The recent (Wednesday, January 27, 2010) death of 26-year-old Kansan Daniel Shaull in Portland, Oregon, who set himself afire downtown outside a fur store to protest the wanton and callous cruelty of the fur industry and of those who buy from fur stores and who engage in supporting the fur industry, has promoted much discussion on the Internet.
Man Sets Himself on Fire at Portland Fur Store
A man set himself on fire Wednesday outside Ungar Furs in Portland, Oregon. After dousing himself with gasoline, he attempted to enter the store, shouting “There are animals dying! Animals dying!” After police extinguished the flames, he was taken to Legacy Emanuel Hospital where he later died. The man was identified as 26-year-old Daniel Shaull from Kansas. Among the local activists I have spoken to, none are familiar with Shaull by name, nor recognized him as being a part of the active, long-running campaign against Ungar Furs. Yet the location and witness reports strongly indicate this man sacrificed himself to bring attention to the horrific treatment of animals on fur farms…..
http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/man-sets-himself-on-fire-at-portland-fur-store/
2. The Defendants have literally gotten away with murder…
The courts are no friend to underdogs. They are ostensibly objective, but ultimately, they exist to protect the “rights” of the rich and powerful to bully the rest of the world, including the poor, minorities, immigrants, the working class, and, last but not least, nonhuman sentients and those who fight for them. Grand juries, which are often witch hunts and sometimes violate their victims’ Constitutional rights by imprisoning them indefinitely without charging them with a crime, and stalking orders, which are becoming frequently employed tools of judicial over-reach and creative law enforcement, are the repressive measures of choice that the corporate-state is using to attempt to intimidate and shut-down legal, above-ground animal rights activists….
http://gahc.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/the-defendants-have-literally-gotten-away-with-murder/
Nuancing this sacrifice correctly is going to be a challenge to the AR movement, particularly activists in Portland because, even though Daniel may have wanted to the horrible things being done to animals (albeit rodents, we're often reminded), the attention has been on the burning of oneself.
Ethicists always focus; we focus on the (statistically-frequent) cruel interface between humans and nonhumans for whom some uses, often trivial and indefensible uses, have been invented.
We abolitionists don't separate defensible and indefensible human uses of others against their willful consent; many consequentialists do such a conceptual distinction.
Daniel, who may have said to others that he was going to 'do something' that day and had previously expressed that the (social) world is not as it should be (he has the world's religions and ethical philosophies backing him up there), still seems to have decided and acted on his own (and even his father commented in one interview that his son had never presented himself to his family as being an animal rights activist, though he had presented himself as being troubled about the state of the (social) "world" around us that was filled with so much wanton cruelty.
Whatever solutions we offer need to be adopted as sustainable solutions (such as abandoning ALL animal wearing - I suggest for items other than shoes, though we know quite easily that we can do without leather shoes) and recognizing the personhood of nonhumans - rather, acknowledging that what makes each of us humans persons is something that is not unique to us - individual corporeality, complex nervous systems that coordinate as individual self-aware selves capable of complex outlooks on the world and complex emotions regarding other persons, including persons of other species (demonstrated, WE think and many others think, too) in nonhumans widely.
However, the attention has been reassigned to Daniel's mental status, a mental status that IMHO remains fully capable of recognizing when something is dreadfully wrong with how one class of humans (from whom we expect moral accountability) treats another class of beings (who are structurally marginalized by the society of the dominant species).
This needs the kind of attention that will NOT marginalize or dismiss the atrocity of their even BEING industries of animal exploitation and abuse and will NOT let the definition of the situation drawn tightly around one individual's presumed mental status (a designation made by a relative, not a mental health professional).
"I'm not a big fan of self-sacrifice" in any way, and I've commented often in public spaces to that effect, but some desperation is triggered when society's moral condition reaches such overt depths of depravity that we wear bodies of tortured animals as symbols of status and glamor and pride.
