For the sake of the animals we eat, for the sake of our own health and safety, it’s time, come November, to pass Proposition 2, the California Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act.
You may consider it blasphemy, but it matters more to me that you vote “yes” on Proposition 2 than who gets your vote for president.
Millions of animals on industrial farms in California are depending on you to deliver them from unspeakable cruelty. They have no vote.
If you think this isn’t a religious issue, think again. Yes, as humans we are allowed to eat animals — at least from a Judeo-Christian perspective.
The subject index in my new Green Bible, which highlights passages related to animals and nature in green, cites Deuteronomy 14:3-6 as a list of animals that may be eaten. In Acts 10:12-15 is the vision of Jesus’ disciple Peter, which revealed all animals to be edible.
In a post-resurrection story in Luke, Jesus eats fish. As a Jew and a rabbi, it’s likely he ate meat, at least at the Passover meal.
But as Pope Benedict XVI pointed out while he was known as Cardinal Ratzinger, “We cannot just do whatever we want with them.” Not morally.
In his essay, “A Religious Case for Compassion for Animals,” Matthew Scully quotes the Pope: “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.”
A hard copy of the essay is available from the Humane Society of the United States or you can download a PDF copy from www.hsus.org/ religion/resources. The examples mentioned by Benedict XVI only scratch the surface of repugnant factory farming practices.
Pregnant pigs and veal calves are kept in metal pens so small they can’t turn around. They stand in their own filth.
Hens are confined in battery cages that prevent them from spreading their wings. Male chicks — useless for egg production — are suffocated to death by the thousands.
I’ll spare you more gory details. They are easily found on the Internet.
