The Christian Case For Animal Welfare

God loves animals

Many Thomists, like Timothy Hsiao and Brian Besong, are of the view that we have no direct duties to animals. While perhaps we have some indirect duties to them—hurting animals might be bad because it perverts our character—we have no reason to help animals for their sake. When animals suffer, when they cry out in pain, that’s not a genuinely bad thing unless it makes us sad or corrupts us.

(Could we really have no direct duties to this little guy? On this view, if he was tortured to death but it didn’t negatively affect any human, such a thing wouldn’t be genuinely bad).

Fortunately, such a view isn’t universal among Thomists. Friend of the blog Pat Flynn informed me that he thinks animal welfare matters, and the Thomistic case for caring about them has been defended in print. My devout Catholic friend James Reilly years ago wrote an article panning factory farming titled "Dark Satanic Mills," (Catholics tend not to be fans of things that are dark and satanic!) Matthew Scully, a conservative Christian who worked for Bush and Trump, even wrote an entire book titled Dominion about the cruel ways that we mistreat animals, advocating for an end to them.

Ordinary Christians in the pews rarely go as far as the Thomists in holding that animals don’t matter at all, but it tends not to be their issue. Christians in my country are mostly conservative, and they tend to regard advocacy for animal welfare as a left-wing cause that only effeminate socialists care about. They’re against hitting or kicking dogs, but don’t support major institutional reforms to how we raise animals.

I think Christians should take animal welfare a lot more seriously. There’s a lot that can be done about it. Billions of land animals and trillions of sea creatures languish and die painful deaths on the factory farms. They live in feces and filth, caged and mutilated, without enough space to turn around or express their natural behaviors. Chickens are in such horrifying and unnatural conditions that they routinely go insane, attacking the chickens around them, leading to constant brutal injury. On average, hens endure about 300 hours of pain as intense as the most intense pain that the typical human is ever subjected to.

Fortunately, there’s a lot that can be done about it. You can go vegan, but even more impactful than that is giving to highly effective animal charities which can prevent, on average, animals from being caged for five years per dollar they’re given. This frees around one animal from a cage per penny that you give. That’s pretty incredible; if I could free a bird in front of me from a cage for just a penny, doing so would be a no-brainer! But that’s the opportunity that we all have, with every dollar in our possession. If you give 1,000 dollars per year to animal charities, every year, you’ll prevent animals from languishing in cages for 5,000 years!

The position that animal suffering doesn’t matter is really an extreme position. Think about what it’s like to be in really intense pain. It’s bad! And what makes it bad isn’t that you’re smart or are a particular species or have some kind of essence. What makes it bad is that it hurts! So if animals can hurt then we should try to prevent them from hurting. The most detailed report ever compiled found that chickens feel pain, on average, about a third as intensely as we do.

If animals feel pain a third as intensely as we do and their pain matters, then the fact that billions of them are going insane in grotesquely inhumane conditions is very morally serious, that we grind up baby chicks in macerators, that we slice off their beaks without anesthetic, and that half a million birds are boiled alive is morally serious. We’re doing things that would be called torture if done to a dog to billions of animals, and almost no one seems to take it seriously.

Have you ever stepped on a dog’s tail by accident? When you do it, I think you can see that something bad has happened. And it’s not bad just because it made you sad. It’s bad because it hurt and frightens the dog. But if we have no direct duties to animals, then hurting dogs is only bad because of what it does to us. If a dog fell into a blender, so long as no one ever found out about it, on the indirect duties view, this wouldn’t be bad at all.

If we can treat animals however we want so long as it benefits us, then suppose that we could burn live cats for biofuel and this was slightly more efficient than other ways of powering cars. We’d load live cats into cars, set them on fire, and use them to power engines—we could seal up the car so that we aren’t bothered by their screams. On this view, such a thing wouldn’t be immoral, and in fact would be a great idea. But this is nuts.

(Were I to pull a Trump and give my opponents mean names, I’d call Brian Besong, a proponent of such a view, Bonobo biofuel Brian).

In fact, I think this view can’t even account for our intuitions about it being wrong to hurt animals. It’s often said that the reason it’s wrong to hurt animals is because it makes us worse people—many serial killers hurt animals as children. But suppose things went the other way? Suppose that psychologists discovered that hurting animals doesn’t make one any less caring; it’s being less caring that makes people hurt animals. In such a world, on this view, we’d have no moral reason not to hurt animals. But this is deranged!

I think we can see from natural reason that animals matter. But Christians don’t just rely on natural reason, instead relying also on revelation. So, in the words of Tovia Singer, “what’s God’s opinion on all this?”

The Bible is clear that animals matter. It tells us “Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel.” In numbers 22:32, God condemns Balaam for hitting his donkey. Genesis 1:21 describes that “God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.” In Luke 14:5, Jesus argues that pulling an Ox out of a ditch that fell in is so important that you should do it even on the Sabbath, something rejected by many at that time. This isn’t motivated by profit loss from an Ox dying—an Ox won’t die after lying in a ditch for a few days—but instead is motivated by concerns about welfare.

Jesus constantly makes comparisons involving animals. He describes himself as a good Shephard, caring after his people the way a Shephard cares after his sheep. A good Shephard, according to Jesus, cares about his flock not just because they’ll benefit him, but for their own sake. Deuteronomy tells us that “You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain,” and Exodus says “If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying down under its burden, you shall refrain from leaving him with it; you shall rescue it with him.” The Bible is clear: animals matter.

It’s true that the Bible describes God giving man dominion over animals. But dominion just means having power over another. A parent has dominion over children, but that doesn’t mean he can do what he wants to his children. A parent shouldn’t eat his child! In fact, dominion can’t mean we can do whatever we want to animals because when God first grants humans dominion over animals, he commands us to be vegetarians.

It’s true that God later says that we can eat meat. But the fact that we can eat animals doesn’t mean we can treat them however we want. The Bible is against animal cruelty, even if it sanctions meat-eating.

Furthermore, it sure seems like God allowing us to eat animals is his recognition of a non-ideal situation rather than something ideal. Immediately before he permits humans to eat animals he explains “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” This is the rationale behind permitting meat eating; he is making a concession to our wicked nature. That’s why in the eschatological age, when God’s plan is carried out, the wolf and the lamb will lie down together.

Both moral intuition and the Bible are clear: animals matter. The fact that we grind up and cage, mutilate and gruesomely slaughter, debeak and starve, boil and burn, tens of billions of creatures every year is horrendous and something worth doing something about.

(If you’d like to do something about this, I’d encourage you to give to the statistically most cost-effective charities working on the problem).