The longstanding issue is NOT the mental status of Daniel Shaull; it's (a) the grave injustice of animal exploitation and abuse AND (b) the moral depravity of a species who, beyond all consequentialist calculations, continues to abuse where there IS no defensible rationale.
This is the year 2010. Are YOU still eating and wearing dead animals? [If so, grunt !] It's time for a profound change in our understanding of our moral relationships with self-aware persons of all kinds, not merely symbolic readjustments or the same-old same-old dismissive marginalizations.
Labels: animal rights, animal-rights, animals, animalsuffering, anti-fur, compassion, cruelty, mental health, protest, speciesism
# posted by Maynard S. Clark @ 1/30/2010 02:21:00 PM
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I have long thought that personalism is an ideal conceptual or philosophical 'vehicle' for expressing per-personal (and thus pro-animal) sentiments conceptually, abstractly, philosophically. The later Peter A. Bertocci, a well-known Personalist, taught at Boston University. He is often cited in papers about complex moral matters, particularly about sex and love, but the moral status of the person in distributed moral obligations is a concern for principled persons of all kinds, including those of us with profound respect for personhood in every species.
Peter Anthony Bertocci
May 13, 1910-October 13, 1989
Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy, Boston University, where he taught for thirty-one years. B.A., Boston (1931); M.A., Harvard (1932); Ph.D., Boston (1935). Dissertation: The Empirical Argument for God in Late British Thought (published in 1938 by Boston University Press; advisor: Frederick Robert Tennant - the process metaphysician).
Other books include
The Human Venture in Sex, Love, and Marriage (1949);
Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (1951);
Free Will, Responsibility, and Grace (1957);
Religion as Creative Insecurity (1958);
Sex, Love, and the Person (1967);
The Person God Is (1970); and
The Goodness of God (1981)
On This Site:a
Materialism: Failing before Life’s Challenges
In 1951, Bertocci wrote:
“. . . no matter how narrow the gap between the chemical and the living becomes—and discoveries about the nature of viruses and colloids do indeed narrow that gap—we must remember that the gap is a qualitative and not a spatial one. Suppose we consider the colloids the ‘missing link’ between living and dead matter. This may impress our minds with the wondrous continuity of degree between one order of being and another. But let us take a closer look. Has the gap between life and matter really been crossed, let alone explained? Even though a colloid may reproduce as living things do, it otherwise behaves like a chemical. But a cell acts throughout like a living being and not like a chemical. The fact still remains that when life appeared,life appeared. . . . This collocation of events, this close interrelation of living and nonliving beings, is an opaque fact unless we postulate a purpose which uses one order as an aid to the continuance of another. Obviously this appeal to a broader purpose will not explain how the food enters the stomach becomes part of the living blood, bone, nerve, and brain. Any biochemist can give us the sequence, but he is as silent before this fact of transmutation as we are. However, we’re not trying to introduce a Purposer to describe what science has not so far described; here we seek to explain the harmony between two orders of being, the harmony between two differing and interacting qualities of existence. We are seeking a view which, far from denying established scientific facts, will allow them to fit into a broader scheme which decreases the mystery. What mystery? The fact that living beings should appear and be so closely interconnected with nonliving beings—especially if all there was to begin with was the nonpurposeful, nonliving, nonthinking hustle and bustle of units of energy. . . .”
“. . . Our interest here is to emphasize the greater coherence which comes into our thinking if we consider the interrelation of the physical universe and life and the developing evolution of species as the handiwork of a creative Intelligence intent on producing a world rich in life, and, in the existence of man, rich in mind and value. The evidence so far adduced enables us to envisage a Mind which is responsible not only for the ultimate physical preparations for life but for the first appearance of life in its many forms and for the additional mutations and variations discovered by our scientists.”
Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 1951, pp. 333-34, 337 (italics in the original).
