The Dirt on Humane Washing

This article was originally published by Farm Forward and is reprinted here with permission.

For decades the American public has been subjected to rampant greenwashing, from ads about "clean coal" to "green" labels on toilet paper made from clear-cut forests. Now Farm Forward is peeling back the labels on meat, dairy, and egg packages to reveal a dangerous new trend that is growing in scope and sophistication within our food supply: humanewashing.

[Farm Forward’s] new campaign video takes on the meat industry's increasingly deceptive claims and warns shoppers that simply finding a "humane" label on a product doesn't make it so. Instead, these labels are often industry-driven humanewashing tools: efforts to market animal products to conscientious consumers through deceptive packaging and labeling, promoting the illusion of animal well-being while concealing the extent of animals' illness and suffering. 

While the most basic of these tactics take from the form of "all-natural" or "free range" labels, even independent welfare certifications have become embroiled in the dirty business of humanewashing. In Farm Forward’s latest report, published on the heels of the organization resigning in protest from the board of the nation's largest independent welfare certification, Global Animal Partnership (GAP), Farm Forward reveals that by putting their stamp of approval on factory-farmed products, certifications, too, are likely deceiving shoppers and betraying the animals whose welfare they are charged with overseeing. 

The Grim Reality

With an ever-expanding array of product labels and marketing confronting shoppers, it's hard to know who and what to trust—but we all know what we want the labels to mean: in 2014, for instance, Consumer Reports found that 79 percent of all shoppers expect humane labels to guarantee outdoor access for animals, and 92 percent expect inspections to verify these welfare claims.(1) In reality, though, the smiling cows and hens on grocery store shelves belie the harsh reality for 99 percent of farmed animals: factory farming.(2) The chart below sums up what leading claims and certifications mean.

Peeling Back the Labels

But what to make of all those certification seals and check marks that you see on products? Certifications fall into three categories: First, there are schemes created by meat industry groups like the National Chicken Council that merely obfuscate standard factory farming practices behind an authoritative-looking seal. Then, there are those certifications run by organizations that appear to be watchdogs but are in fact deeply embedded with the industry: American Humane Certified (AHC), whose standards condone practices like crate confinement of mother pigs and dehorning of cows,(3) and the new One Health Certified (OHC) created by the nation's sixth largest poultry producer, Mountaire Farms, which embodies greenwashing, healthwashing, and humanewashing, all rolled into one.

The final category of certifications are independent certifications like Certified Humane and Global Animal Partnership (GAP). These labels can provide meaningful welfare improvements: both certifications, for instance, require environmental enrichments for chickens, prohibit debeaking birds and routinely tail docking pigs, and require cage-free housing for laying hens.(4,5) However, while describing themselves as "humane," these certifications offer tiers of welfare, meaning that only some animals live on pasture. The vast majority of the products they certify actually come from animals with unhealthy genetics who were raised in total confinement. 

Some of the most basic and least-considered welfare provisions, like those listed in the chart below, are simply incompatible with factory farming and are often left unresolved by even the most stringent certifications.(6) The reality is that the certified "better" meat dominating grocery shelves is still cruel and overwhelmingly derived from genetically modified, unhealthy animals.

Join the Movement for Truth in Labeling

Humanewashing fools us into paying higher prices for factory farmed products. So how can you shop according to your conscience? Fortunately, as our Food Choices page explains, with some effort, we can seek out those rare products that meet a minimum standard most of us expect: animals free to roam on pasture. For many shoppers, centering plants on their plates is easier than decoding the sea of deceptive labels at the grocery store to find the few products that align with their values.

Just as important as eating according to your values, you can help us stop the dirty business of humanewashing where it starts. Supermarkets stock what their customers demand, so let's tell them to do better. Next time you're shopping, ask the meat department manager to start offering more pasture-raised products and ditch the worst humanewashers like American Humane Certified and One Health Certified.

Get the Latest Dirt on Humanewashing

• Farm Forward Campaign and Ad Blitz Denounce ALDI’s Deceptive New Chicken Label (April 22, 2021)

• NowThis: How the Meat Industry Uses 'Humane Washing' Terms (April 6, 2021)

• Coalition Blasts "One Health Certified" Meat Industry Humanewashing Scheme (January 26, 2021)

• Farm Forward Report Exposes the Dirt on Humanewashing (December 30, 2020)

• Why We Resigned from the Board of the Nation's Largest Animal Welfare Certification (October 2, 2020)

Sources 

1. Consumer Reports National Research Center. 2014. Food Labels Survey. http://www.panna.org/sites/default/files/ConsumerReportsFoodLabelingSurveyJune2014.pdf.

