Care for Animals and Animal Ethics

Apart from being vice president of ASWA, I am on the board of two other faith-based
organisations, Catholic Concern for Animals (CCA) and the Animal Interfaith Alliance (AIA).
These, of course have slightly different remits. CCA, which has a number of Anglican
supporters apart from myself , attempts to spread the word throughout the Roman Catholic
church and at this time is particularly campaigning against bullfighting in Spain, Portugal and
Southern France, but like us takes its ‘genesis’ from Genesis, chapter One. We (human
beings) are merely God’s stewards. Ten years ago, they lobbied the Vatican and were
delighted as we all were by the late Pope Francis’s Laudato si’. The AIA is an attempt to pull
together various faiths, including Christian groups, in a common cause of caring for animals,
both domestic and wild.

Of course care for other creatures is not a monopoly confined to people of faith, but it does
imply an ethical stance, and here an increasingly powerful force is the Oxford based Centre
for Animal Ethics, founded indeed by an Anglican priest, Revd Dr Andrew Linzey, who
continues to run it with his daughter, Dr. Clair Linzey. Apart from campaigning on issues
such as hunting in all its guises, and factory farming, the parent society publishes a scholarly
journal, the Journal of Animal Ethics, as well as books , and sponsors an annual conference
in Oxford. In addition it has a very lively student branch with meetings in all three terms,
many of the participants being passionately involved in animal welfare and conservation.

Although there are some firm ethical lines, such as not killing animals for pleasure by
hunting them, or treating other creatures as commodities as is done in factory farming,
ethical dilemmas confront every one of us. For some indigenous communities, the Inuit in
the High Arctic, for example, and herdsmen in the deserts of central Asia, a meat-based diet
is inevitable, while for others, animals are subject to ritual sacrifice as part of ancient
religious rites. For us in England, however lightly we live on this earth, even a plant-based
diet will displace wild animals, and farming practices often involve violence to habitat; the
keeping of cats increases predation of songbirds, while the pet-food they eat comes from
other animals. The conservation of some species may involve the eradication of invasive
species such as rats. Then there are the ethics of medical research involving animals which is
a far larger industry than it was when John Henry Newman campaigned against it.

We can certainly start by asking ourselves what Jesus did, but as a practicing Jew he would
have participated in the Pascal sacrifice, and from Luke’s gospel we see his parents offering
doves in sacrifice at his birth, and living by the Sea of Galilee his followers were fishermen
and he ate fish, inevitably, as he was part of a particular society. More important for us is his
re-iteration of the beauty of creation and our duty of care. He surely demands of us a like
diligence in our own society, following him and those who followed him most closely in his
gospel of love for each other, and also for everything his Father had made. Jesus preached
that each of us has ethical responsibility for our actions, which surely means giving a high

priority to our duty of care for the only world we have been given to tend and the creatures
with which we share it.

Martin Henig