusion of Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil. Through the book, she diagnoses and deconstructs a wide range of systemic injustice, using the lens of the many stereotypes imposed on black women in the USA. Then at its end she issues an arrestingly simple call to action: to ‘live our faith more deeply’ through the ‘everydayness of moral acts’, through ‘getting up and trying one more time to get our living right’, through witnessing ‘to a justice wrapped in a love that will not let us go and a peace that is simply too ornery to give up on us’.3 ‘Won’t you join me?’, Townes invites us graciously and generously in the last words of her book. In addition to consideration of the global impacts of using other animals for food, Townes points us to a rationale on a personal level. Here is an opportunity to engage with broad systematic injustice through the everydayness of the stuff we choose to put on our plates. Instead of merely asking Christians to accept the conclusion to an ethical argument, focusing here offers Christians the opportunity to respond to Townes’s invitation, live Christian faith more deeply, and witness to God’s love and justice for all creatures through the everydayness of what we eat. This focus on everydayness is a reminder that thinking On Animals is not merely a theological or ethical task, but also a spiritual one. Christians took up and treasured biblical texts that celebrated the place of all creatures in God’s purposes, each given by God their own particular mode of creaturely being, each contributing their particular voice to the great chorus of creaturely praise. New

The CreatureKind project, which I founded in 2015 with Sarah Withrow King, seeks to encourage and resource such work in churches and other Christian institutions (http://becreaturekind.org). 3 E. M. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 164–5. 2

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Testament texts and early Christian theologians were intoxicated by the vision of the work of Christ as encompassing the whole of creation, all things in heaven and earth gathered up in God’s mighty and gracious plan of redemption. Later Christian traditions saw prophetic visions of this redeemed creation realized in acts of compassion towards particular animal creatures, and recognized that it belonged to Christian holiness and discipleship to be merciful to the vulnerable fellow animal creatures we find ourselves alongside. Living mercifully in this way orders our relationship to these fellow creatures in a way that also orders our relationship with God. We love because God first loved us, and our love for these fellow animal creatures follows God’s love for them. We need to think On Animals not just as a doctrinal and moral task, but in order to find our place within the glorious creation in which God has situated us, and to live faithfully in response.

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INDEX OF BIBLICAL REFERENCES Note: ‘n.’ indicates a reference in a footnote. Old Testament Genesis 1 1.29 1.29–30 2 2.18–23 2.25 3 3.7 3.21 4 6.11 9 9.3 9.3–4 9.4 9.5 9.10–17 41.1

xxv, 16, 81–2 78–9 18 xxv, 16, 99, 126, 240 205 99 16 99 99 16 16 18–20, 78–80, 81–83 18–20, 78–9 20 16, 78–9 26 26 29

Exodus 14.9 15.1 20.8–11 20.10 20.13 22.30 23.3 23.4–5 23.11 23.12 23.19 30.15

122 122 xxi, 125 29 17 xxi 29 n.87 xxi 29 xxi, 125 xxi 29 n.87

Leviticus 1 3–5 6–9 14–16

16, 20 20 20 20

On Animals II: Theological Ethics

282 17.1–9 17.14 19.19 22–23 22.28 25.6–7

20 xxi xxi, 2 20 xxi xxi

Numbers 6–8 15 18–19 22.20–33 28–29

20 20 20 20, 30 20

Deuteronomy 5.14 5.17 12.15 14.21 20.1 22.1–4 22.6 22.6–7 22.10 25.4

xxi, 125 17 20 xxi 122 xxi 2 xxi xxi xxi, 2, 125

Joshua 11.6

122

2 Samuel 12.3

29

1 Kings 4.26 10.22b 10.26

122 224 122

Job 5.22–23 12.7–10 24.2–3 30.29 38–41

26 31 29 29 231

Psalms 23–4 74.1 74.19 91.3 104

29 29 177 90

Proverbs 6.6–8 28.1

30 30

Index of Biblical References 30.18–19 30.24–28 30.29–31

31 31 31

Ecclesiastes 11.12

30

Isaiah 206–7 11 11.6–8 11.6–9 11.6–10 51.20 65.25 65.25–6 66.3

xxv, 186, 240 126 16, 79, 129, 206 231 30 231 16, 79, 129, 206 16, 21

Jeremiah 1.5 7.20 12.4 14.5–6 21.6

xviii 20 29 29 29

Ezekiel 14.13–21

29

Hosea 2.18 4.1

26, 231 29

Joel 1.18 1.20

29 29

Jonah 4.11

29

Zephaniah 1.2–3

29

Haggai 1.11

29

Wisdom 5.17

20

New Testament Matthew 6.26 6.28 10.29 10.31

xvi, 31 31 xvi, xxii n. 21, 30 xvi

283

On Animals II: Theological Ethics

284 12.11–12 23.37

xvi 65

Mark 3.4

xvi

Luke 6.9 6.36 10.29 10.29–37 10.33b 10.36–7 12.6 12.7b 12.24 14.5

xvi 141–2 xviii 27 27 29 xvi, 244 xvi xvi xvi, 27

Acts 10.9–11.18 10.17 10.19 10.34–5 11.1–17

80 n.182 80 n.182 80 n.182 80 n.182 80 n.182

Romans 207 8 8.18–23 8.21 8.21–22 8.22 13.10

81, 186 xxii n. 24, 206 16–17 79 22 141

1 Corinthians 9.9 9.9–11

xxii, 2 xxii

1 Timothy 5.17–18

125

2 Peter 2.15–16

30

Revelation 4.6–11 5.11–14 21.3–4

17 17 17, 79

INDEX OF AUTHORS AND SUBJECTS Note: ‘n.’ indicates a reference in a footnote. Adams, Carol 4–5, 7–8, 13, 56 Aesop’s Fables 30 African honeyguides 108, 111, 124 Akhtar, Aysha 155 Alexander the Great 187 Alfred, King 187 alligators 96–7 alpacas 91 amphibians 96–7, 131–2, 199–200, 207–9, 220–1, 228 Anderson, Kay 225–7, 229–30 animal rights xiii, 1–16, 123–4, 145–6, 182, 203–4, 210 antelopes 30 nilgai 219 antibiotics 57, 59, 238–9 anti–vivisection. See vivisection ants 30–1 apes experimentation 133 mystery plays 174 Planet of the Apes (Boulle) 156 Pompey’s games 176 slaughter 176 zoos xxiv, 224 Aquinas, St Thomas 2–4, 10, 18–21 Aristotle 8–9, 14, 18–19, 23, 62 n.140 asps 16–17 asses. See donkeys assistance animals 107–8, 113–16, 239–40. See also dogs; horses; Lucky; monkeys Atkinson, Michael and Kevin Young 170–1 Atwood, Margaret 75 Augustine 4, 17–21, 25, 38, 137–8 Augustus 176 auks, great 216–17 aurochs 224 Austen, Jane 202 avian flu. See under chickens; ducks; fish; pigs