2. Farm Forward calculation based on U.S. Department of Agriculture 2012 Census of Agriculture, June 2014.

3. American Humane Certified. 2020. “Science-Based Standards.” http://humaneheartland.org/our-standards/.

4. Certified Humane. 2020. “Our Standards.” https://certifiedhumane.org/our-standards/.

5. Global Animal Partnership. 2020. “Our Standards.” https://globalanimalpartnership.org/standards/.

6. One independent certification, A Greener World’s (AGW’s) Animal Welfare Approved (AWA), stands out as anomalous: it is both the smallest and the most rigorous. It is the only certification that avoids the particularly disturbing humanewashing involved in certifying as humane products from animals raised in intensive confinement. However, AWA, too, struggles with the reality that other forms of cruelty, such as the forced separation of calves and mother cows before natural weaning or the use of genetic lines of chickens prone to disease and chronic pain, are so pervasive in modern animal agriculture that even it cannot insist that these cruelties be banned and continue to operate. Further, AWA’s high standards and commitment to protect smaller independent farmers have precluded its ability to scale to the level of other certifications like GAP. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the circumstances under which the meat, poultry, dairy, and egg companies that dominate the industry today would adopt AWA standards at scale with options like AHC, Certified Humane, or GAP available. Thus, while AWA could partially be viewed as an exception to the humanewashing rule, its inability to achieve market scale is another datum illustrating the failure of animal welfare certification.

Reflections on COVID-19: Suffering from Exile

by Ashley Lewis

Throughout scripture, human and non-human animals are bound up in each other’s lives. In the Garden of Eden, animals and humans shared the experiences of creation and vocation. Aside from immediate family, Noah’s only companions on the ark were animal-kind. From Abraham to Joseph, sheep and goats are a constant. Wherever the family traveled, so went the livestock. When Moses led a revolution against Pharaoh, the Israelites and their animals caravanned out of Egypt together by God’s saving action. When Moses translated the law from God to Israel, the law did not only hold humans accountable, but non-humans as well. When God spared Nineveh, much to the prophet Jonah’s dismay, it was out of concern for an entire city of 120,000 people, and “also many animals.” When the Old Testament Prophets called for justice and deliverance, their message extended to all living members of the community and often to the occupants of the nearby wilderness as well. The Wisdom books, the Psalms, and even the New Testament are filled with lessons about the shared lives of humans and non-humans. All of this, plus my own instinctual sense of wonder and attraction to the other-than-human world, tells me that God’s expectation for humans and animals is to be in community together. 

If we were to take seriously the types of community modeled in the biblical narrative, we would find ourselves connected with animals in our day-to-day realities more than most of us currently are.

The average U.S. citizen is several steps removed from all other kinds of animals, aside from pets and companion animals. We will muse at them when they are domesticated by a zoo, or are displayed for entertainment at theme parks, or are part of a cultural excursion, regardless of whether or not the habitat is natural for them. We may come close to encountering creatures considered “wild” outside our homes, on hikes, or in parks, but when these animals cross the line into our neighborhoods, they’re considered pests or threats to society and must be kept at bay through trapping, baiting, or shooting. Animals outside our homes are barely tolerable.

The vast majority of land animals on our planet are livestock, and these are animals we almost never see, unless we seek them out. Each year around the world, 70 billion land animals are killed for food. Aquatic animal lives used for food cannot even be counted, though the weight is around 160 billion pounds per year. (1) Animals that are used for food far out-number any other group of animals in the world, even humans, and yet the industrial operations responsible for these animals remain entirely out of sight. The average consumer need never consider what sort of life these creatures lived, and in fact, the success of the food industry requires exactly that – a lack of consideration, a veil of isolation. 

Societal distance from animals has become the norm in the global West and in many other nations that take part in industrialized treatment of animals. The more I think about it, the more this separation feels like exile – a forced outing of one group by a more powerful entity, which often involves relocating the less powerful group under harsh conditions without consideration for that population’s preferred ways of being. In biblical terms, exile could mean leaving a place once thought of as home, being separated from family and friends, living in lands that are harsh and unfruitful, suffering loss of relationships – or all of these. Walter Brueggemann says, “Exile is understood as a consequence of imperial policy designed to establish new political and economic order in a subjugated realm.” (2) Animal-kind has been continually relocated against their will because of imperial policy. Our contemporary ways of life require that animals be exiled from our human communities, almost always out of the public’s view.

Exile is common in the biblical narrative for both humans and non-humans; but the key difference between the exile of scripture and the exile experienced today is that people and animals are exiled together in the Bible. As they wait expectantly for reconciliation with God and with their homeland, all creature-kind experience the hardship of exile as one community – undergoing transitions and adapting to a new life while bearing the burdens, stresses, and sorrow that come from isolation and separation. They do what they can to live fruitful lives during ambiguous times, relying on one another to survive. 

Exile is something over which God laments. Living in a state of perpetual discomfort and fear of the unknown prevents creatures from worshipping their Creator in the way they were meant to. Until reconciliation occurs and a restoration of abundant communal life can take place, God provides; but a feeling of longing is to be expected for those in exile. We know that humans are not unique in this. Animals who are lonely, separated from loved ones, or who must be relocated to a new environment demonstrate that they feel stress and depression. They also show joy when they’re reunited with what they’ve missed. 