Fifty years later, the atheist Antony Flew wrote:
“[We may now know] how—by evolution through natural selection—one or more very primitive kinds of organism evolved into the enormous variety of species now known either still to exist or to have existed during some period in the past. But that is a very different thing from knowing the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life or even of any life. For, so far as I know, no one has as yet contrived to produce any plausible conjecture as to how even the most primitive kind of organism with a disposition to reproduce and thus to expose itself to natural selection might have evolved from a mixture of the many kinds of complex molecule which are now known to be required for that construction. [My italics; Flew has been dealing with these issues for over fifty years.]
“Conway sees here a threefold challenge to the materialist, of which I consider two of the elements to be much more formidable than the third. The first of these two is to produce a materialistic explanation for ‘the very first emergence of living matter from non-living matter. In being alive, living matter possesses ateleological organization that is wholly absent from everything that preceded it.’ The second challenge . . . is to produce an equally materialist explanation for the emergence, from the very earliest life-forms which were incapable of reproducing themselves, of life-forms which a capacity for reproducing them-selves.”
Review of David Conway, The Rediscovery of Wisdom, Philosophy, January 2001, p. 161.
Posted October 13, 2007
Labels: animals, Boston, materialism, metaphysics, nature, personalism, personhood, philosophy, predation, religion, religious, speciesism, teleology
# posted by Maynard S. Clark @ 1/16/2010 11:50:00 AM
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Unlike World Vegetarian Day (October 1, which is happy and festive), World Day for 'Farmed Animals' (October 2) is more morose, on the spirit of remembering genocides and holocausts because of the sheer needless tragedy of meat production in the modern world. Labels: animals, cruelty, ethics, suffering, tragedy, vegan, vegetarian
# posted by Maynard S. Clark @ 10/02/2009 09:53:00 AM
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Why not just email me at Maynard.Clark@GMail.com?
The Harvard Crimson's blog article on yesterday's "Is Eating Animals Ethical?" debate
http://www.flybyblog.com/2009/09/12/peta-debate-on-tolstoy-and-bonzai-trees/#more-4137
PETA Debate: On Tolstoy and Bonzai Trees
Published by amcleese on Saturday, September 12, 2009, at 9:07PM
There's a lot of irony here. Bullhorns. Resemblances. Soak it in.
Most Harvard students eat meat. And most Americans probably think of
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals as an extremist group.
You wouldn’t have known it at the debate the Harvard College Vegetarian Society organized this afternoon between Wesley N. Hopkin ’11, a social studies concentrator and member of the Harvard Speech and Parliamentary Debate Society, and Bruce G. Friedrich, vice president of policy and government affairs for PETA.
The most heated dispute concerned our own Harvard University Dining Services. Hopkin praised HUDS: “They are moving in the right direction,” he said. “We can, generally speaking, eat meat or eat meat products with a relatively clear conscience even now.”
Friedrich responded sharply. He noted that HUDS buys eggs from cage-free farms, but said that is the only bright spot. “Eating meat in HUDS when they are doing nothing for farmed animals, and eating meat in the real world, in any restaurant around here,” he said, “for people here who said you do eat meat: that is unethical.” Get the skivvy on Hopkin’s response and more after the jump.
Throughout most of the debate, though a slim majority of the packed Science Center audience admitted to eating meat, Hopkin conceded Friedrich’s arguments about the immorality of being a carnivore in today’s world. PETA seemed downright reasonable.
Hopkin and questioners from the audience rarely presented compelling reasons to dispute the main thrust of Friedrich’s well-supported argument. The PETA leader argued that facts overwhelmingly show that eating meat is bad for the environment, for the world’s poorest, and for the conscious experiences of animals. Instead of disputing Friedrich’s figures, Hopkin and others raised abstract intellectual questions heard in Social Studies 10 and “Justice”: How can we compare animal pain with human pain? And can animals be a part of the social contract?
Friedrich’s argument, by contrast, was direct and sure of its moral clarity. Throughout the event, he peppered his arguments with colorful quotations from celebs and intellectuals alike:
From Paul McCartney: “It’s staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty.”
From Leo Tolstoy: “Vegetarianism is the root of humanitarianism.”
And from Cameron Diaz, on eating bacon: “It’s like eating my niece.”