baboons 134–5, 152, 223–6 Baden–Powell, Robert 168 badgers baiting 172–3, 240–1 cull 218, 232 Proverbs 30–1 zoos 224 Baket III 187 Balaam’s ass. See donkeys Barth, Karl 80–5 covenant 27 n.73 The Good Samaritan 29 neighbours xx n.18, 29 oxen xxii n.24 Bartholomew 113–14 Barton, Matthew 26–7 Basil of Caesarea 38–9 bats 59, 190–1 bears 16–17, 175–6, 218–19, 222–3 Andean 228 polar 30, 222–3 pollution 222–3 spectacled xxiv and Thecla 175–6 zoos 224–5 Bearzi, Maddalena 28 bees 85–6, 108, 219 Bekoff, Marc 184 Belgian Malinois 127–8 Bell, Sir Charles 140–1 Bella 183–6 Bentham, Jeremy 5 Berkman, John 67 n.158, 83 Bernard, Claude 138–9 biomass domesticated vs. wild xi, 57–8, 215, 217–18, 245 seabed 39–40 birds xvi–xvii, 31, 41–5. See also African honeyguide; budgerigars; canaries;

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chaffinches; chickens; cormorants; crows; dodo; doves; ducks; eagles; falcons; geese; Greylag geese; grouse; guinea fowl; hen harriers; ibis; magpies; pheasants; pigeons; quail; starlings avian flu 58–9 biomass xi, 215 breeding 41–2, 199, 209 church 189, 241 companion 188–9, 192–3, 198–200, 205–9 compassion for 19–20, 26–7, 29–30 consumption of fish 200 covenant, Noahide 26 down 97–8, 104 in Eden 79 experimentation 131–3 fighting xxiv in films 174 fishing by-catch 39–40 human collaboration 108, 123–5, 129 killed by cats xxiii, 199–200 killed for meat 36, 98, 104 labour 108, 123–4, 129, 174 mother xxi sacrifice xxi, 20–1 shooting as sport 161, 164–6, 179 subjects–of–a–life 6–7, 11 theos–rights 11–12 n.45 used for egg production 36 zoos 224, 228–9 Blackfish (Cowperthwaite) 3–4, 174, 227 boars. See pigs bonobos 28 Boulle, Pierre 156–7 bovine spongiform encephalopathy 59 Boyle, Robert 138 Broome, Arthur 68 Browne, Anthony 225–7 Browning, Robert 140 Buchanan, Robert 143 budgerigars 192–3 Budolfson, Mark Bryant 67 n.158 buffaloes 36–7, 51–4 extensively farmed 51–2 killing male 86–7 labour 119–20, 123 leather 91–2, 101–2

racing 168–9 Bull, Phil 171–2 bullocks. See cattle bulls. See cattle Butterworth, Andrew and Mary Richardson 95 Buxton, Fowell 68 Caesar, Julius 176, 201–2 Cahoone, Lawrence 73 n.166, 88 n.205, 165–6 Caius, Johannus 201–2 calves. See cattle Calvin, John 19 n.58, 82, 99 camels 36, 119–20, 123, 168, 224 canaries 192–3 capabilities ethics xii, 1, 4–5, 8–9, 14–15, 237–8 Carlyle, Thomas 140 Cartmill, Matt 178 Cassidy, Rebecca 169 castration (see under buffaloes; cattle; pigs; sheep) caterpillars 24–5 cats. See also leopards; lynxes; ocelots; panthers; tigers; wildcats breeding xxiii, 197–200, 204, 208–11, 213–14, 241 communication 101, 183–4 companion 181–2, 184, 186–214, 241 declawing 204, 209–10, 241 domestication 110, 187 experimentation 133 intensively reared 198, 241 kittens xxiii, 12, 28, 192–3, 198 Mitsy xxiii–xxiv, 101–2, 183 mystery plays 174 pets (see under cats, companion) shelters 194–8, 208, 210–11, 241 slaughter 188 witchcraft 188–9 cattle xx, 51–4, 59–60. See also oxen Augustine 17–18 bovine spongiform encephalopathy 59 branding 51–2, 59–62 breeding 52–3, 59–62, 75 bullfighting 172–3, 240–1 bullocks 119–20 bulls 20–1, 107, 119–20

Index of Authors and Subjects calves 16–17, 51–3, 64–6, 74, 77–8, 85–7, 223, 238 castration 51–2, 59–62, 64–5, 77–8 compassion for 20, 29–30 culling 53–4, 59–60 dairy 52–4, 59–62, 64–5, 75–8, 85–7, 238 dehorning 51–2, 59–62 domestication 110, 119–20 eschatological harmony 16–17 export 50–1 extensively farmed 51–2, 59–60, 64, 74, 76–8, 86–7 (see also extensive farming) flourishing 77–8, 85–7 free–range 51–2, 76–7 Holstein 54 infertility 53–4, 59–60, 75 insemination 66 intensively farmed xxiv–xxv, 51–60, 64–5, 74, 76–8, 86–90, 238 (see also intensive farming) killed for food 20, 36 labour xxi, 107–8, 116–17, 119–20 leather 91–2, 102 mastitis 53–4, 60, 75 mother cows xxi, 52–3, 64–5 Newman, J. H. N. 144 rose veal 53 sacrifice 20–1, 72–3 slaughter xxi, 16–17, 20–1, 50–1, 51–3, 54–6, 60, 72–3, 74, 86–7, 92, 238 Thessalian bulls 176 tuberculosis 218 zoos 223 Cayenne 184–6, 204–5 Ceballos, Gerardo 222 cetaceans 227–8 chaffinches xxiv Charles II, King of England 188 Charles VIII, King of France 93–94 cheetahs xxiv, 224, 226 chickens 36–7, 41–5, 238 avian flu 58–9, 238–9 battery cages 43, 238 biomass xi, 57–8, 215 breeding 41–3, 74–8, 244 broiler hens 41–5 chicks 65–6 cockfighting xxiv