As I remain home for the twelfth day of isolation, exile seems accurate to describe how I feel. In exile, we suffer from loss of community, grieve experiences we will never have, and we may be forced to ride out the wave of uncertainty in a place we do not call home. Rather than attending seminary classes on campus with friends, classmates, and professors, I must complete all schoolwork alone, from a computer. Rather than physically stepping into shared spaces of work, leisure, worship, and community, I try to connect with others through video-conferencing and social media. Rather than having predictable income, my husband and I realize that eventually our money will run out. I’m grateful that I have a level of comfort and cushion during this time – including more-than-adequate shelter, food, entertainment, health, and companionship. I recognize many do not have access to these privileges. God’s people and creatures throughout history, and even still today, have been violently and traumatically thrown into chaos in a way that I have never known. My social isolation is merely an entry point through which I can imagine how oppressive communal displacement may feel. 

The irony of this exile is that it may have been caused by society’s desire to exile animals by sending them to hidden and unnatural places. COVID-19, like many other bacteria and viruses that sicken people around the world every day, most likely developed in an environment of mass animal confinement. The virus is thought to have evolved in an exotic animal market where animals of all kinds are kept in crowded, stressful, and unsanitary conditions by handlers and hunters who experience their own financial exile in an imperialistic world and must engage in this trade to provide for their families. (3) The human desire to keep animals in places where they do not belong – whether in plain sight in a market or zoo, or hidden far away from the public in a factory farm or testing laboratory – has not only placed the burden of exile on the animals, but has brought on the exile of social distancing and isolation in which we find ourselves today.

In a way, our human systems have exiled us into this; and while isolation may be necessary for a time, exile only generates more exile. In this ambiguous time, I find a challenge: to practice the kind of hope that the biblical Prophets had when they too faced unending exile. I return to the words of Walter Brueggemann:

The remarkable act of hope that permeates the Old Testament lies in the fact that the promises Israel heard and remembered link together the character and intent of YHWH, the creator of heaven and earth, with the concrete material reality of the world. YHWH’s promises characteristically do not concern escape from the world but transformation within it…. [The prophetic promises] are not predictions but are rather acts of faithful imagination that dare to anticipate new futures on the bases of what YHWH has done in the past. (4)

I dare to imagine healthy, holistic communities, where no person or animal is sent away because of speciesism, classism, racism, or any other category of belonging. This creature-kind community means every creature engages in the fullness of relationship to God and their neighbors, while contributing to the project of ushering in the New Creation. The example of Jesus – who lived and died as an earthly creature so that we earthlings could be forever united with the Triune God – allows me to commit an irresponsible act of faithful imagination, to dream of a time when exile will no longer impoverish the lives of our fellow earthly creatures and when illness will not take the lives of the ones we love. During this time of isolation, I invite you to join me in hoping for an end to exile – for all creaturekind – so that our lives may be bound up beautifully in each other, in a community redeemed by the grace of God and emboldened by Christ’s love.

Sources:

1) Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo, “The biomass distribution on Earth,” PNAS June 19, 2018 115 (25) 6506-6511. Edited by Paul G. Falkowski, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ, first published May 21, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1711842115. Cows, pigs, goats, and sheep used for food make up 60% of all mammal biomass on the planet. Poultry birds like chickens and turkeys equal 70% of the planet’s bird biomass.

2) Walter Brueggemann, Reverberations of Faith: A Theological Handbook of Old Testament Themes, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 70.

3) Holly Secon, Aylin Woodward, and Dave Mosher, “A comprehensive timeline of the new coronavirus pandemic from China’s first COVID-19 case to the present.” in Business Insider Updated March 24, 2020. https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-pandemic-timeline-history-major-events-2020-3#december-31-2019-chinese-health-officials-informed-the-world-health-organization-about-a-cluster-of-41-patients-with-a-mysterious-pneumonia-most-were-connected-to-the-huanan-seafood-wholesale-market-a-wet-market-in-the-city-of-wuhan-1

4) Brueggemann, 101.

VIDEO: An Expert Explains...The Ethics of Farming Animals

Check out this video that the University of Chester produced of CreatureKind co-founder David Clough talking through the basic ethical issues of using animals for food!

New Video Highlighting CreatureKind's Work!

Watch this great video to see how CreatureKind addresses faith, anti-racism, and farmed animal welfare, in conversation with other community initiatives that share similar concerns.

A note from CreatureKind: We are grateful and happy to be in partnership with Farm Forward, which takes seriously the role of faith communities in creation care and animal protection. We hope you enjoy this video, which talks about our work as it relates to other projects supported by Farm Forward. You can read more about the video series here.

This video focuses on the power of storytelling and identity to transform how we eat. It introduces Christian and Jewish faith leaders guiding our efforts to make compassion and justice for animals and people part of every meal.