Hopkin, the subtle debater, conceded that today’s factory farming practices are “unconscionable, and should not be permitted.”
Instead, he wondered whether better farming techniques could ever create a world in which eating meat was ethical. He advocated an approach to animal rights that focused on the social contract instead of utilitarianism, and on leveraging consumer power to work for better farming practices instead of abstaining from eating meat.
During the question and answer session, Harvard’s lofty minds posed provocative questions:
Is it ethically permissible to eat the meat leftovers of your friend sitting across the table at dinner?
How anthropocentric is the social contract, after all?
Cuteness aside, can we kill kangaroos in the barren outback of Australia?
And: is it morally responsible to own a pet—or should you buy a bonzai tree?
Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons
Labels: animal-rights, animals, bioethics, diet, ethics, Harvard, PETA, public opinion, speech, vegan, vegetarian
# posted by Maynard S. Clark @ 9/13/2009 11:18:00 PM
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A critique of Vegan Outreach literature
Popular utilitarian welfarist group, Vegan Outreach, maintains that in order to help non-human animals now, we must adopt a strategy which aims to reduce suffering, regardless of means. However, there are critical inconsistencies, misconceptions, and outright misuses of terminology which undermine any real benefit to non-human animals. Despite their self-designation as a “[…] nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing animal suffering by promoting a vegan lifestyle,” Vegan Outreach in fact hinders veganism with notions of extremism and promotion of reductionism or vegetarianism.
Veganism as Extremist
Vegan Outreach states in their 2009 “Why Vegan” pamphlet:
Being vegan isn’t about being perfect or pure—it’s about reducing suffering (14).
The 2002 version states:
Being vegan isn’t about avoiding a list of ingredients […] (14).
The 2008 Guide to Cruelty-Free Eating furthers that veganism can be difficult:
[…] especially if you try to change too fast or hold yourself to too high a standard. The important thing is to do the best you can (30).
It’s a good thing that society doesn’t hold the same low standards for rapists. It would be great news for molesters everywhere if they could avoid moral obligations by simply doing the best they can.
Remember: Continuing to eat cheese while avoiding meat and eggs does much more good than scrapping the whole idea because you can’t be completely consistent (Guide to Cruelty-Free Eating 30).
The implication in the above quotes is that veganism is somehow difficult, unobtainable, militant, or even utopian. Rather than defining veganism as a moral refusal to participate in violence or the absolute baseline required for taking the exploitation and use of non-human animals seriously, veganism, is instead framed as one of many opportunities for reducing suffering. In effect, this statement refutes the moral necessity of veganism and opens the door to reductionism. If veganism isn’t about being perfect or pure, what’s the harm in sneaking a donut with your morning coffee?
Sneaking that whey-tainted donut might be acceptable for Vegan Outreach:
For instance, it can be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to shun every minor or hidden animal-derived ingredient. More importantly, avoiding an ever-increasing list of these ingredients can make us appear obsessive, and thus lead others to believe that compassionate living is impossible. This defeats our purpose: ending cruelty to animals!” (Guide to Cruelty-Free Eating 2008: 24)
Apparently having moral consistency and absolute abstinence against an evil is obsessive. Does the same go for child abuse, rape, murder, or cannibalism? Would it be acceptable to beat a child to avoid appearing obsessive? Is it impossible to completely abstain from beating a child? Of course it is, and there’s nothing obsessive about holding abstinence from violence and wrongdoing as the absolute baseline.
Vegetarianism and Reductionism as Progress
We can already see progress in just the past decade—public concern for farmed animals’ interests and condemnation of factory farms, as well as more vegetarians, near-vegetarians, and vegetarian products (A Meaningful Life: Making a real Difference in Today’s World 2008: 14)
Is reductionism and vegetarianism really progress? Is the underlying moral injustice being addressed if we continue to participate in non-human animal use? Is the focus on factory farms and the ignoring of exploitation in “humane” farming progress?