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cognition 5–6, 43–4 culling male chicks 24, 42–3, 60, 61–2, 64, 74–8, 244 eggs xi, xxi, 23–4, 35–7, 41–5, 56–7, 60–1, 64, 67–8, 70–1, 74–8, 85–7, 89–90, 107, 215, 238–9, 244 extensively farmed 64, 74–8, 238 (see also extensive farming) flourishing 23–4, 64–8 free–range 42–3, 74, 77 intensively farmed xi, 23–4, 41–5, 54–58, 74–8, 86–7, 238 killed for food xi, 36, 41, 44–5, 55–8, 74, 215, 238 labour 107, 174 mother hens xxi, 64–6 mystery plays 174 non–substitutability 10–11 red junglefowl 41–2, 188 slaughter 41–5, 54–6, 238 chimpanzees xviii, xxiv, 25, 156–7, 225–6, 229–30 Cholbi, Michael 213 Cicero 176 circus 120–1, 173–4, 179, 240–1 Clark, Stephen 17–18 cleaner wrasses 39 climate change xiv, 57–8, 70–1, 83–4, 216, 219–20, 221–3, 232, 234–6 Coetzee, J. M. 196–7 Coleridge, John, Lord Chief Justice 140–3 colonialism American fur trade 93–4 companion animals 191 hunting devastation 216–19 hunting and racism 167–8, 240–1 companion animals xi–xii, xix–xx, xiii, xxvi, 29, 107–8, 110–13, 126–7, 171, 181–214, 241, 244. See also under birds; cats; colonialism; dogs; ducks; fish; flourishing; horses; insects; pigs; rabbits; reptiles compassion xx–xxi, 10–11, 104, 178, 179, 247–8 anti–cruelty legislation 68 ‘Christ in the Laboratory’(Morley)141–3

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Coleridge, John 140–3 divine 19–20, 29–31, 62 fatigue 196–7, 241 neighbour 27, 29 for the poor 29–30 virtue ethics 7, 12–15 cormorants 190–1 covenant 26–7, 31–3, 78–9 Barth, K. 27 n.73 Moltmann, J. 26–7 Noahide 26, 78–9 Cowperthwaite, Gabriela 173–4, 227 cows. See cattle creation against human cruelty 20 Barth, K. 81–3 charity for 10 fallen 16–17, 24–5, 237–8 flourishing xxvi, 1–2, 9–10 Genesis stories 99, 126, 205–7 God’s acts of xii–xiv, 9–10, 14–15, 26, 247–8 God’s care for xxii, 1–2, 140–1, 231 goodness xiii, 18–19, 90, 243 groaning 21–2, 29–30, 79–80, 186, 206, 232–5, 237–8, 243 hierarchy xvi–xvii, 18–19 new xiii, 16–21, 66–7, 71, 79–83, 87–8, 129 particular creatures xiii, xv–xvii, 13–15 Paul xiii, 16–17, 79 reconciliation of xiii–xiv, 1–2, 9–10, 15, 88–90, 234–5 redemption of xiii, 1–2, 9–10, 15, 21–2, 231–3, 247–8 crocodiles 96–7, 103, 176, 219, 239 crows New Caledonian 43–4 cuttlefish 132–3 Cyril of Jerusalem 176–7 Darwin, Charles 24–5, 147–9 Darwin, Erasmus 62–3 David 29–30 Decalogue 17–20 deer 29–30, 117, 177–8, 219–20, 224–5, 233 Defoe, Daniel 188 DeGrazia, David and Jeff Sebo 154, 158–9

Deleuze, Giles and W. Félix Guattari 202–3 Descartes, René 137–8 Diesel 127–8 Dirzo, Rodolfo 222 Dives and Pauper 19–21 dodo 216–17 dogs 1–2. See also Belgian Malinois; Bella; Cayenne; Diesel; foxhounds; German Shepherds; greyhounds; hounds; huskies; La China; Lucky; Moss; Newfoundlands; Reggie; St Bernards #JeSuisChien 127–8 assistance animals 107–8, 113–17, 126–7 badger–baiting 172–3 breeding 13, 113, 126–7, 170–1, 186–7, 192, 197–9, 204, 208–9, 213–14, 241 and Christ 141–3 church 176–7, 189–90, 241 circus 173–4 communication 108, 111–12, 183–4 companion 3, 102, 107–8, 181–9, 201–14, 241 compassion for 27, 28, 196–7, 241 with disabilities 198–9 domestication 110–11, 119 experimentation 132–3, 136, 137–8, 140–1, 149–50, 158–9 (see also under dogs, vivisection) fighting 172–3, 240–1 in films 174–5, 212 guarding, non military 119, 129–30, 182–3 guide 107–8, 113–17 herding 116–17, 126–7, 129–30, 185–6, 206 hunting 72–3, 110–11, 117, 176–7 intensively reared 197–9, 241 Isaiah 16–17, 20–1 Kant, Immanuel 3 labour 107–8, 110–19, 123, 126–30 military and police 111–13, 116–17, 123, 126–30 muzzled 192 as neighbours 27 and North American Indians 191 pornography 212 puppies 11, 28, 113, 192–3, 197–8, 201–3, 208

Index of Authors and Subjects racing 168–72, 179–80 (see also greyhounds) search and rescue 28, 113, 128–9 sexual relations with humans 212 shelters 194–7, 208–11, 213–14, 241 shows 208–9 stray 193–6, 206 tax 190 vivisection 137–43 (see also under dogs, experimentation) zoo 223 dolphins 2, 30 n.92 Blackfish (Cowperthwaite) 173–4, 227 bottlenose 27–8, 109 by-catch 39–40 captivity 173–4, 227 human collaboration 109, 124–5, 129 interspecies care 27–8 military 123 shows 174 Donaldson, Sue and W. Kymlicka 118–19, 125–6 donkeys xxi, 29–30, 107, 119, 123–5 asses 36 Balaam’s ass 19–20, 30, 174 slaughter 123–4 Donovan, Josephine 4–5, 7–8, 13–14 doves 29, 174, 188 pigeons 147–8 rock 188 Socorro 228 down, feather 91, 97–8, 104–5, 239. See also ducks; geese drongos 109–10 ducks avian flu 58 companion 190–1 down 91, 97–8, 104 intensively farmed 45, 58, 97–8, 104, 238 killed for food 45, 238 mallard 188 eagles 30–1 golden 164–5, 240–1 slaughter 240–1 ecology xi–xii, xxiii–xxv, 29–31, 231–6 extinction and eradication 216–23, 231–2, 241–2, 245–6 fish 37–41, 57

