Step Over a Homeless Man to Feed a Dog (and other things I've never had to do as an animal advocate)

Step Over a Homeless Man to Feed a Dog

(and other things I’ve never had to do as an animal advocate)

by Sarah Withrow King

beaks

The beaks of chickens, turkeys and ducks are often removed to reduce the excessive feather pecking and cannibalism that can arise among stressed, overcrowded birds.

overproduction

To induce greater egg production, farmers shock hens’ bodies into additional egglaying cycles by starving them for several days and keeping them in the dark.

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Toes Toe-clipping is

the amputation of a bird’s toes just behind the claw. This painful procedure is performed to reduce clawrelated injuries to workers on factory farms.

I’ve

been an activist since I was old enough to walk. For most of my life, my passion was poured into the pro-life movement. When I was 4, my parents took me to a pro-life rally at the Idaho capitol building, and our picture made the front page of the newspaper. In middle school, I was president of a drug education club. In high school, I presided over the local Teens for Life group, worked tables for Oregon Right to Life at local events, performed pro-life songs and plays at rallies, and attended packed, statewide pro-life conferences. None of my Christian friends and family ever questioned whether or not the defenseless beings I was working to protect needed or deserved my help. It was (and continues to be) my calling to be a voice for the voiceless, to stand up for justice and life in the face of a culture that systematically finds ways to prevent lives from truly flourishing.

During college, I started to read about factory farming, which is the way that billions of animals that end up on North American plates are raised and slaughtered. My images of happy animals on Old MacDonald’s farm were shattered and replaced with dark new ones: miserable lives all ending in the same nightmarish way, hung upside down on a fast-moving slaughter line, throat slit, waiting to die. I stopped being able to look at the chicken on my plate as food and started to realize that when I ate meat, my meal had stopped a beating heart.

I started to work for animals. I didn’t stop loving Jesus. I didn’t stop advocating for peace and life for humans everywhere. I just started to advocate for nonhuman animals, too. And when that started, so did the pushback: “Aren’t there other things that are more important?” “What about the starving kids in Africa?” “Shouldn’t you work to solve all of the human problems first?” “What, are you going to step over a homeless dude and

feed his dog?”

I understand the concern. One of my closest friends spent a lot of time in foster homes as a teenager. He and houses full of kids without families would be watching TV and hear the familiar Sarah McLachlan refrain as pictures of abused and homeless dogs and cats flashed across the screen.

He still gets pretty fired up at the memory and says he’ll be happy to start worrying about homeless dogs and cats as soon as people start airing commercials for homeless kids. I totally get it. But here’s the thing—if God is calling you to reduce homelessness, dig wells in Africa, fight poverty, minister to the dying, stop sex trafficking, fix a broken education system, reduce gun violence, foster world peace or racial reconciliation, or any other Really Godly Uses of Time, you can do any of that and still help stop cruelty to animals.

One vegetarian saves more than 100 animal lives a year. Period. No protesting, tract-handing-out, quitting-of-full-time-job-level sacrifices required.

Helping animals and helping people are not mutually exclusive propositions.

In fact, they are closely linked.

Meat wastes essential water and grain Eating meat wastes valuable and increasingly limited resources. It takes up to 13 pounds of grain plus another 30 pounds of grasses to produce just a pound of meat.1 You want a pound of animal protein? That’ll use 100 times more water than a pound of plant protein. Studies have shown that up to 5,000 gallons of water is required for every pound of beef.2 That’s what it takes to produce, but what do we consume? In 2011: 26.5 billion pounds of cow flesh.3 In 2012: 35.4 billion pounds of chickens and turkeys4 and nearly 18 billion pounds of pigs.5 These aren’t worldwide figures—this is what we consumed in the United States alone. That means

separation at birth Dairy cows are forcibly impregnated through artificial insemination every year. Calves are generally taken away within a day of being born. Mother cows can often be seen searching and calling for their babies long after they have been taken away.

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billions upon billions of pounds of grain and millions of gallons of water destroyed to raise crops used to feed animals on factory farms.9 Meanwhile, were pumped into animals to produce a limited and costly food source for Oxfam reports that 66 million Brazilians face daily food insecurity.10 These an already fattened populace instead of being distributed directly to hungry, are just a few examples of the global failures of today’s food production thirsty people throughout the world. The World Health Organization reports methods. that “Chronic food deficits affect about 792 million people in the world, including 20 percent of the population in developing countries. Worldwide, God made the whole world malnutrition affects one in three people and each of its major forms dwarfs I think sometimes we forget that God made the whole world, including the most other diseases globally.”6 chickens and the turkeys. I think we forget, because why else would we think Jesus tells his disciples, “When it was okay to do some of the Son of Man comes in his glory, and Most chickens used for meat or eggs never see sunlight or the things we do to animals all the angels with him…he will say to breathe fresh air. Conditions are so crowded from birth to before we eat them? I have those at his left hand, ‘I was hungry and death that they cannot even stretch their wings. a special affinity for chickens, you gave me no food, I was thirsty and so let’s talk about them for a you gave me nothing to drink...Truly few minutes.

