Meat, Morality, and the Silence of the Clergy

By Colman McCarthy

Backed by a major new study, food scientists have put the nation’s nutritional gears into reverse. Low fat or fat-free foods, it is now said, offer little protection against heart disease or cancer. Ice cream is in, skimmed milk is out. Two years ago, it low carbs vs. high carbs. On now to the next food fad.

For a few people, myself included, only two categories of food exist: cruelty-based or cruelty-free. All flesh foods, which include sea foods, involve killing or exploiting sentient beings whose right to live free is ignored, first, by the food industry and, second, by consumers who make meals out of the body parts. An estimated 12 million mammals and birds are killed daily in the nation’s slaughter houses and factory farms, and not counting millions of fish.

Much of the cruelty inflicted on species whose flesh is deemed tasty by humans is unconscious. The killing and suffering is rarely witnessed personally. Who has strolled recently through the kill floor of a meat company as low-paid workers slit the throats of cows and hogs passing on the conveyor belt? The print and broadcast media, reaping billions in ad revenue from flesh-supplying corporations ranging from McDonald’s to Tyson’s, rarely offend their patrons by reporting the horrors of factory farm brutality.

Supermarket meat displays, like the fare of fast food joints, bear little resemblance to the reality of what was once a living being. In “The Sexual Politics of Meat, “ ethician Carol Adams explains the disconnection: “We live in a culture that has institutionalized the oppression of animals on at least two levels: in formal structures such as slaughterhouses, meat markets, zoos, laboratories and circuses, and through our language. That we refer to meat eating rather than the eating of animals is one example of how our language transmits the dominant culture’s approval of this activity.”

Perhaps because they eat animal body parts themselves, few theologians go near the issue. One exception is Rev. Andrew Linzey, an Anglican priest who has taught at the University of Essex in England and author of “Animal Rights: A Christian Assessment.” In “Animal Theology,” one of his many books, he debunks the notion of Thomas Aquinas that animals lack moral status: “A major weakness in Aquinas stems from what appears to be most derived in his thought from Hellenistic sources. Two axioms from Aristotle are taken over almost without question. The first is that humans alone have a rational capacity….The second is that animals have no other purpose save that of serving human beings.”

The utilitarian argument was debunked also by Alice Walker: “The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites, or women created for men.”

Most of the world’s 10,200 religions endorse the 2500 year-old Confucian Golden Rule—“do unto others…” What does “others” mean? Only two-legged upright primates, aka, humans? Or all sentient beings, with none having greater value in the creational mysteries of symbiotic life. As the dominating species, humans easily dupe themselves into believing they are superior to those who are conveniently labeled “the lower species.” Overlooked is the essential sameness: animals may not think or reason as human but they feel pain as humans do. What kind of morality allows the thinking and reasoning species to inflict suffering on another species?

Occasionally a member of the progressive clergy celebrates the October 4 feast day of St. Francis of Assisi with a liturgical blessing of the animals. But how often are the faithful called on to stop eating animals slaughtered in factory farms and not on hand to be blessed?

Think of how much suffering would end if America’s Catholic bishops would condemn the killing of animals for food, clothing, hunting or testing. Think, too, if that were extended globally with a papal appeal.

It won’t be happening anytime soon. Objections to animal rights are routinely and predictably voiced. Animals eat each other, why can’t we? Animal rights means giving them the right to vote? Plants have feelings, should we not eat them either? Should we stop swatting flies? Can you prove that animals feel pain? Why don’t animal rights people stop being so sentimental and focus on bigger problems like war and racism?

With those rationalizations well in place, right-thinking omnivores can go on working for a world of peace and justice—while at mealtime merrily dining on creatures who are given neither.