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habitat devastation 221–3 human population growth 235 hunting 72–3 leather 92 reptiles and amphibians 96–7 Eden 16–17, 21–2, 79 Edison, Thomas Electrocuting an Elephant 174 Edward VI 190 eels 190–1 Ehrlich, Paul 222 Electrocuting an Elephant (Edison) 174 elephants Asian 120–2, 227 conflict with humans 219, 232 cruelty in training 120–2 domestication 120–1 in films 174 hunting and extinction 216–17 hunting and racism 167–8, 240–2 ivory 217, 223–4 labour 120–2 military 123 slaughter 176 social structure 120–2 Topsy 174 zoos 223–31 Eliphaz 26–7 Esau 176–7 ethics of care, feminist. See feminist ethics of care European Union regulations declawing cats 209–10 experimentation 131–4, 153–4 gassing chicks 42–3 macerating chicks 42–3 shooting birds 164–5 traps 95–6 euthanasia human 194–5 non-human animal 95, 194–6, 213–14, 227–8 Evelyn, John 62–3 ewes. See sheep experimentation, research xi–xii, 131–59, 180, 240, 242, 245–6. See also vivisection baboons 134–5, 152 birds 131–3 dogs 13, 133, 136–8, 140–3, 149–50, 158

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Eden 206 fish 38–9, 131–3 guinea pigs 136–7, 149–50 humans 152–9, 240 mice 131–7 monkeys 66, 134–7, 152, 156 Newman, J. H. 144 pigeons 147–8 pigs 135–7, 158 rats 131–3, 136–7, 151–2 sacrifice 136–7 extensive farming 56–7, 59–60, 64, 74, 77–8, 86–9, 238. See also buffaloes; cattle; chickens; goats; pigs; sheep Ezekiel 29–30 falcons peregrine 164–5, 240–1 slaughter 240–1 fall xxvi, 16–17, 21–5, 78–83, 232, 237–8 farming. See extensive farming; intensive farming Fast Food Nation (Schlosser) 54–5 feminism 7–8, 64–6, 212 feminist ethics of care xii, 1, 4–5, 7–8, 13–15, 237–8 Ferdowsian, Hope and John Gluck 135–6 films Blackfish (Cowperthwaite) 173–4 Fast Food Nation (Schlosser) 54–5 films, non-human animals harmed A Dog’s Purpose, Universal 174–5 Eight Below, Disney 174–5 Electrocuting an Elephant (Edison) 174 The Hobbit (Jackson) 174–5 Life of Pi (Lee) 174–5 Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Disney 174–5 fish 35–41, 238, 245–6. See also cleaner wrasses; cuttlefish; gobies; goldfish; lampreys (murenas); mullet; octopus; salmon; squid; zebrafish angling 161–4, 179, 240–1 animal rights 11 avian flu 58 by-catch 36, 39–40 cognitive capacity 38–9

companion 181–2, 188, 192–3, 199–200, 207–8 discarded fishing gear 39–40 Dory 38 Ecclesiastes 29–30 experimentation 131–2 in films 38, 174 fishing for food 36–7, 72 fishing as sport 162–6, 176–7 food for cats 199–200 food for fish 41 Francione, Gary 6–7 Hosea 29–30 industrial trawling xi, 37–41 intensively farmed xi, 36–41, 59–60, 83–4, 88–9 (see also intensive farming) Job 30–1 leather 92 as live bait 36, 39–40 over–fishing 199–200, 217–18, 221–2 pets (see under fish, companion) Regan, Tom 6, 11 sentience 6–7, 38–40, 61–2 subjects–of–a–life 6 wild–caught xi, 36 n.2, 37–41, 59–60, 238 zoos 228–9 Flaubert, Gustave 177–8 flies xxiii–xiv flourishing xiii, xvii–xviii, xx, 1–2, 23–5 breeding 208–9 bullfighting 172–3 capabilities approach 8–9, 14–15 circuses 173–4 companions 101–2, 180, 181–3, 206–14, 239–41, 244–5 creatures glorifying God xiii, 16, 23, 73–4, 88–9, 102–3, 125–6, 128–9, 157–8, 206, 243 ducks and geese 97–8 Eden 206–7 entertainment 179–80 experimentation 157–9, 180 in fallen creation 21–2, 232, 237–8 farming 23–5, 65–6, 70–1, 73–8, 85–9, 93, 100–1, 126–7, 129–30, 238 with fellow creatures xx–xxi, xxiii–xxiv, 1–2, 9, 13–14, 16, 23, 26, 70–71,

Index of Authors and Subjects 73–4, 88–89, 91, 100–4, 125–6, 130, 157–9, 179–80, 208–11, 231, 243–5 labour 124–30 long life 24–5 mother and baby 53, 64–6, 74, 77–8, 136 mutual human/non-human xx–xxiii, 87–8, 125–6, 180, 181–2, 206–7, 212, 239–40 sheep 93 wild animals 24, 72–3, 88, 91, 101–3, 173–4, 215–16, 231–2, 241–2 foxes xxiii–xxiv arctic xvii–xviii, 103 fur 93–5, 103 hunting 117 foxhounds 192 Francione, Gary 6–7, 11, 203–7 Franklin, Adrian 162–3, 193, 202–3 Frazer, J. G. 190–1 Frederick II, Emperor of Swabia 224–5 frogs xxiii, 228–9 fruit bats Nipah virus 59 Fudge, Erica 211–12 fur 13–14, 91–6, 101–5, 246. See also leather and skin beavers 94 n.17, 95–6 coyotes 95–6 ermine 93–5 foxes 93–5 mink 93–5 otters 95–6 seals 95 Galen of Pergamon 137–8 gazelles 24–5, 232–3 gecko 199–200 geese 45, 91, 97–8, 104 Greylag 188 genetic engineering 75, 132–7, 157, 240, 244 gerbils 198 Lola 205 German Shepherds 175 giant pandas 13–14 gibbons Molloch 228–9 Gillespie, Kathryn 66