I tell you, just as you did not do it to Chickens raised and one of the least of these, you did not killed for their meat on facdo it to me’” (Matt. 25: 31-46). Take tory farms are hatched in a few minutes to read the whole pasdrawers and dumped onto sage and then reread the disturbing the floor of a giant shed facts above. where they stay for two The Global North is often acmonths until they are “fully cused of using far more than its fair grown.” As the chickens share of resources. We vow to change grow, quarters get tighter the kind of light bulbs we use, drive and tighter, and the aca little less, take reusable shopping cumulation of feathers, bags to the grocery store, recycle feces, and urine creates our pizza boxes and water bottles… toxic air and can become these are all valuable changes, but so dangerous that chickthey barely make a dent when we ens get ammonia burns continue to chow down on animals. and workers must wear In the first chapter of Genesis, Male chicks are useless to the egg industry, so they are protective clothing and God prescribes a vegetarian diet for ground up alive or simply thrown away and left to die. respirators to safely enter human and nonhuman animals alike the sheds.11 Chickens natand calls the created world “very urally establish dominance good” (Genesis 1:29-31). In the secthrough pecking orders, ond account of the creation story, God but in such cramped quartells the human creatures to “till and ters, pecking can be quite keep” the garden (Genesis 2:15). We harmful. To prevent this are tilling the garden, but we aren’t natural behavior, workers doing a very good job of keeping it. In use hot blades or wires to the United States about 60 percent of cut the beaks off of baby our pastures are overgrazed, and soil birds. Because we have erosion is accelerating at an unsusdeveloped an affinity for tainable pace.7 The land simply isn’t breast meat, chickens are made to sustain billions of people bred to grow too fast, and relying on a diet of animal products. their legs often cripple beIt would be bad enough if we neath them.12 were wreaking this havoc just on our Egg-laying hens are own soil, but globalization has exported more than cheap and dangerous crammed into cages about the size of a file cabinet. They each have less clothing manufacturing to the majority world. In an effort to keep pace with room than a sheet of paper on which to live.13 They eat, sleep, and defecate the global market and capitalize on an export market hungry for animal in this small space and are unable to stretch their wings. Cages are stacked protein, the Brazilian Amazon has become, according to Greenpeace, the one on top of the other in huge warehouses; you can imagine what that “largest driver of deforestation in the world, responsible for an average of looks, feels, and smells like. Egg-laying hens live this way for an average one acre lost every eight seconds.”8 Greenpeace researchers found that in of two years before their bodies will no longer produce enough eggs to be the 2004-2005 growing season alone, 2.9 million acres of rainforest were worth keeping. Dead and dying chickens are rarely removed.

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The first time most chickens feel the sunshine or breathe fresh air is when they are on the back of a truck, headed to slaughter. To gather chickens for transport to the slaughterhouse, workers walk through the sheds, grabbing birds and flinging them into crates; this frequently breaks wings and legs. At the slaughterhouse, the crates are dumped onto conveyer belts from which workers grab birds and slam their legs into shackles at the rate of 140-180 birds per minute per line.14 Their heads are sent through an electric stunning bath (which often does not render them insensible to pain), and then they are run across an automatic blade, which frequently misses the bird’s throat, maiming them instead. In 2007, 1.5 million chickens and turkeys were still alive when they entered the scalding tank for feather removal, meaning they drowned to death in boiling water.15 While I have focused on chickens, the foundational view of animals as commodities and resulting methodologies are found across the entire industry, and parallel abuses will be found in an examination of cow, pig, or fish farming. What I have described is standard agricultural practice, meaning these practices are common, accepted, and legal. What I have not described are the grotesque abuses exposed by undercover investigations of farms and slaughterhouses by animal advocacy groups, such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and Mercy for Animals.16 Factory farms are only “successful” because they dramatically alter God’s original creative design. We have seen many examples of this in explorations of chicken farming: Birds are unable to stretch their wings; they are denied the small pleasures of fresh air, sunlight, pecking for food, or social interaction; and they are genetically modified to a crippling degree.

