Where is the human compassion for Animals at
Christmas
Lanka WebShenali D Waduge 2013-12-26
December 24-- Except Buddhism
and Jainism all other religious festivities are celebrated by
denying the life of animals. Buddhists and Jains are the only
religions that has festivities without culling animals as sacrifice
or for food. Celebrations for Abrahamic religions of Christianity
and Islam means to slaughter animals and deny them their right to
life so that human beings enjoy their right to rejoice. Thus
throughout the year, every celebration has meant millions and
millions of animals being slaughtered to be consumed as
food.
The 5th commandment says
‘you shall not kill’ does this then not refer to animals? The Roman
Catholic Church permits and supports slaughter of animals for food.
If animals are created by God, just as man is, where does it say
that animals are to be sacrificed? How did the RCC determine that
animals were created to be consumed as meat? Is it because the
Church excommunicated vegetarians in the 6th century AD? Those who
became vegetarians in order to save animals from slaughter were
sent to hell to suffer everlasting torment while those who tortured
animals were rewarded with heaven.
The Church supports
stockbreeding which is also a key component of environmental
pollution as an enormous amount of greenhouses gases are released
from the livestock industry which are 18% higher than what issues
from transportation. These greenhouse effects eventually causes
floods, hurricanes, droughts and other forms of disasters we see
rising all over the world. The Church should seriously address
their role in helping these disasters by encouraging stockbreeding.
It may be a better option to encourage compassion towards animals
as it would also save the environment. Moreover, consumption of
meat has been the cause of a rise in a number of diseases amongst
humans and these are affecting people’s health and their
purses.
What does Christmas
means for animals?
Approximately
20million turkeys are killed in the UK each year and around a third
of them are slaughtered for the Christmas table. Britain’s biggest
turkey producer processes 100 birds a minute in the run-up to the
festivities
The majority (90%) of
turkeys reared for their meat are kept in windowless sheds, with
some containing as many as 25,000 birds. Turkeys have to endure a
number of routine mutilations, such as beak trimming and toe
cutting. Beak trimming is mostly carried out to prevent or control
behaviour which could result in injury. It involves slicing off
about one-third of the beak, usually with a red hot blade when the
turkey is around five days old (breeders may be de-beaked again at
14 to 18 weeks). This can be extremely painful for the bird and
studies on de-beaked chickens have shown pain to be prolonged and
perhaps indefinite. The natural lifespan of a wild turkey is around
10 years, but they are normally slaughtered between 9 and 24 weeks
old, depending on the size of bird being produced.
Around 9.8 million pigs were
slaughtered in the UK in 2011. 2m Pigs are reared primarily for
bacon, ham, pork and sausages. Sows are first mated when they are
six to eight months old, with the majority of sows in the UK being
serviced by artificial insemination.
Geese are bred for their
meat, feathers and fat, with around 15 million geese and ducks
killed in the UK in 2011
In all, 62 billion animals
died to feed Americans in 2010.
Over a lifetime,
this amounts to 16,000 animals per meat eater.
An article written
by Deborah Jones titled ‘Christmas without cruelty’
http://www.all-creatures.org/gcm/articles-christmas.html
calls upon people to refrain
from killing animals
"What a witness it would be to the
birth of the Prince of Peace if all Christians were to desist from
colluding in the slaughter of millions of fellow sentient creatures
– and replace the 'Christmas' turkey/goose/duck with a perfectly
delicious vegetarian alternative.’
Her message is one that all
Christians may like to read:
But the Bible has to be seen
in its entirety. It has been put together as a collection of
writings with a beginning, a middle and an end. Creation and the
Garden of Eden mark the beginning; the coming of Christ on earth is
the central event; and finally, there is the revelation of a new
creation, when Christ will come again at the end of time. The
natural world, so damaged by sin and destruction, is to be
wonderfully renewed and the original harmony restored ‘at the end
of time’. This new creation, the kingdom of God in its fullness, is
to be one of justice, love and peace.
A sign of that kingdom to
come is to live as if it were already here – in other words, to
live lives of justice, love and peace. To take part in the
deliberate killing of any part of creation, especially for the
excuse of simply ‘liking the taste’ of a dead animal or bird, is a
sign, not of the Kingdom, but of this fallen, sinful
world.
One principle which most
people, Christian or not, would support is that we should try to
ensure that the least harm is committed in the world, the least
violence inflicted and the least stress and pain suffered as
possible. So it is consistent to propose that, where plants can
serve human need, plants, not animals, should be destroyed for
food.
The refusal to kill and eat
animals has a long Christian tradition. The early monastic movement
embraced total abstinence from meat. The monks modelled their
lifestyle on Jesus’ forty day sojourn in the wilderness, which he
spent peaceably in the company of ‘the wild beasts’. As Athanasius
said of Antony of Egypt: ‘His food was bread and salt, and for
drinking he took only water. There is no reason even to speak of
meat and wine, when indeed such a thing was not found among the
other zealous men.’ St Ambrose’s homilies on Genesis included the
following exhortation: ‘We ought to be content to live on simple
herbs, on cheap vegetables and fruits such as nature has presented
to us and the generosity of God has offered to us.’ Such a modest
life-style would also be good for the environment and for enabling
more of the world’s poor to have enough to eat. It would even
benefit the health service, as the over-consumption of meat, dairy
and fatty products is one source of poor health in the prosperous
West.
In terms of rights, I
propose that the right to choose to eat animals simply for
pleasure, for taste or by convention should give way to the duty to
preserve the life of animals; and the right to produce animals for
meat should give way to the duty to provide sufficient healthy food
for the world’s entire human population. For anyone who does claim
the right to kill animals for food, Dr Marie Hendrickx, a leading
Vatican theologian, asks:
"Does the right to use animals for
food imply the right to raise chickens in tiny cages where they
live in a space smaller than a notebook? Or calves in compartments
where they can never move about or see the light? Or to keep sows
pinned by iron rings in a feeding position to allow a series of
piglets to suck milk constantly and thus grow faster?"
The birth of the
Christ-child at Bethlehem inaugurated a whole new creation: the
Kingdom of God to be experienced in its fullness by the whole of
creation. In acts of loving-kindness, in gentleness, in beauty, in
compassion, we can glimpse facets of this new creation. Let us
celebrate Christ’s birth in a manner consonant with the values of
the Kingdom; let it not be the cause of yet more suffering, more
blood shed, more cruelty. Let this year see a bloodless, happy
Christmas for all God’s creatures. We can pray that this is
so.