Genesis says that God gave man dominion over the earth and its inhabitants. Some Christians take this to mean that we can do whatever we want – good or bad. People who believe this are also frequently adherents of the ‘prosperity gospel’ – grab as much money as you can because wealth is a sign of God’s favor – while poverty and sickness are signs of a broken faith.
But most mainstream Christians cleave to a traditional theology, which holds that God’s gift of dominion has a concomitant duty to take care of His creation – in much the same way that the pater familias’ dominion over his household comes with a duty to protect its members. Bearing that in mind, it is profoundly un-Christian to torture animals. But that happens in feedlots and slaughterhouses every day.
It doesn’t mean we should all become vegetarians – after all before supplements, vitamin B-12 was only available from animal products – but it does mean that Christians should tend to animals with a Christian philosophy. So what would be the consequences?
It is a secret in plain sight that our methods of animal husbandry do not take into account the animal. Traditional husbandry let the animal eat food it was designed to eat and live in the manner conducive to its well being – there is hardly a more American image than beef cattle grazing on the open range. So why don’t we do it that way anymore? Because it costs more, of course.
American agricultural technology has brought tremendous benefits; once poor people risked hunger and starvation, today it is hard to imagine that that there would be widespread deaths from lack of food. But the dark side of this technological miracle is that the cost of producing a calorie of food has been so reduced that the health risk comes from too much food, not too little – as evidenced by American’s expanding waistlines.
If we raised our food animals with Christian precepts of kindness and charity, if we let our animals roam free and eat as nature intended, it would make meat more expensive, but in all likelihood it would taste better and have more nutrients. People would eat less but better food. Call it the Christian diet for better health – after all our body is supposed to be a temple.
It’s not just Christianity – most religions place great stock in the relationship between man and food. Many of the religious dietary laws may seem capricious to us. But in the days before refrigeration and our understanding of food pathogens many of the rules came out of the ancients’ observations of the effects of food on people.
Many animals eat other animals, but it is only man who practices animal husbandry. We can chose to do the right – and Christian – thing; benefitting both us and the animals, or we can continue down the path we are on.
A few thoughts on hunting
Animal rights activists generally abhor hunting, and I would generally agree that hunting for sport is cruel. But as long as we eat animals, hunting is the most humane way of bringing food to the table. Take the Northeast; there are large populations of deer that live exactly as their instinct tells them to. They go where they please, eat as they want – with suburban gardens that is quite a cornucopia – and produce more deer. Once a year – during hunting season – they are in some jeopardy. But unlike animals raised to be slaughtered they have a significant chance of living another year.
In fact ask yourself if you would prefer to be a beef cow, raised to be eaten and killed at about 15 months, or a deer in the wild, who, in the fall, has the possibility of being shot but for the rest of the year lives as nature intended?
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