Here’s what Farm Forward’s Erin Eberle says about our work: “Founded with Farm Forward's support, CreatureKind has worked with dozens of Christian churches and seminaries in the US and the UK to foster conversations about animal welfare and faith, provide education about factory farming, and encourage Christian institutions to adopt plant-based and higher welfare food policies.”

If you’d like to support CreatureKind’s work, please donate today! (note: donations are processed by our fiscal sponsor, ESA at Eastern University).

Apply Now: CreatureKind Climate Leadership Fellow

We’ve spent a lot of time on college campuses recently and met so many compassionate, intelligent students with a heart for affecting positive change on a global scale. One of our primary takeaways from these weeks spent on the road is this: we are confident that the future is in good hands. Students are increasingly excited about the intersection of faith and food.

CreatureKind has always supported students who want to have critical conversations about this topic in their schools and churches, and a new partnership with Young Evangelicals for Climate Action (YECA) helps us do that better than ever. We’re thrilled to announce that applications are now being accepted for the new CreatureKind Climate Leadership Fellow program.

The student selected to serve as the CreatureKind Climate Leadership Fellow will learn to lead faith-based discussions about the wellbeing of animals used for food and factory farming’s environmental impact. Working together with experienced YECA organizers, CreatureKind, and other mentors, the CreatureKind Climate Leadership Fellow will invest approximately 10 hours each week on work developing a strategy and specific project for engaging their campus/community around issues related to farmed animals and climate action.

Oh, and did we mention that the fellowship includes a $1,000 stipend for project support and related travel expenses?

YECA is an experienced fellowship partner with five years of experience supporting this sort of student opportunity. In 2018-2019 there are seven fellows from across the country, representing a variety of majors. Some of them are even using the experience to meet internship or other academic requirements for graduation. The 2019-2020 fellowships begin with a training retreat in August and run through April of the following year.

Learn more about the Fellows program and apply for the 2019-2020 CreatureKind Climate Leaders Fellowship by visiting these links on YECA’s website. Application deadline is March 30, 2019. Remember to indicate that you are interested specifically in the CreatureKind Fellowship when completing the forms.

We deeply appreciate all students with a heart for this work. Best of luck in the application process!

Three Must-Watch Videos on Farms and Farming

by Sarah Withrow King

Wondering what to do this weekend? Need resources to help raise discussion in your church or school on why Christian attention to food and farming is so urgent? Check out these three must-watch videos on farms and farming.

73 Cows

Alex Lockwood | 73 Cows

At about ten minutes in, I started to sob, thinking maybe there was hope for us after all. This short film tells the story of an English cattle farmer who follows his heart.

Eating Animals

Based on the best-selling book by the same name, this is a compelling and comprehensive look at the toll factory farming takes on animals, farmers, the land, and people who speak out against the cruelty they see.

Soul Fire Farm: Feeding the Soul, Growing Community



A short feature on Soul Fire Farm, a BIPOC-centered community farm that works to raise awareness of and combat racism and injustice in our food system. “In the 1910 census, black folks owned and operated about 14% of US farms…there was a long time throughout history when the most likely occupation you’d find an African-American person in would be farming and now that’s the least likely.”

Do you have additional suggestions or favorites? Drop them in the comments, below.

Who is my Neighbour? A St. Francis of Assisi Feast Day Meditation

by Michael Gilmour

Photo: Michael Gilmour

The punchline of Luke’s Good Samaritan story comes at the beginning rather than the end, and it is not Jesus who delivers it but instead a nameless onlooker. He cites Torah: love God and love your neighbour as yourself (Luke 10:27; cf. Lev 19:18; Deut 6:5). Jesus agrees and then goes on to tell the oft-told tale of an assault and robbery, and the unlikely hero who comes to the victim’s aid. Love is owed to a stranger left for dead on the side of the road, and it is a cultural and religious outsider who extends it. My neighbour does not always look like me, or believe like me but that’s no matter. Jesus collapses the two great commandments. If we love God, we love our neighbours, whoever they are. We love our neighbours because we love God.

The onlooker who wisely recited Torah then adds a question (Luke 10:29): Who is my neighbour? Jesus’s story is the answer given. Your neighbour is the one in need. Your neighbour is the one in need, even when they are not part of your community. We are to love across boundaries. Love not only family and tribe, or those of our race and nation, or gender and religion, or sexual orientation and socio-economic status. Love not only the citizen but also the refugee. Simply love your neighbour as yourself, says Jesus. Love the one in need as you love yourself. That’s all it says.

Animals are neighbours too. There’s nothing in the story limiting this boundary-defying love to bipedal types. If this sounds odd, note the vague kinship between this parable and remarks Jesus made about an animal fallen into a pit (Matt 12:11). You don’t pass by the sheep in its moment of need any more than you pass the victim of a robbery laying in a ditch at the side of a road. You help that poor creature, and you do so even if it’s the Sabbath. Humans extending kindness to nonhumans—Jesus expects it of the God-fearing. And perhaps it’s worth noticing it works both ways in our parable. The Good Samaritan isn’t the only one who helps the injured man: he places the stranger “on his own animal” to get him to an inn for care (10:34). A brief hint of cross-species compassion?