Cows, chickens, pigs, and turkeys that would otherwise forage for a variety of foods are given a manufactured diet of grain spiked with antibiotics. To keep pigs from biting one another and chewing on their cage bars, their teeth and tails are cut off. Pigs and cows are castrated without painkillers, and cow’s horns are scooped or burned out of their heads. These acts are not only cruel, they dishonor God’s creative plan and betray our selfish and power-hungry tendency to elevate our own wants and desires at any cost.

The British theologian Andrew Linzey claims that a strong Christology leads to a view of nonhuman animals that doesn’t allow for these types of uses or abuses. “The pattern of obligation disclosed by Christ makes no appeal to equality. The obligation is always and everywhere on the ‘higher’ to sacrifice for the ‘lower’; for the strong, powerful, and rich to give to those who are vulnerable, poor, or powerless.”17 Jesus came to us as a humble servant (c.f. Mark 10:45, John 13:1-20, Acts 3:13, Philippians 2:5-9). Consider again the passage from Matthew 25—what we do to the “least of these” we do to Jesus. When we are in positions of power, we are called to serve.

The Good Samaritan One striking example of the power of service is in the story of the Good Samaritan. When the story begins, Jesus is teaching a small crowd. A lawyer asks Jesus how he can inherit eternal life. We’re told the man is testing Jesus, who responds as a teacher does, with a question: “What is written in the law?” The lawyer answers, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus commends him, but the lawyer pushes back: “And who is my neighbor?” In this context, we hear of the man who was traveling a dangerous road and overcome by robbers. He is passed by a priest and a Levite (examples of highly respected citizens) before the Samaritan stops, is “moved with pity,” and saves him from certain

"THE OBLIGATION IS ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE ON THE ‘HIGHER’ TO SACRIFICE FOR THE ‘LOWER’; FOR THE STRONG, POWERFUL, AND RICH TO GIVE TO THOSE WHO ARE VULNERABLE, POOR, OR POWERLESS." death. Jesus asks the lawyer which of the three was a neighbor. The lawyer answers, “The one who showed him mercy,” and Jesus tells his listener to “Go and do likewise.” In this story, the hero is the person who crosses the road and saves the life of another—and he is a Samaritan—a no-class, unclean, bottom-of-the-barrel foreigner. 18 Through the lens of this parable, through the lens of Jesus, “neighbor” is not social location but action—and specifically love in action. Using a Samaritan to illustrate neighborly love was a game-changer in 1st-century Palestine. It was astounding to think that a barbaric Samaritan could demonstrate love, and unthinkable to cross the rigid cultural boundaries that prevented showing mercy or friendship to the “other.” Perhaps it is just as astounding to consider crossing rigid species boundaries to extend mercy and friendship to nonhuman animals. But consider that as each era passes, humans realize past injustices (slavery, child labor, the subjugation of women, the wanton abuse of natural resources) and work to rectify them.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is not the only place Jesus makes the outrageous claims to expand our circle of compassion and care (remember “Love your enemies”?). We are to respond in love to those who persecute us, who want to murder us and our families. How much more is our obligation to respond in love to the vulnerable creatures God has placed in the world alongside of us?

Theologian and ethicist Daniel Miller points out that “granting neighborly love to animals does not lead to a diminishment of the Christian’s capacity to love human neighbors.”19 Indeed, doesn’t our capacity for communion with God and neighbor, and our ability to freely respond to injustice in our world, demand from us care rather than cruelty?

Jesus didn’t ask us to love some times and hate other times. Jesus didn’t ask us to be merciful when it was convenient and to turn a blind eye when we felt uncomfortable. Jesus didn’t ask us to categorize and prioritize and show love to the top first—and then to the bottom if we had any energy left at the end of the day. Jesus didn’t ask us to have the bleeding victim of greed answer a three-part questionnaire to determine his worthiness before intervening on his behalf. Jesus tells us that neighborly love is merciful love, regardless of the giver or the recipient, and that we are to go and do likewise.

HELPING ANIMALS AND HELPING PEOPLE ARE NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE PROPOSITIONS. IN FACT, THEY ARE CLOSELY LINKED.

(Editor’s note: You’ll find the endnotes for this article at PRISMmagazine.org/endnotes.)

Sarah Withrow King is deputy director of the Sider Center and an MTS student at Eastern University’s Palmer Seminary. She lives in Philadelphia and believes that peace begins on our plates.

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