Despite the organization’s name, “Vegan” Outreach, the organization is merely an animal advocacy organization which utilizes veganism as one of many tools to reduce suffering:
In order to prevent the most suffering, it’s important we each take an approach we can sustain. After reviewing this booklet, some people may decide to go vegan immediately; others may choose to eat fewer animal products and explore more vegetarian meals. […] …veganism is best viewed as a tool for reducing suffering (Why Vegan 2009: 14).
The notion of veganism, vegetarianism, and reductionism as mere tools is perhaps most evident in their publication and distribution of the “Try Vegetarian!” pamphlet:
[…] eating vegetarian is likely the most effortless—and enjoyable!—way to have a profoundly positive impact as often as every day” (Try Vegetarian 2003).
As an organization that openly advocates vegetarianism, is it really appropriate to operate under the name, “Vegan Outreach?”
Vegan Outreach’s 2008 “Guide to Cruelty-Free Eating,” intended for meat eaters, vegetarians, and vegans alike, presents a results-based approach:
When you first discover the reality of modern animal agriculture, avoiding all producers from factory farms might seem too big a change. But don’t be overwhelmed—just take small steps. For example, you could eliminate meat from certain meals or on certain days. As you get used to eating less meat and find alternatives you enjoy, it may become easier to eliminate meat altogether (Guide to Cruelty-Free Eating 2008: 3).
As a vegan outreach organization, it seems strange that veganism is not promoted as a baseline, but here, reductionism is suggested to be morally acceptable and consistent. Furthermore, this statement specifically targets factory farming. Support of “humane” farming, then, could logically be assumed by readers to constitute a “small step.” After all, it’s all about reducing suffering, right?
Ultimately, living with compassion means striving to maximize the good we accomplish, not following a set of rules or trying to fit a certain label. From eating less meat to being vegan, our actions are only a means to an end: decreasing suffering (Guide to Cruelty-Free Eating 2008: 3)
Can reduction of suffering ever truly be accomplished and can abolition of non-human animal use ever be reached so long as so-called vegan organizations maintain that the exploitation of non-human animals is sometimes acceptable?
For every person you persuade to become vegetarian, dozens of farmed animals will be spared from suffering each year! (A Meaningful Life 2008: 23)
The argument that vegetarianism somehow makes a real difference for non-human animals is an empirical fallacy. There is no continuum whereby vegetarians necessarily progress to veganism. Further, vegetarianism does nothing to challenge the property status of non-human animals. Often, vegetarianism causes more suffering than it reduces in that many vegetarians simply replace non-human animal flesh with non-human animal excretions. Milk, eggs, and other non-flesh non-human animal products involve far more suffering than that of flesh.
Veganism as the Moral Baseline
Vegan Outreach posits:
The question isn’t, “Is this vegan?” but, “What is best for preventing suffering?” (Guide to Cruelty-Free Eating 3)
The answer to that question is: “GO VEGAN.” Veganism is the only moral choice if we truly want to reduce suffering, respect the moral standing of non-human animals, and ultimately reach total abolition of non-human animal use. There’s nothing hard about it, there’s nothing obsessive about it, and there’s nothing inconsistent about it.
More About: abolition · animal rights · welfarism
Labels: abolition, animal rights, animal-rights, animal-welfare, animals, critical thinking, cruelty, diet, diet and nutrition, health, meatless, suffering, vegan, vegetarian, welfarism
# posted by Maynard S. Clark @ 9/06/2009 11:23:00 PM
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Harvard Public Health graduate student
Stella Zhou becomes a Brighter Green Associate. Stella's interests include population-level bioethics, animal rights, and the relationship between public health and diet. A Chinese citizen, Stella hopes to use her degree to reinvigorate the bioethics curricula used in Chinese Universities. Brighter Green looks forward to working with Stella and gaining from her fresh insights.
China: Animal Welfare on the Legal Docket
July 26, 2009 8:58pm
In future, a different destiny?