The story of the Good Samaritan resonated recently as I led a chapel service at Providence University College (Manitoba) marking World Animal Day and the Feast Day of St. Francis of Assisi. This is not usual fare for us. Few of the fifty or so students and staff in attendance had previous experience of animal blessing or animal-themed services, or even heard sermons suggesting animals are theologically consequential or relevant for religious ethics. So, how to get that point across?

Enter Daisy, the tripod puppy and newest layabout at chez Gilmour who joined me for the service. Last spring I received word from one of our graduates of a stray dog found injured at the side of the road after being hit by a car. She stopped to help, taking the puppy to a nearby veterinary clinic even when unsure of how to fund the expensive surgery/amputation needed to save her. This was a costly act of kindness. Costly just like the love shown by the Samaritan (“he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend’” [Luke 10:35]). I wanted students to meet Daisy. To meet one of God’s creatures who experienced a boundary-transgressing act of Christian love. There is room in the church for other species. The church, represented in that moment by a generous, self-sacrificing student, reached out to a helpless animal and saved her life. A Christian reached across boundaries to show the love of God. (And at this St. Francis service she was further welcomed by the community of God’s people—and exuberantly so, as you can see—by some of our dog-loving students!)

Photo: Michael Gilmour

The service also marked the launch of Providence’s second Friendly Food Challenge (on which, see the CreatureKind blog, “Throwing Rocks at Giants”). The hope was to help participants make the connection between sweet Daisy who made all in the room smile that day, and other equally vulnerable, equally important animals who live and die as part of the food industry. Pets, wildlife, domesticated farm animals—they are all God’s creatures, and the call to extend love beyond boundaries must include them too. I am pleased some students and staff at Providence University College are making that connection, leaving meat off their plates as an expression of compassion.

Michael Gilmour teaches English and biblical literature at Providence University College. His most recent book is a study of animals in the writings of C. S. Lewis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Objections to a Christian Food Ethic Treating the Consumption of Animals

The following is an excerpt of a paper ("Consuming Animal Creatures: The Christian Ethics of Eating Animals") written and given by David Clough at the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics annual meeting and published in the journal Studies in Christian Ethics. Read the full article. 

by David Clough

David Clough

We are rightly sceptical about ethical arguments for radical positions, so before presenting arguments in favour of my position, let me consider three potentially fatal points that would quickly defeat the argument I am seeking to develop.

First, it seems unlikely that the vast majority of Christians today and in past generations could be in error in failing to recognise that their faith required abstention from most animal products. There is a strong and plausible argument from conservatism that should make us pause before accepting this judgement, and a parallel requirement on anyone advancing such a claim to provide an error theory explaining how things could have come to such a pass. My explanation for this is that the ways in which farmed animals are raised has changed radically and Christians, together with others, have been inattentive to these changes. I was shocked when I first came across the claim, not so long ago, that the first large-scale rearing of farmed animals exclusively for meat was in England in the late eighteenth century: up to that point meat was largely a by-product of keeping animals for other reasons, such as milk, eggs and wool. Meat was a cash-crop made possible by the Highland clearances in Scotland and the enclosures in England, displacing the largely arable agriculture of the poor, and, as Percy Bysshe Shelley noted in 1813, causing wastage of food productivity ‘absolutely incapable of calculation’.(1) The intensification of farmed animal production has developed over the past two hundred years since, but accelerated rapidly from the mid-twentieth century. Most farmed animals are now raised in ways that would be unrecognisable in comparison to conditions only a few decades ago. Broiler hens are a particularly extreme example: bred through intricate multi-generational programmes to reach slaughter weight at only 35 days old, their young legs unfit to support their unwieldy bodies, living the entirety of their lives in warehouses with artificial night and day, automated feeding and climate control, with human interaction restricted to a daily patrol to remove the dead, and finally stuffing them into crates for transport to slaughter. I still remember the experience of holding a straggly 16 day old hen in the midst of a huge broiler shed, surrounded by 26,000 of its fellows, with 23 similar sheds nearby, filled with the 600,000 birds that had been delivered together as day-old chicks two weeks previously. I had the strong sense that these animals were not being treated as animals, but as a crop, grown for harvest. The hen I held had only just lost its fluffy yellow chick feathers, yet was nearly halfway through its life. Pigs fare little better: most are also raised indoors in crowded conditions where farmers often resort to cutting off their tails to reduce the injuries from aggression and boredom that such intelligent and socially complex animals experience in such a monotonous environment.

Organic, free-range, family run chicken farm. Photo by Jo-Anne McArthur | We Animals

My point is that most of what now generates the need for radical changes in the Christian ethics of consuming animals is radical changes in farmed animal practice—changes which the farming industry has understandably not been active in publicising to consumers, and of which most consumers have therefore been unaware.

