A Pilgrim’s Digression

Quite by accident, I stumbled across the website for a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, Matthew Scully. He has written a book titled Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. In it, he makes a powerful argument against cruelty to animals from a Conservative Christian viewpoint.

Primarily, his argument is from the Christian perspective, which makes it neither Conservative or Liberal, but rational and ethical. In fact, if you read some of his other articles on his website, you find that the defining quality of his thinking is not the bigoted reasoning informed solely by political gain we have come to associate with Conservatives, but pure, powerful logic.

One wonders what happened to all this levelheadedness when Scully sat down to write for the President.

Although animal rights activists have been making moral arguments for the justness of their cause since the beginning of the movement, it is Scully’s Christianity which provides a new angle on this old debate.

Scully writes,

No one who does not profit from them can look at our modern factory farms or frenzied slaughter plants or agricultural laboratories with their featherless chickens and fear-free pigs and think, “Yes, this is humanity at our finest—exactly as things should be.” Devils charged with designing a farm could hardly have made it more severe. Least of all should we look for sanction in Judeo-Christian morality, whose whole logic is one of gracious condescension, of the proud learning to be humble, the higher serving the lower, and the strong protecting the weak.

When he writes of how our Agriculture and Animal Science departments at state Universities are now trying to engineer featherless chickens to defray the cost to “farmers” of plucking them, I thought of Margaret Atwood’s science fiction novel, Oryx and Crake (an excellent read; I highly recommend it). In that novel of the end of humanity, scientists have genetically engineered what can only be called living chicken breasts. Since the breasts are the only part of the bird that matter, these horrific, raw, but living chicken breasts are grown on enormous factory farms. At the time I read the novel a year or two ago, I did not think much of Atwood’s prediction. From what Scully writes, it now appears we are half-way there to the point where we only raise the part of the animal we want to eat.

Ultimately, Scully makes his case from the standpoint of justice and morality, which he finds to be indistinguishable from the issue of “rights.” Conservatives typically base their argument against protection for animals from the standpoint that animals are lower in God’s order than human beings, thus they have no rights. It’s true that people were given dominion over the animals, but as Scully points out, this does not make men and women mere figurehead monarchs. We have responsibilities towards animals, responsibilities charged by God.

As Scully frames it, the problem is that merely recognizing this responsibility not to be cruel is not good enough. It lets us off the hook, because those who claim they recognize their obligation inevitably come to argue over “precisely how much is mandatory and how much, therefore, we can manage to avoid.”

If one is using the word “obligation” seriously, moreover, then there is no practical difference between an obligation on our end not to mistreat animals and an entitlement on their end not to be mistreated by us. Either way, we are required to do and not do the same things. And either way, somewhere down the logical line, the entitlement would have to arise from a recognition of the inherent dignity of a living creature. The moral standing of our fellow creatures may be humble, but it is absolute and not something within our power to confer or withhold. All creatures sing their Creator’s praises, as this truth is variously expressed in the Bible, and are dear to Him for their own sakes.

Animal rights is an issue I have reflected on, in a haphazard way, all my life. I remember once when I was a small child, I kicked our pet dog. My Dad whipped me for it so I would know how the dog had felt, and afterwards I lay on my bed crying. After a little while, my Dad let the dog into my room, and he jumped onto my bed and licked me in the face.

That was a powerful moment, a life-changing moment. I could not define it in quite these terms then, but what I had experienced was the mercy of God through my dog. My dog had shown me the love and forgiveness I had withheld from him. Ever since that day, I have been sensitive to animal cruelty.

The issue has raised itself in my mind at various other points in my life as well. When I was a High School librarian back in 2000, I bought a copy of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, the primary text of the Liberal wing of the movement. I had every intention of reading it for the three years I worked in that library, but I never read beyond the back cover. I may decide to give it another go now.

My wife and I have also been thinking and talking about ways in which we can change our own habits to reflect a more ethical view of the treatment of animals. For some time now, we have been buying organic products, from dairy products like eggs and milk to vegetables and fruits. In place of some meats, we substitute Boca burger. On the other hand, pork chops are still a regular feature of meals at our house. We have pork at least once a week, I’d guess; chicken and fish are also staples, and bacon and sausage are also still on the menu for breakfast. So I embarrassingly admit that we do have quite a way to go before our eating falls into line with this new ethic we’re trying to live.

I also wonder about the growing “organic” sections of local chain supermarkets. When I was in college in the mid-nineties, the organic market in Morgantown, West Virginia, was a co-op run by hippies, from whom it was rumored one could also buy some organically grown marijuana. Today, Krogers has an entire aisle devoted to organic foods, and there are organic products elsewhere in the store, as well. Furthermore, many ancient producers of pre-packaged foods are now coming out with “organic” lines of their same old products. I noted the other day that Ragu now has an organic spaghetti sauce. I put two jars of it in my shopping cart.

While it might seem to be unrelated to the issue of animal cruelty, the issue of organic foods is intimately tied to both the unethical business practices of large corporations, and to consumer guilt which leads us to buy food we believe to be healthier or to reflect business practices that are more humane. The question is, are we being fooled? When I buy Eggland’s Best “organic eggs,” what exactly am I buying? The website for Eggland’s Best says only that the hens that lay the eggs are fed “the patented Eggland’s Best hen feed.” I have no clue what that hen feed is, and conspicuously absent from the website is justification for the claim that the hens that lay the eggs are not caged. Under the link for Quality Standards, there is no mention of how the hens are treated. “Quality” refers only to the eggs, specifically with regards to the health of humans, not to the quality of life or health of the hens.

The “Organic” label is probably controlled by the FDA, though how strict the regulations are on its use, I don’t know. However, the FDA does not regulate the use of the term “natural” for example, and when you think about it, “organic” is hardly less universally applicable. If everything under the sun can properly be termed “natural,” then most everything grown or raised for human consumption can be termed “organic.” Even those raw, living chicken breasts in Margaret Atwood’s novel are organic.

Apparently, the FDA did issue some guidelines for the use of the term organic, as detailed on the website in a press release from 2000. It’s interesting that the issuance of these guidelines roughly coincides with the sudden appearance of more and more “organic” foods in ordinary supermarkets. I would be interested to know how strictly the FDA is enforcing its guidelines, and whether any food maker has been prosecuted for falsely marketing a product as “organic.”

In the meantime, I’ll probably continue buying organic vegetables, “cage free eggs,” and organic milk, just because they are labeled “organic.” Matthew Scully’s call to conscience is one we all ought to heed, in whatever small ways we can. However, the corrupt greed of industrial farmers and the companies that market their products doesn’t leave me hopeful that I am actually making a difference, and maybe I am even being played for a sucker.

What else can I do, however? In the end, living Christianity is about making a difference one soul at a time, starting with our own.