Guest Post II: Catholicism and "Animal Rights"

Hello! This is Tabby's second ever guest post, originally written for an ethics class I'm currently taking.

We spoke in class today about animal rights, specifically the utilitarian basis for secular animal rights (a la Peter Singer), and the Catholic critique of this basis. Now, the Catholic critique is not predicated on a simple disinterest in the welfare of animals--many Popes, even in the 19th century, were involved with the SPCA--but is instead directed towards the faulty basis of the secular notion of "rights" in the first place, a notion rooted in an erroneous belief that nature is just so much matter, and comprised of discrete, autonomous "things"--ironically the very same notion that leads to a devaluing and instrumentalization of nature. Rights in this case means that we as individuals have a right to retain our complete freedom and autonomy. If this is accepted, Peter Singer's argument is compelling because human beings under this argument are not qualitatively different from animals--they are just more highly refined by evolution. Singer argues that if rights are granted based on autonomy, animals should be granted full rights, while brain-dead patients (and presumably fetuses in an early stage of development, or possibly at every stage of development) should not. The Catholic response is that we humans do not possess autonomy from each other, from nature, and most importantly from God; and rather than being highly evolved creatures that are otherwise no different from animals, humans are specially made in the image of God.

This view has been accused of being anthropocentric (it is), and thus of rendering Christians blind to the suffering of non-human creatures. But I don't think that has to be the case. In fact, a recognition that pure autonomy is a myth contributes to humanity's responsibility towards creation. Singer's argument suggests that healthy humans and animals are independent, while injured humans on life-support are not--but that is completely untrue, and most obviously so when animals are considered. God's charge to humanity to exercise "dominion" over nature is not simply a divine command--it is the way reality actually works. Human beings do have dominion over nature, whether that is because we are made in the imago Dei or because our evolutionary position put us there (possibly both). Animals are dependent on humanity to a certain extent, especially in the modern world, and acting as if humanity can separate itself from them to grant them their "rightful" autonomy is a delusion. JPII speaks of this when he criticizes "ideologies which consider it unlawful to interfere in any way with nature," ideologies which leave "man in 'fear' of his freedom." But once one recognizes nature's dependence on humanity--and humanity's responsibility towards nature, because ultimately it is God's, not ours--one sees that the need to protect animals fits perfectly into JPII's notion of a "culture of life." It is a "culture of death" that treats animals like they are pieces of machinery, simply cogs in the great engine of our economy. A culture of life would protect animals because it is our God-given duty to do so. As John Henry Newman once preached, comparing the helplessness of animals to Jesus's helplessness as the Lamb, "there is something so very dreadful, so satanic in tormenting those who have never harmed us, and who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power, who have weapons neither of offense nor defense, that none but very hardened persons can endure the thought of it." This is the same sort of language John Paul uses when referring to the culture of death's freedom of the strong over the weak.

But then, you might argue, even if Catholicism might support the welfare of animals, it is so anthropocentric that veganism could never be supported by it. Certainly no one could say that the blunt act of eating meat or dairy is some sort of mortal sin; after all, Jesus ate meat and fish. But the factory farming industry is certainly a "structure of sin," to use JPII's phrase, and the way we treat animals in the modern world is blatantly sinful. Beyond the environmental, economic, and health reasons for not eating meat, I think the levels of instrumentalized animals we are required to upkeep to sustain the demand for meat and dairy in the modern world means any non-vegan diet in developed nations (anywhere the farm is involved in this system) is necessarily participating in one of the very structures of sin that JPII believes sustains the culture of death. Many people (including me) have tried to get around this by buying organic or free-range meat, or dairy from a farmer's market, but even these sources of animal products are forced to participate in the structure of sin in many ways--when cows are mated by a dairy farmer with bulls to produce the offspring necessary to sustain the farm, where do you think the bulls end up going? They are most frequently sold off to another factory farm that will end up butchering them to produce even more red meat. Worse, extra calfs are often sold off to be used as veal calfs. And organic and "free-range" all too often is just a ploy of the meat industry, and doesn't actually provide substantially improved conditions for the animals.