Therefore, the act of eating chicken today is different ethically from the act of our grandparents eating chicken, which they did much less frequently because before the invention of broiler hens chicken was a luxury compared with cheaper alternatives such as beef.(2) My position does not imply a retrospective judgement that our grandparents were wrong in eating farmed animals, but that the nature of the industry now is that we almost always are. It is also helpful to note that my position is also not a retrospective judgement in relation to what Jesus ate, which is commonly raised in discussions of Christian vegetarianism. Animals were not raised intensively in first-century Palestine, so my argument that intensively raised farmed animals should be off the table for Christians do not apply to Jesus’ dietary choices. In summary, I am arguing that the primary reason most Christians have not recognised the ethical problems associated with eating animal products is that farmed animal practice has changed comparatively recently and we have failed to attend to and appreciate the ethical implications of this change.

Rescued rooster. Photo by Jo-Anne McArthur | We Animals

A second potential way of defeating my argument that Christians should not consume products derived from farmed animals that have not been allowed to flourish as fellow creatures of God begins from New Testament teaching. ‘Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?’ (Mk 7:18-19). These scatological words of Jesus recorded by Mark and echoed by Matthew (Mt. 15:11, 16) seem to short-circuit any Christian food ethics, especially as Mark adds the parenthesis that in saying this Jesus declared all foods clean. Other New Testament passages echo this license to eat freely: Jesus allows his disciples to pluck heads of grain on the Sabbath and eat them (Mk 2:23- 24 and par.); Paul states that only those weak in conscience are concerned about eating meat offered to idols, and states that eating or not eating is irrelevant to our relationship to God (1 Cor. 8:4-8; cf. Rom. 14:2); and Peter receives a shocking vision in which he is told to kill and eat all kinds of animals, because God has made them all clean (Acts 10:9- 16). Clearly, the very particular context of early Christian communities negotiating their relationship with Jewish food practices is a crucial background here, and is inappropriate to determine Christian food ethics entirely within this context, but the texts do not encourage Christian attention to the ethics of eating. Given this early history, it is surprising that Christian monastic movements so often made stringent dietary demands of their members, and that traditions of fasting became so widespread, but the Reformation questioned this practice, with Luther reemphasising Paul’s position that neither eating nor fasting counts for anything,(3) and much more recently in 1966 Roman Catholic fasting requirements were relaxed.(4) All this seems an unpromising context for Christian attention to the ethics of what we eat.

What we consume, including what we take in through our mouths, has obvious and problematic impacts on other humans, on non-human animals, and on the wider environment.

Yet what we eat is of very clear and direct relevance for Christian ethics, as captured memorably in the title of Ron Sider’s 1978 book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger.(5) What we consume, including what we take in through our mouths, has obvious and problematic impacts on other humans, on non-human animals, and on the wider environment. To take one example: we currently devote 78 per cent of all agricultural land to raising farmed animals, and feed more than one third of global cereal output to those animals.(6) Philosophers and theologians from Plato onwards have noted that raising animals for meat is an inefficient use of land, and it is abundantly clear that fewer people would go hungry and thirsty if the land were used to grow crops instead, where this is possible.(7) We may disagree about the ethical implications of this observation, but we cannot reasonably use the biblical passages cited above to deny its relevance for Christian ethics.

As the growing literature in this area confirms, twenty-first-century Christian ethics cannot therefore afford to leave food ethics beyond its range of concerns.(8) There is nothing wrong in eating an apple as such, but if food is scarce and eating it would be to take more than our share, then the decision to take and eat it is obviously an ethical one. Similarly, if the apple has been produced under conditions that fail to provide adequately for agricultural workers, or using pesticides that poison sources of water, or do other unwarranted damage to other animals or the environment, this wider context makes the decision to purchase and consume it relevant to ethics. In a Christian context what we eat is an ethical question because of the implications of our consumption for fellow creatures of God. This is the basis for a Christian ethics of food.

On dairy and veal farms, babies like this one are taken from their mothers within hours of birth and placed alone into small crates. Photo: Jo-Anne McArthur | We Animals

In this article, I want to focus on a particular part of this issue: the ethics of consuming animal products. Here we encounter a third possible defeater to the argument I announced. You may agree that Christian food ethics should properly take account of the implications of our consumption for our human neighbours, but deny that we should be concerned about the impacts on other animals. There are good theological foundations for such a lack of concern for animals. In Augustine’s discussion of the Decalogue prohibition of murder in The City of God, he notes that some people have said that the prohibition of killing should be extended to beasts and cattle, but that this would lead to a reductio ad absurdam because if it is unlawful to kill animals, why not plants as well? To avoid involving ‘ourselves in the foul error of the Manichees’, Augustine draws on the Greek idea of the soul as threefold: plants have a nutritive soul, animals have a sensitive soul in addition, but humans uniquely have a rational soul. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ does not refer to plants because they are not sensitive, and does not refer to animals because they have no society with us in reason, he argues, and because God has ordained that their deaths and lives may justly serve our use.(9) When Aquinas considers whether it is permissible to kill any living thing in the Summa theologica, he cites Augustine’s argument about animals being irrational, and adds Aristotle’s view in the Politics that plants were created for the sake of animals and animals for the sake of human beings.(10) Aquinas draws on Aristotle to argue that, just as some human races are ‘intended by nature for slavery’ so that it is just to go to war to enslave them, so we can see animals as naturally enslaved for the use of others.(11) Elsewhere in the Summa, Aquinas argues that animals are excluded from consideration in relation to both justice and charity.(12)