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Gilligan, Carol 7–8 Gilmour, Michael 21 n.61, 149–50 giraffes 176, 224–5, 227–8 Marius 227–8 goats 49–50 domestication 110–11 extensively farmed 49–52, 56–7, 59–60, 238 (see also extensive farming) intensively farmed 238 (see also intensive farming) killed for food 36–7, 49 labour 107 leather 91, 107 for milk 36–7, 49 Proverbs 30–1 sacrifice 20–1 slaughter 49–50, 59–60, 86–7 wool 91 gobies 38–9 goldfish 38–9, 192–3 Gompertz, Lewis 68 The Good Samaritan xviii–xx, 27–30 Gorilla (Browne) 225–6 gorillas 1–2 Koko 28 Planet of the Apes (Boulle) 156 zoos 229–30 Graham, John William 142–3 Grandin, Temple 51–2 Gratian 176–7 Great Chain of Being 18–19 greenhouse gas emissions xx–xxi, 57–60, 64, 66–8, 83–9, 92, 241–2 greyhounds 161–2, 168–72, 179–80, 185–7, 192, 240–1 Grier, Katherine 192–3 grouse shoots 161, 164–5, 240–1 slaughter 240–1 grub 3, 12–15, 24–5, 104 guinea fowl 45 guinea pigs 36–7, 101–2, 136–7, 149–50, 198–9 habitats 72, 87, 241–2, 245–6 bees 85–86 deer 219–20 education 235

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elephants 230–1 fish 40–1 human destruction xxv, 58, 219–20, 221–3, 230–2, 234–6 polar bears 222–3 seabed 40–1 Haggai 29–30 Halteman, Matthew 67 n.157 Hamington, Maurice 183–4, 186 Haraway, Donna 87, 184–6, 204–5, 208–9 hares 117, 170–1 mountain 164–5 Harlow, Henry 66 Harper, A. Breeze 69–70 Harrison, John 188 Harrison, Ruth 68 hartebeest 223 Harwood, Dix 224–5 Hauerwas, Stanley 82–3 hawks 65, 115–16, 174, 176–7, 189 sparrowhawks xxiv hen harriers 164–5, 218, 232 slaughter 240–1 Henry IV, King of England 93–4 Herodotus 27–8 Herophilus 137–8 Hinde, William 176–8 Hippocrates 115–16 hippopotamus 175–6, 223 Hiram, King of Tyre 223–4 Hiuser, Kris 26–7 Hobgood–Oster, Laura 175–6, 206 Hogarth, William 3 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 10–11 Hornaday, William 123–4 horses anti–cruelty legislation 68 assistance ponies 115–16 breeding 118–19, 169–70, 199, 201 church 189–90, 241 companion 181–2, 199, 201, 241 experimentation 132–3 human health 115–16 hunting 117, 176–80 killed for food 36 labour 107–8, 115–20, 129–30 leisure (see horses, companion) military and police xv–xvi, 117–18, 122–3, 126–7, 129–30

mystery plays 174 neglect 201 and North American Indians 191 Przewalski xxiv racing 161–2, 168–72, 176, 179–80, 185–6 shows 201 slaughter 169–70 War Horse (Morpurgo) xv–xx, 27 Hosea 26–7, 29–30, 231 hounds 143, 176–7, 188–90 Hribal, Jason 107, 118–19, 123–4 Hugo de Seton 189 human/non-human animal collaboration 108–11, 126, 129–30, 186, 239–40. See also companion animals; dogs; dolphins; drongos; labour; orcas; wagtails; wolves human/non-human animal sexual relations 212 Hume, David 3–4 Hursthouse, Rosalind 4–5, 7, 13–15 huskies 175 Huxley, Thomas Henry 147–8 ibis 228–9 Reunion 216–17 Imutran 134–5, 151–4 indirect duty ethics 1–4 Industrial Revolution 107, 124–5 insects xxiii–xxiv, 6–7 companion 181–2 cyborg 123 harmed in film-making 174 sentient 174 theos-rights 11–12 n.45 intensive farming 5, 54–78, 83–90, 91, 165–6, 216, 238–9, 244–8. See also cats; cattle; chickens; dogs; ducks; fish; partridges; pheasants; pigs; rabbits; sheep Animal Machines (Harrison) 68 Brambell Report 68 clothing and textiles 68–9, 91, 97–9, 104, 239 cruelty 60–2, 67–9, 216, 238 disease 55–6, 58–9, 76–7, 133–4, 197, 238–9 economic impact xx–xxi, 60–2, 64, 68–9, 76–7

Index of Authors and Subjects impacts on humans xx–xxi, 54–60, 66–70, 88–90, 238–9 intersectionality 54–9, 69–70 necessity for human survival 62–3 pollution 57–8, 59–60, 64, 70–1, 83–4, 238–9 Regan, Tom 6 Singer, Peter 5–6 Sistah Vegan (Harper) 69–70 zero–grazing 52–4, 244 intersectionality xx–xxi, 54–9, 66, 167–8, 237–8, 246 in vitro meat 75 Isaac the Syrian 10 Isaiah xxv, 16–17, 20–1, 29–30, 79, 129, 186, 206–7, 231, 239–41 Israel (ancient). See also sacrifice covenant 26–7 fellow labourers 125 killing for food 16–17, 20–1, 72–3, 231 law xxii, 2 Sabbath xxi, 20–1, 125 jackals 29 Jackson, Frederick 167–8 Jeremiah xviii–xix, 29 Jesus Christ xiii–xv Christ the Physician 145–6 crucified Lamb of God 144 The Good Samaritan xix–xx, 27, 29 incarnation xiii, 144–6 and jackass 123–4 mother hen 65–6 neighbours xviii–xxi, 12 –13, 27–31 peaceable kingdom 79–81, 87–8 Placidus’s stag 177–8 reconciled in Christ xiii–xiv, 66–8, 71 Sermon on the Mount xvi–xviii and vivisection 141–6 Job 26–7, 29–31, 231 Joel 29–30 Johnson, Samuel 138–9 Jonah 29–30 Joseph 29–30 kangaroos 91–2 Kant, Immanuel 3–4, 8–9, 12–13, 145–7, 152–3 Kercsmar, Joshua 124–5 killer whales. See orcas