It is no innovation to suggest that Catholicism condemns factory farming--multiple Popes have spoken out against it, including Benedict XVI when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger. In 2002, when asked about the issue, Ratzinger said, "That is a very serious question. At any rate, we can see that they are given into our care, that we cannot just do whatever we want with them. Animals, too, are God's creatures . . . Certainly, a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible." And though the Catholic Catechism suggests that resources should not be spent for the protection of animals if they could be spent for the protection of humans, veganism doesn't require the spending of resources--just the withdrawal of one's voluntary support from a structure of sin. In fact, this structure often encourages unsanitary and dangerous conditions for the human workers involved as well as for the animals--another thing JPII explicitly condemns in Evangelium Vitae.

So, is it okay to eat meat and dairy if you have your own farm in the middle of nowhere, and treat your animals fine? I think it would be better, not sinful, but still not ideal. For one thing, it would be again perpetuating the myth of autonomy to think creating some perfectly autonomous farm separated from the structures of the world is really possible. Second, there are Catholic reasons not to eat meat even beyond the evil of factory farming--the accounts of the eschatological kingdom in Scripture envision a world without death, even the death of animals. Hosea 2:18 speaks of a new covenant between humankind and animal ("Then I shall make a covenant on Israel's behalf with the wild beasts, the birds of the air, and the creatures that creep on the ground, and I shall break bow and sword and weapon of war and sweep them off the earth, so that my people may lie down without fear"), and Isaiah specifically uses the lion and the calf lying down together as an example of how there will be no death on God's holy mountain. Just as in Eden there was no carnivorousness, the eschatological kingdom will return humanity and animals to a state in which they do not need (or feel the need) to consume each other in order to survive. So there is another reason not to eat meat and dairy, an eschatological reason--veganism is a foretaste of the kingdom of heaven. Fasting from flesh (and dairy in the Orthodox tradition) is not just an exercise in self-depravation; there are theological reasons why meat is what traditional Christians are told to abstain from. As John Berkman, a moral theologian at the Catholic University, concludes, "the question of general abstinence from animal flesh is one of many questions the resolution of which depends on the extent to which one has a realized (as opposed to a yet unrealized) eschatology and the extent to which one believes that one can embody the coming Kingdom of God in one's present life."

In fact, Berkman's "The Consumption of Animals and the Catholic Tradition" provides a much better summary of veganism in terms of the Catholic tradition than I am writing here, so I urge anyone interested in this topic to read it (it originally appeared in Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 1.7, but it's accessible online if you have access to Project Muse). Berkman mostly focuses on the eschatological and ascetic reasons to abstain from animal flesh, but recognizes that the moral debate over meat is different in the age of factory farming, specifically making reference to Evangelium Vitae to support his position. Berkman concludes "that although Catholicism has never been a 'vegetarian' religion, it has always concerned itself with appropriate eating practices, especially the significance of abstaining from animal flesh. Furthermore, Catholic theology is certainly compatible with, and arguably encouraging of a diet that perpetually abstains from animal flesh. The medicinal, ascetical, and eschatological forms of reasoning for abstaining from animal flesh move Catholics toward living excellently through the disciplined training of their bodies, the practice of virtue, and harmony—to the extent possible—with an eschatological vision of our God's world." This conclusion is not predicated on a secular utilitarian view of rights, but a view rooted in the very culture of life JPII argues for in his encyclical.

It's true that Christians tend not to care about animal welfare, but that's not because they start from an anthropocentric worldview--if it's just Christianity that is the problem, why haven't Peter Singer's arguments caught on more fully with those who are ardently secular? The reason both Christians and secular people alike tend to ignore animals is because animals are weak, and because it is so easy to become inured to the structures of sin that, yes, Evangelium Vitae warns against--structures that obscure humanity's vocation to protect the weak, human or otherwise. To end with a quote from Proverbs, "A right-minded person cares for his beast, but one who is wicked is cruel at heart."