Christians have biblical and theological grounds for recognising animal creatures as different from plants, and these differences have implications for how we treat them

Let us agree to agree with Augustine and Aquinas that the Decalogue does not prohibit killing animals, and agree to disagree absolutely with Aristotle and Aquinas in their view that there are humans who are naturally ordered to be slaves to others. What should we make of the argumentation between these two points? First, while Augustine is right that killing animals is not prohibited here, he is wrong that we have no way of recognising the difference between killing animals and plants. As we shall see below, Christians have biblical and theological grounds for recognising animal creatures as different from plants, and these differences have implications for how we treat them. Our rejection of Aquinas’s analogy from races naturally destined to be slaves ought to lead us to question the analogous Aristotelian logic that plants were created for animals and animals for humans. Genesis 1, notably, provides no basis for such a claim: the creatures of each day are declared good in themselves without reference to their utility to any other creatures.(13) Genesis 1 gives humans dominion over other animals, but its specification of plants as food both for animals and humans suggests that this dominion does not include the taking of their lives, and the peaceable coexistence of humans with the animals in Genesis 2 strengthens the case for a dominion that does not involve killing. After the fateful events of Genesis 3, and after the flood God causes in eventual response, God gives permission for the first time for humans to eat other animals provided they do not consume their lifeblood (Gen. 9.3-4), but we might well follow Luther and many other theologians in interpreting this as a departure from the ideal of Genesis 1, especially in the light of prophetic visions of an end to animal sacrifice and the Messianic reign bringing peace between humans and animals, and Paul’s anticipation of the whole creation freed from its groaning bondage.(14) We should also question Augustine’s use of the criterion of reason to identify creatures we may and may not kill: there are human beings not capable of reason whom we rightly wish to protect, and we need to recognise that the abundant examples of animal reasoning offered in contemporary animal studies—such as the politicking of chimpanzees, the abstract logic of parrots, the innovative tool-fashioning of crows, and the ability of dolphins to parse grammar, to take a few of myriad possible examples—mean the Greek idea of a binary divide between humans and other animals on the basis of rationality is unsustainable.(15) The early fourteenth-century English commentary on the Ten Commandments, Dives and Pauper, seems preferable to Augustine and Aquinas’s discussions at this point. It notes that Genesis 9 must mean animals are excluded from the Decalogue prohibition on killing, but interprets not consuming animals with their blood as prohibiting cruelty, ‘For God that made all has care of all, and he shall take vengeance on all that misuse his creatures’.(16) Karl Barth, influenced by Albert Schweitzer’s vision of reverence for all life, recognised the serious ethical attention Christians need to give to fellow animal creatures, stating that animals belong to God, not to human beings, and that therefore any human treatment of other animals must be ‘careful, considerate, friendly and above all understanding’.(17) While Barth considers that this could include killing other animals for food, he judges that such killing could only be obedience to God where it is done under the pressure of necessity. Otherwise, Barth comments strikingly, such killing is nothing less than murder.(18) Augustine, Aquinas, the author of Dives and Pauper, and Barth are right to recognise that Genesis 9 is a strong argument against the idea that vegetarianism is a universal requirement for Christians, but their positions do not indicate that animals are of no moral account, and we are clearly not necessarily guilty of the ‘foul error of the Manichees’ in considering that Christians might have faith-based reasons to be concerned about their treatment of animals.

Photo: Jo-Anne McArthur | We Animals

My judgement, then, is that there are no convincing fundamental objections to a Christian ethics of food, nor to thinking Christianly about the ethics of eating animals in particular. I will return to some more specific objections to my argument below, but in the next section I proceed with my positive argument for the position that Christians have strong faith-based reasons to avoid consuming animal products derived from animals that have not been allowed to flourish as fellow creatures of God.

You can read the full article by following this link. 

Footnotes:

1. Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 2006), p. 403; Shelley’s A Vindication of Natural Diet quoted by Stuart, pp. 405–406.

2. A. Godley and B. Williams, Democratizing Luxury and the Contentious ‘Invention of the Technological Chicken’in Britain, Business History Review (Reading: Centre for Institutional Performance, University of Reading, 2009), p. 1.