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Kohlstedt, Sally 224–5 Koko 28–9 Kraft, Karen 114–15 Kublai Khan 224 Kymlicka, Will 118–19, 125–6 labour 107–30, 156–7, 179–80, 239–40. See also assistance animals; cattle; companion animals; dogs; dolphins; donkeys; elephants; honeyguide birds; horses; human/non-human animal collaboration; orcas; wolves draught 117–22, 125–30, 239–40 Eden 206 film-making 173–5 intersectionality xx–xxi, 54–56, 104–5, 246 military and police 122–3, 128–9 search and rescue 27–8, 113 slavery 18–19, 29–30, 111–12, 124–5 sport and entertainment 161–80, 240–1, 246 La China 28 LaFollette, Hugh and Niall Shanks 138–9 lambs. See sheep lampreys (murenas) 188 leather and skin 91–2, 99–105, 107, 239, 246. See also buffaloes; cattle; ecology; fish; fur; goats; kangaroos; reptiles; sheep; snakes Lee, Marion (Mrs Henry) 146–7 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 3, 12–15 leopards 16–17, 219, 224–5 slaughter 175–6 Lévi–Strauss, Claude 190–1 Lewis, C. S. 148–50, 156–7, 166–7 Li, Chien–hui 140, 146–7 Ling Ti, Emperor 186–7 Linklater, Richard 54–5 Linzey, Andrew 10, 11–12 n.45 lions and lionesses 24–5, 30–1, 167, 206, 224–8, 232–3 slaughter 162–3, 175–6 lizards 30–1, 96–7, 190–1 llamas 91 locusts 30–1 Lola 205 Louis XIV 224–5 Lucky 116 Ludwig, Edward 230

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Luther, Martin 19 n.58, 65–6, 78–9, 82–3, 176–7, 206 lynxes 224–5 slaughter 175–6 Lyons, Dan 134–7, 151 MacIntyre, Alasdair 23–4 MacKenzie, John 167–8 Magendie, François 139 magpies 43–4 Manning, Henry Edward 140, 146 margays 190–1 Marino, Lori 227 Marius 227 Martel, Yann 226 Martin, Richard 68 Marx, Karl 128 McFarland, Ian xviii–xix McGregor, JoAnn 219 Messer, Neil xviii–xix Michael VIII, Emperor of Palaiologos 224 migrants, human xx–xxi, 54–6, 237, 238–9, 246 Miller, Daniel 27 mink xvii–xviii, 93–5, 102–3 slaughter 94 Mitsy xix–xx, xxiii–xiv, 101–2, 183–4, 186 molluscs 6–7, 39 n.27 Moltmann, Jürgen 26–7 monkeys artificial insemination 66 assistance animals 115–16 capuchin 116 church 189–90, 224, 241 companion 181–2, 190–1, 201–2 deprivation studies 136 Imutran organ xenotransplantation 134–5, 152 mothers and babies 136 Planet of the Apes (Boulle) 156 racism 167–8 rape–rack 66 zoos xxiv Montaigne, Michel de 113–14 Morgan, Jon 21 n.60 Morley, Robert ‘Christ in the Laboratory’ 141–3, 156–7 Morpurgo, Michael A. B. War Horse xv–xx, 27

Moss 183–6 moths, silk 98–9, 104–5 Muers, Rachel 64–6 mules 36–7, 107, 118–20, 123, 189–90, 241 Mullen, Stephen 67 n.158 mullet 109 murenas (lampreys) 188 Murray, Robert 26–7 Newfoundlands 28, 199 Newman, John Henry 144 Niebuhr, Reinhold 80–1 nilgai 219 Nimrod 176–7 Noah Chester mystery plays 174 covenant 19–20, 26, 78–80 Northcott, Michael 30 n.92, 72–3 Nozick, Robert 152–3 Nussbaum, Martha xi–xii, 1, 4–9, 14–15, 23–4, 237–8 ocelots 190–1 octopus 132–3 O’Donovan, Oliver xviii–xix Ogra, Monica 219 orang–utans 156, 228–9 orcas 109–11, 122, 124–5, 173–4 Blackfish (Cowperthwaite) 173–4 ostriches 29–30 otters 95–6, 190 oxen. See also cattle anti–cruelty legislation 68 arable land 62–4 Barth xxii n.24 compassion xvi–xvii, 27, 29–30, 68 domestication 119–20 labour 107, 119–20, 123, 125 military 123 muzzled xxi–xxii, 2, 125 Paul xxii, 2 sacrifice 16–17, 20–1 Oxenham, Henry Nutcombe 145 pacifism 32–3, 80–1, 87–8, 139–40. See also war Paley, William 62–3 Pangur Ban 187 panthers 224–5

Index of Authors and Subjects parrots 181–2, 190–1 partridges 164–5 Patterson, Francine 28 Patton, Kimberley 21 n.60 Paul baptised lion 175–6 muzzled ox xxii, 2, 125 new creation xiii, 16–17, 79 and Thecla 175–6 Pearce, Fred 233 peccaries 190–1 Pepys, Samuel 138–9 PETA 210–11 Peter Sandøe, Sandra Corr and Clare Palmer 210–11 Peterson, Anna 124–5 pets. See companion animals pheasants 31–2, 45, 164–5 slaughter 240–1 The Physiologus 30–1 pigeons 147–8. See doves pigs 24, 35–7, 45–8 avian flu 58–9 boars 24, 45–8, 66, 167–8, 206 castration 47–8, 61–2 cognition 46–8, 182 companion 181–2, 190–1 conflict with humans 219 domestication 45–8, 87, 110 extensively farmed 74 (see also extensive farming) flourishing 24, 45–8, 65–6, 74, 87, 210–11 free–range 74 Imutran organ xenotransplantation 134–5, 152 insemination 66 insulin production 158 intensely farmed 24, 45–8, 59–62, 238 (see also intensive farming) killed for food 36–7, 45–6, 182 labour 107 mothering 65–6 Nipah virus 59 piglets 45–6, 65–6 pig–sticking 167–8 pollution 57–8 (see also intensive farming) processing plants 55–6, 58–9 slaughter 47–8, 54–5