China has drafted it first Animal Protection Law. At present, Chinese animal law covers wildlife only. A team of experts headed by Chang Jiwen, director of the
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Social Law Research Department, is looking to change this. On June 15, 2009, state media reported that the team finished drafting
China’s first Animal Protection Law. According to the draft, severe cases of animal abuse, such as the
hauling of cats from all over China to Guangdong Province for a Cantonese delicacy of
shui zhu huo mao or water-boiled live cats, can result in the jailing of violators. Lighter punishments include fines of up to 6,000 yuan ($877.50) and detention periods of 15 days or less. The draft also proposes implanting data chips in pets as a means of controlling stray populations, and improving farm animal welfare through the adoption of humane breeding, transportation, and slaughter practices.
In August, the draft law will be published to solicit public opinion and will be submitted to various government departments by year-end.
Repeated accounts of animal abuse reported by the Chinese media have spurred on the legal drafting team’s work. In 2002 for example, a student from Tsinghua University poured sulphuric acid into the mouths of Beijing zoo’s black bears. In 2005, a graduate student from Fudan University abused 30 stray cats, gouging out their eyes and eventually killing them. More recently, in 2006, a group of teenage girls in high heels trampled a number of cats to death, supposedly for fun. An Internet uproar ensued and the events sparked off heated ethical debates.
While China’s animal lovers responded eagerly to news of the draft law, critical voices were also heard. “We’re unable even to take care of the numerous poor, let alone animals. Let’s talk about human rights first!” was a common public response. Some went further, accusing the scholars and activists of blindly emulating the West and pointing out the hypocrisy of “animal welfare,” as the animals are ultimately killed regardless of how humane the slaughter.
In an interview with CCTV, Professor Chang, head of the drafting team, responded to such criticisms. He stressed that the team sought to craft the law in accord with the actual conditions for animals in China, with anti-abuse (that is, punishing the infliction of unnecessary pain on nonhuman animals) forming the basis of the law. Professor Chang admitted that it while it is currently unrealistic for China to mirror Western standards of animal welfare, he detailed step-by-step measures to improve Chinese animal welfare that can be implemented within the next two decades.
A final version of the draft law will have to go through the State Council, China's highest executive organ, and undergo three readings at the National People’s Congress (China's national legislature) before taking effect. Every change in life presents its own set of challenges. Such difficulties are inevitable, but are never reason enough to avoid action. This draft presents the Chinese people with a plan detailing not only better animal treatment, but also reforms to industrial animal agriculture systems and rural labor. The "humane" path will encounter roadblocks in China, but it is an important route to the future.
Labels: animals, China, Chinese, species, StyellaZhou, vegan, vegetarian, ZhouYing
# posted by Maynard S. Clark @ 7/27/2009 09:54:00 PM
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On my refrigerator is a refrigerator magnet from folk song artist Jay Mankita, for his melodic and memorable album, 'Dogs are watching us." He talks about their trust in us (unlike cats, some might add; others have inspired the trust and love of one or more cats, but that's a different day's posting). Some of us may find this topic mildly to moderately offensive (some may find it greatly or even profoundly bothering or offensive). It's an obvious takeoff from the song 'God is watching us' which gave many folks pause in the face of an unsettled society in multifactorial upheaval.
Others might think, well, if God is not vegan or even vegetarian (think of all the omnivorous animals in the creation and the deadly 'food chain' observation, even if some of us are exempt, as perhaps the stewards - we humans - who can honor God in the respect of loving all creation (a la NT scholar and professor Richard Alan Young: Is God a Vegetarian?), then at least (omnivorous) dogs CAN be (and should be, for ethical reasons.
Others object, but though cats need taurine (which CAN now be synthesized in a lab (it's good to be gifted with the neurological complexity that enables rational behaviors AND rational analysis, which can lead to the social construction of scientific method and scientific results which reshape society according to socially desirable HUMANE values), (omnivorous) dogs clearly CAN be not merely vegetarian, but also vegan.
