http://www.latimes.com/
Op-Ed: Listen to the pope: Don't cause animals to suffer or die needlessly
By Bruce Friedrich
Does Catholicism require opposition to animal cruelty, including industrial farming?
For two years I taught social studies at an inner-city high school;
for six years I ran a Catholic Worker shelter for homeless families.
Then, almost 20 years ago, I became a full-time animal advocate,
confident that such labor is integral to Catholicism.
As one might expect, I received plaudits from fellow Catholics for
my anti-poverty and educational work but less support for my animal
protection work. Most Catholics I've encountered seem to think of such
do-gooding as fundamentally removed from religious imperatives.
Yet Pope Francis begs to differ.
“Living our vocation to be protectors of God's handiwork,” Francis
wrote in his latest encyclical, “is essential to a life of virtue; it is
not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience.”
On the day Francis released the encyclical, he tweeted, “It is
contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly.
#LaudatoSi.”
Leaving aside the modern method of transmission, this statement is
not actually remarkable. It's a quotation from the Catechism of the
Catholic Church.
But what does it mean that we should not cause animals to suffer or
die needlessly? Surely this admonition demands more of us than that we
not personally injure and kill animals. I'm convinced that we are also
obligated as Catholics to avoid paying others to kill or harm animals,
absent some exceedingly compelling justification.
Put another way, “purchasing is always a moral — and not simply
economic — act.” That line also comes from the encyclical, in a
paragraph in which Francis applauds consumer boycotts focused on pushing
corporations to engage in more ethical practices.
If what we are doing as a society to God's animals is not a sin, what is? -
Thinking about consumer choices in the context of animal rights,
consider that by far the most needless suffering comes at the hands of
the meat industry, which kills about 9 billion land animals annually.
These creatures are treated in ways that would warrant
cruelty-to-animals charges were dogs or cats similarly abused.
Most pregnant pigs, for example, spend their lives in crates so
small they cannot turn around, and more than 90% of egg-laying hens are
crammed into cages where they cannot spread a wing. In such devices,
animals suffer both physical and mental torment.
Chickens on some farms grow so quickly that their limbs and organs
cannot adequately support their massive bodies, consigning them to a
life of constant misery. At slaughter, workers “are literally throwing
the birds into the shackles, often breaking their legs as they do it,”
to quote USDA inspector Stan Painter.
Just try watching one of the videos of factory farming and
slaughterhouses that are readily available online: If what we are doing
as a society to God's animals is not a sin, what is?
No less a moral authority than Pope Benedict XVI denounced
society's “industrial use of creatures” on farms as a violation of “the
relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible.” Or as Francis
put it, “the Bible has no place for a tyrannical anthropocentrism
unconcerned for other creatures.”
In arguing that there is no difference between cruelty to a farm
animal and cruelty to a dog or cat, primatologist (and proud vegetarian)
Jane Goodall declared that “farm animals feel pleasure and sadness,
excitement and resentment, depression, fear, and pain … they are
individual beings in their own right. Who will plead for them if we are
silent?”
Francis could not have said it better, and those of us who take these concepts seriously should see them as a call to action.
For me, not only opposition to factory farming but also a
vegetarian diet is a requirement of my faith. Since I don't need to eat
animals to survive, I believe Catholicism dictates that I must not.
But this is not just an individual concern. Our faith also demands that we take a public stand on behalf of God's creatures.
It would be entirely consistent with the pope's encyclical if the
church positioned itself on the forefront of the animal protection
movement; if it endorsed measures aimed at stopping the worst abuses,
and even announced that the faithful cannot in good conscience cause
other animals to suffer for something so inconsequential as a momentary
gustatory pleasure.
When the church does that, it will begin to fulfill God's promise
of mercy for all creatures, as revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures, the
Christian Scriptures, the Catechism and Laudato Si'.
Bruce Friedrich is director of policy for Farm Sanctuary, a national farm animal protection organization.
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http://paxonbothhouses.
"Pope Francis Links"
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
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