Language

Today was the first day of Animal Planet. It was even better than I expected. In high school I took a class that was very seminar based that focused on lot of human rights issues. This class has the same sort of feel – except that it focuses on animal and human rights, and that all of the students want to be there. I struggled with my class in high school because only about fifty percent of the students had prepared for seminar each class and only half of them would actually participate. I can already tell that this class is going to be much different.

In class today we watched a short clip of a French philosopher talking about the word “animal”. He claims that simply using the word animal is offensive and violent. Lumping all non-human living things together is a crime. I had never thought about this before. It made me think of words that humans use to lump certain groups of people together - often insensitively. For example, when someone references an Asian person, they might say "that Chinese person" assuming that the person is Chinese. That person could easily be of a different Asian descent such as Japanese, Taiwanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc. By lumping groups together, you loose the sense of the individuality and the intimacy of knowing the identity of another person - or in this case, the animal.

Immediately I thought about the Bible and human's relationship with animals through scripture. I was brought up Catholic and believe that scripture is the true work of God. However as I have gotten older, I have begun to realize that scripture can be misinterpreted, taken to an extreme, or not followed at all.

Pertaining to animals specifically, scripture tells us that humans have complete domination over animals.

28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Genesis 1:28

Adam was also given the duty of naming all animals. The fact that all the animals have a name is significant. It means that they are individual species, not just “non-human”. By calling them “animals” it lumps them all together. Animals have names because they are different from each other. WE are technically animals, even though we may be religiously given power over non-human animals.

When God granted Adam the responsibility to name all the animals, it implies intimacy. Not only is the animal an individual, but there is an inherent closeness when naming something. It is often said that it is harder for a child to give away a pet when it has already given it a name. The dominion that Adam was granted was not a tyrannical dominion, but rather the dominion of a shepherd. I believe that God gave humans dominion over animals so that humans would care for them and respect His creation.

Whenever I have thought about or discussed vegetarianism in the past, I have always thought it was not for me because I am Catholic and God gave me the right to eat animals. I now realize how narrow and closed minded this thinking really is. In no part of the Bible did God grant humans the right to drag turkeys hung upside down by their legs through scalding baths completely conscious as Foer describes in his novel, Eating Animals. In no way does God condone the treatment of chickens when they are crammed by the tens of thousands into tiny shacks. And certainly I would hope God does not tolerate humans dismissing these acts as “okay because humans are superior”. Yes, animals may have been created so that we can use them for food. But they also enrich the earth, provide us with companions, and demonstrate God’s power and creativity. We can eat them, but they absolutely do not need to be tortured in the process. That does not reflect the intimacy that God bestowed upon the relationship between animals and humans.