The watershed book in the Vegetarian Dogs (and possibly! cats) movement was Dogs and Cats Go Vegetarian by the co-authors whose surname rhymes with EDEN: Barbara Lynn Peden (who did most of the journal research, I'm told; she is now a folksinger, I'm told) and her former husband, James Peden, who in the divorce got full rights to their shared book production AND VegDog & VegCat and empire (he had a paying job on the side and could sustain the D&GV 'empire' (enterprise) ("Harbingers of a New Age"), and she, claiming no extra-corporate skills of her own (though she had done most of the journal research and networking), left with little in the way terminated employees often do, with no IP rights to the work they have done along the way. Jim has since written new literature and a new chapter in the re-released book. In this light, one ought to read the book about Little Tyke, the vegetarian (not vegan) lioness, sold by the American Vegan Society (she died from being overstressed and overexposed on television as a celebrity - read 'oddity' or 'curiosity')
Blaming PETA in the recent media blitzes about vegan - read that again - not vegetarian but VEGAN dogs AND CATS - are those who (IMHO rightly) are concerned that some animals are, when not technically assisted with periodic lab-derived supplementary doses, suffer - read that again - SUFFER. However, the question persists, particularly in a Christian (read Genesis: God gave the animals the world; there was no DEATH (thus no killing for food) in Eden (rhymes with Peden).
More broadly, in monotheistic, Abrahamic 'traditions' of receiving the common literature of Genesis, the problem remains. Mohammed reported taught that 'it is better to drink milk than to eat meat', and while not PROSCRIBING the eating of meat (forbidding or teaching that it is wrong), there is remarkable tolerance in some branches of Christendom and Jewish practice, and even calendared encouragements of it (for its spiritual and 'meditative' or devotional benefits - as in Lent or in PRAYER AND fasting, etc.). Some monastics are largely or always vegetarian in some branches of Christendom. Dissident NON-MONASTIC groups have been suppressed, but often for doctrinary (not doctrinaire, but doctrinary - related to teaching or 'doctrine') or 'non-subscribing' (to doctrine) reasons.
What concerns me, though, is the philosophical problem of thinking inductively in the present world (as we all must) and committing oneself to a loving, rational (and both all-wise and all-knowing AND all-powerful) Deity, known among the uninitiated as God, though sometimes and by some through more personal names, quite reverently thought.
God has an interest in our intentionality - our behaviors - deliberate and unintentional
Some ways of being ourselves behaviorally and mentally are better (or at least less objectionable) than other behaviors. Some secular folks agree to this much; not all do.
In Genesis we are given stewardship in the sense of caring for all life; from this our (a) ecological and (b) humane AND (c) sociological stewardship obligations are derived.
In terms of our spiritually-derived public policy contributions, how can we endorse (let alone mandate) that we OR others care for animals - and humans, too - and the ecosystem in ways that trade off the well-being of some for that of others, even if mathematically one is numerically or quantitatively better.
Further, we’re helped along in this reflection by the prophecy of Isaiah, where the predatory rests with the herbivore, and there is no more exploitation of one (type) of the other (type), nor of one (type) by the other (type).
So, is keeping carnivorous animals, even pre-existing animals BEFORE any possible PHASING OUT of carnivorous animals by massive spay-neuter programs, ethically tolerable, particularly for those who derive at least part of their moral reasoning and rationale from Biblical sources and indirectly from others who also derive their thinking from those Biblical sources/texts?
Searching for vegan-friendly pet food is laudable in general, but specifically in light of this contextual reflection, that somehow, in the process BEFORE God becomes 'All in All', we ought to live in light of the eschaton, the hope of which (perhaps the Indwelling spirit, would be a foretaste or earnest (like earnest money) of one's spiritual inheritance, a life in a world of no more violence, for which righteousness we are to hunger and thirst (and surely our food would be characterized by having no violence).Labels: animals, bible, biblical, eden, eschatology, evolution, hope, predation, reproduction, spay-neuter, species, survival, vegan, vegetarian
# posted by Maynard S. Clark @ 4/26/2009 06:40:00 AM
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And leave the kangaroos alone.
“No, it is NOT ethical to eat animals!”