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social behaviour 45–8 sows 46, 47–8, 66, 74, 201–3, 210–11, 244 tail–docking 47–8, 49–50 teeth–clipping 47–8 Visayan Warty xxiv Placidus Legend of St Eustace 177–8 plants 17–18, 25, 30–1, 60–1, 64, 78–84, 99, 206, 220–3. See also veganism; vegetarianism Augustine 25 Barth 81–3 Genesis 17–18, 78–9, 99, 206 Plath, Sylvia 64–5 Plato 62–3, 84–5 Pliny 186–7, 188 Plumwood, Val 13–14 Plutarch 201–3 pollution xxv, 39–40, 57–8, 59–60, 64, 66–8, 70–1, 83–5, 92, 221–3, 234–6, 238–9, 245–6 Polo, Marco 224 Pope, Alexander 138–9 Pope Francis xiv, 202–3, 207 Pope Gregory IX 188 poultry 36–7, 45, 59–60, 65–6, 86–7, 115–16, 190–1, 197–8. See also chickens; ducks; geese; guinea fowl; pheasants; turkeys processing plants 54–6 poverty xx–xxi, 30, 55–6, 69–70, 127, 235, 237 Preece, Rod 131, 140, 148, 150 processing plants chickens 54–6 human workers 54–6, 70, 83–4, 246 meat xx–xxi, 58–9 rabbits 49 prophetic visions xxv, 16–17, 20–1, 29–30, 79, 80–2, 126, 247–8 puppies. See dogs pythons 96–7, 199–200 quails 45 rabbits 49 assistance animals 115–16 breeding 49, 198–9 church 189–90

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companion xxiii–xxiv, 182, 189–90, 199, 209, 211–12 conflict with humans 87–8 flourishing 209, 211–12 Fudge, Erica 211–12 fur 91, 101–2 hunting 176–7 intensively farmed 49, 59–60 (see also intensive farming) killed for food 36–7, 182, 238 Luther, Martin 176–7 processing plants 49 slaughter 49 wool 91 raccoons 190–1 racing animals, sport. See also under dogs; horses Jewish and Christian opposition 161–2 racism xx–xxi, 54–6, 167–8, 238–9 Rainulf, Bishop of Durham 177–8 rams. See sheep rats 123 Black Death 188 companion 199 environmental impact 220–1, 233, 241–2 eradication 220–1, 241–242 experimentation 131–3, 136–7, 151–5 ravens xvi–xvii, 224–5 Rawls, John 3–4 reconciliation. See under creation redemption. See under creation Regan, Tom 2, 4–7, 11–15, 78 n.175, 195 n.54, 213 Reggie 198–9 reindeer 99–100 Replacement, Reduction and Refinement 136–7 reptiles breeding 198–200 companion 198–200, 207–9 environmental impact 199–200, 220–1 experimentation 131–3 in films 174 killed by cats 199–200 killed for skin (leather) 91, 96–7, 103, 239, 246 slaughter 96–7, 103 subject-of-a-life 11–12 n.45

theos-rights 11–12 n.45 wild capture 96–7, 207–8 rhinoceroses 166, 175–6, 228–9 slaughter 175–6 rights, animal. See animal rights Ritvo, Harriet 167–8, 192 robins 206 Rollin, Bernard E. 45–6, 51–2, 95–6, 210–11 Rossetti, Christina 140 Rowan, Andrew 153–4 RSPCA 68, 140, 199 Rudy, Kathy 196–7 Ruskin, John 140, 145–7 Russell, William Moy Stratton, and R. L. Burch Replacement, Reduction and Refinement 136–7 Sabbath xvi–xvii, xxi, 29–30, 125 sacrifice #JeSuisChien 127–8 Egyptian (ancient) 223–4 experiments on human animals 152–3 experiments on non-human animals 136–7, 152–3 Israelite (ancient) xxi, 16–17, 20–1, 72–3 new creation 16–17, 82–3 vivisection 144–5, 147–9 vivisection and C. S. Lewis 147–50 vivisection and the crucifixion 140–5 zoo 223–4 St Agatha (St Gato, St Cat) 206 St Benedict’s Rule 224 St Bernards (dogs) 113 St Birgit 206 St Eustace 177–8 St Fantinus 177–8 St Felix of Valois 177–8 St Francis of Assisi xiv, 81 St Gertrude 206 St Giles 177–8 St Godric 177–8 St Hilda of England 206 St Hubert 177–8 St Jerome 62–3, 206 St Julian 177–8 St Kentigern 206

Index of Authors and Subjects St Kieran 206 St Patrick 206 St Roch 206 St Servan 206 salmon 41, 92 Sanders, Clinton 111–12 Sartre, Jean–Paul 202–3 Scaurus, Marcus 175–6 Schlosser, Eric 54–5 Schweitzer, Albert 81–2 sea cow 217, 224 sea lions 123 seals 28, 39–41, 95 Selous, Frederick Courteney 167–8 Senior, Matthew 224–5 Serpell, James 115–16, 190–2, 201–2 Sewell, Anna 117–19, 124–5 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of 140–1, 145 sharks 27–8, 39–40, 92 sheep 49–51 anti–cruelty legislation 68 branding 59–60 castration 49–51, 59–60, 100–2 compassion for xvi–xvii, 29 and deer 219–20 dehorning 59–60 domestication 110–11 environmental impact 56–7, 219–20 ewes, dairy 49–50 examples of God’s love xvi–xvii experimentation 135–6 export 50–1, 59–60, 100–1 extensively farmed 51, 56–7, 59–60, 74, 87, 238 (see also extensive farming) flourishing 73–4, 87, 91–3, 100–3, 238 intensively farmed 74, 238 (see also intensive farming) Israel as 29–30 killed for food 36–7, 86 killed for sheepskins 92 labour 107, 181–2 Lamb of God 16–17, 144 lambs 49–51, 74, 77–8, 181–2, 238 milk 36–7 mulesing 93, 100–1 new creation 16–17

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sacrifice 16–17, 20–1 St Patrick 206 slaughter 29, 49–51, 59–60, 77–8, 86, 92, 238 tail-docking 49–50, 59–60, 100–1 wool 91, 93, 100–2, 107 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 62–3 Singer, Peter ‘Heavy Petting’ 212 infanticide xviii–xix non–substitutability 10–11 preference utilitarianism xv–xvi, 4–15 Sirach 30–1 skin. See fur; leather and skin slaughter of human animals 19–20, 48, 167–8, 240–1 slaughter of non-human animals 8, 35, 59–60, 72–8, 83–9, 238. See also under apes; birds; cattle; cats; chickens; donkeys; eagles; elephants; falcons; goats; grouse; hen harriers; horses; leopards; lions; lynx; mink; pheasants; pigs; rabbits; reptiles; rhinoceroses; sheep Barth K. 80–3 humane slaughter principles 95–6 Job 29–30 law, ancient Israelite xxi, 16–17, 19–20 Luther, M. 78–9 new creation 20–1 sport and entertainment 175–6 slaughterhouses xxvi, 8, 54–6, 70, 78, 246. See also processing plants slavery, human and non-human animals xx–xxi, 18–19, 29–30, 68, 111–12, 124–5 Smil, Vaclav xi Smith, Adam 62–3 Smith, Jonathan Z. 190–1 Smith, Julia Ann 211–12 snakes 13–14, 16–17, 96–7, 199–200, 206 Solomon, King 122, 223–4 Somerville, Keith 217 sparrowhawks xxiv sparrows xvi–xvii, 29–30 speciesism xv–xx, xxiv–xxv, 4–15, 27–8, 148–50, 152–3 spiders xxiii–xxiv, 12–14, 232–3 squid 132–3, 174–5

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squirrels xxiv, 93–4, 181–2, 189–90 stags. See deer starlings 28 Stevenson, L. G. 145–7 stick insects 181–2 Stinner, Mindy 226–7 Stolba, Alex 45–6 Striffler, Steve 54–5 Stuart, Tristram 62–3 Tait, Peta Wild and Dangerous Performances 173–4 tapir 190–1 tarantulas 13–14 Montserrat 228 Taras and Phalanthos 27–8 Taylor, Chloë 212 Teleki de Szek, Count Samuel 167–8 teleology 23–5, 104 Tennyson, Lord Alfred 140 Tertullian 137–8 Thecla 175–6 Thomas, Keith 188–90, 207 Thompson, William, Archbishop of York 140 tigers xvii–xviii, 174–5, 219, 224–9 Titus 176 Tonka 226–7 Topsell 190 Topsy 174 tortoises 190 Townes, Emilie 247–8 Tryon, Thomas 62–3 Tuan, Yi–Fu 203–7 turkeys 45 utilitarianism xi–xii, xv–xvi, 4–15, 74–6 veganism xxiii, 5–6, 22, 69–70, 86–90, 238–9 vegetarianism xxiii, 62–4, 66–73, 78–90, 131 Barth, Karl 80–1 Vesalius, Andreas 137–8 virtue ethics xi–iii, 4–5, 7, 12–15, 237–8 vivisection 240. See also experimentation Augustine 137–8 Bell, Sir Charles 140–1 Bernard, Claude 138–9

Boulle, Pierre 156–7 Boyle, Robert 137–8 Browning, Robert 140 Buchanan, Robert 143 Christian opposition 137–50, 155, 161–2, 240 Church Anti–Vivisection League 144–5 Coleridge, John 140–1 Darwin, Charles 147–8 Descartes, René 137–8 Galen of Pergamon 137–8 Graham, John William 141–3 Herophilus 137–8 Huxley, Thomas Henry 147–8 Incarnation 144–6 Johnson, Samuel 138–9 Lee, Marion (Mrs Henry) 147 Lewis, C. S. 148–50, 156–7 Li, Chien-hui 140, 146–7 London Antivivisection Society 147 Magendie, François 139 Manchester Anti–Vivisection Society 146–7 Manning, Archbishop H. E. 140, 146 Morley, Robert 141–3, 156–7 Newman, John Henry 144 Oxenham, Henry Nutcombe 144–5 pacifism 139–40 Pepys, Samuel 138–9 Pope, Alexander 138–9 Preece, Rod 140 Rossetti, Christina 140 RSPCA 140 Ruskin, John 140, 145–6 sacrifice 136–7, 144–6, 148–9 Scottish Society for the Total Suppression of Vivisection, Glasgow Branch 146–7 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of 140–1, 144–5 Tennyson, Lord Alfred 140 Tertullian 137–8 Vesalius, Andreas 137–8 Victoria Street Society for Protection of Animals from Vivisection 140 Wallace, Alfred Russell 148 Westcott, Brook, Bishop of Durham 141–3

Index of Authors and Subjects Wilberforce, Basil 140, 145 Zoophilist 145–6 vultures European black xxiv wagtails 109–10 Wallace, Alfred Russel 148 war 139–40, 146–8. See also pacifism against cruelty 19–20 ‘Animals in War’ memorial 128 birds 123 Christian participation in 32–3, 80–1 Dacian 176 dogs 113–15, 128–9 elephants 120–2 horses 117–18, 122 just 32–3, 80–1 Magendie, François 139 slavery 18 spiritual 147–8 vivisection 143, 147 War Horse (Morpurgo) xv–xviii World War I xv, 114–15 World War II 122–3 Webb, Stephen 88 n.204 Wen Wang, Emperor 223–4 Wesley, John 1–2, 80–1 Westcott, Brooke, Bishop of Durham 141–3 whales 129, 227

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White, E. B. 181–2 Wilberforce, Basil 140, 145 Wilberforce, William 68 wildcats 223 Scottish 228–9 Wilson, E. O. 234–5 wolves 16–17, 28, 110–11, 126, 129, 186–7, 218–20 Wood–Gush, D. G. M. 45–6 World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) logo 13–14 worms, silk 91 Wykeham, William 189–90 Yarri, Donna 158–9 York, Tripp 226–7, 230–1, 233–4 zebrafish 132–3 Zephaniah 29–30 zero–grazing. See under intensive farming zoos 175, 223–34, 241–2 Chester xxiv, 228–30 conservation xxiv, 175, 227–31, 233–4, 241–2 euthanasia policy 228 and human identity 225–6 labour 107 Twycross 28 York, Tripp 226–7, 230–1, 233–4