3. See, for example, Luther’s commentary on Gal. 6:15 in Lectures on Galations (Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, eds Helmut T. Lehmann, and Jaroslav Pelikan (Philadelphia, PA: Muhlenberg Press, 1958), vol. 27, p. 138).

4. In Pope Paul VI’s Apostolic Constitution Paenitemini he allowed local bishops to replace Friday fasts from meat with other forms of penance. Pope Paul VI, Paenitemini: On Fast and Abstinence (Rome: Vatican, 1966), ch. III.

5. Ronald J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Twentieth Anniversary Edition (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997 [1978]).

6. David Clough, On Animals: Vol. II. Theological Ethics (London: T & T Clark/Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2017), ch. 2.

7. Stuart, Bloodless Revolution, p. 402, citing Plato’s Republic, 373d; Clough, On Animals II, ch. 2.

8. See, for example, Stephen H. Webb, Good Eating, The Christian Practice of Everyday Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001); Rachel Muers and David Grumett (eds), Eating and Believing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vegetarianism and Theology (London: T   & T Clark, 2008); L. Shannon Jung, Food for Life: The Spirituality and Ethics of Eating (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004); Norman Wirzba, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

9. Saint Augustine, The City of God, ed. R. V. G. Tasker, trans. John Healey (London: Dent & Sons, 1945), I.19.

10. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Blackfriars, 1963), II-II, 64.1, citing Aristotle, Politics, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998), I.8, 1256b.

11. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, 64.1.

12. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1.2, qu. 102, a. 6; Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2.2, qu. 25, a. 3. It is important to note that there are other much more positive dimensions of Aquinas’s thought for engaging theologically with animals. For discussion of these, see Judith A. Barad, Aquinas on the Nature and Treatment of Animals (San Francisco, CA and London: International Scholars, 1995) and John Berkman, ‘Towards a Thomistic Theology of Animality’, in Celia Deane-Drummond and David Clough (eds), Creaturely Theology: On God, Humans and Other Animals (London: SCM, 2009).

13. Gen. 1:4a, 10b, 12b, 18b, 21b, 25b.

14.  Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis, Chapters 1–5, Luther’s Works, vol. I, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Saint Louis, MO: Concordia, 1958), p. 36; Isa. 1:11; 66:3; 11:6-9; 65:25-26; Rom. 8.19-22.

15. David Clough, On Animals: Vol. I. Systematic Theology (London: T & T Clark/Continuum, 2012), pp. 30, 69–70.

16. Priscilla Heath Barnum (ed.), Dives and Pauper (Oxford: Early English Text Society/Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 35 (my rendition in modern English).

17.  Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. III/4, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. A. T. MacKay et al. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1961), p. 352.

18.  Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4., pp. 354–55. As noted above, I am not arguing in this article for Christian vegetarianism or veganism, but Barth’s argument here seems to be the most promising starting point for such an argument, given that for most humans today, killing animals is not necessary to gain adequate nutrition.

Throwing Rocks at Giants

by Michael Gilmour

My daily commute takes me south of Winnipeg into an area with several intensive hog operations. Manitoba produces somewhere around 8 million pigs a year, more than any other Canadian province, and each day, whether minus 30 C (-22 F) or plus 30 C (86 F), I pass one, two, three, four transport trucks carrying pigs to slaughter. I catch glimpses of them through air holes as I whiz by at 100 kilometers an hour, and they at the same speed in the opposite direction.

Photo courtesy of Manitoba Animal Save.

They’re cold or hot, tired, thirsty with no access to water, often crowded, and certainly distressed owing to the noise, wind and newness of the experience. Most have never seen sunlight until this day. I always react. Sighs. Muttered prayers (“May the Lord bless you and keep you ...”). Curses directed at industrial-scale cruelties. And a sense of utter helplessness to do anything about it.

Photo courtesy of Manitoba Animal Save.

But during one grumpy commute, I remembered there are others making their way to Providence University College where we work and study also thinking about those distressed pigs. So began the Friendly Food Challenge.

One day a week we urge employees and students to choose a meat-free meal or meals. It is a small gesture and those participating do so for a variety of reasons: health and weight loss; environmental concern; foodie curiosity (our supportive cafeteria staff offer up tasty vegetarian fare); a “team spirit” willingness to support campus initiatives; and for a number of students (bless them), animal compassion.

By most measures, the scale of what we’re doing is inconsequential. Providence serves around 340 meals each Wednesday and since starting on November 1, 2017 (World Vegan Day), members of our community chose meat-free meals around 250 times. That won’t show up on any company’s ledger sheet, but no matter. It is instead a quiet, largely symbolic protest against cruelties inherent in factory farming. A handful of students at a little evangelical university on the prairies, surrounded by large livestock producers, bearing witness and saying this is not right, we refuse to participate.

Photo courtesy of Manitoba Animal Save.

Many animal (and other) advocates know what it is to be overwhelmed. The problems are enormous, the suffering endless, the cruel Goliaths too big to take down. A “why bother” defeatism is a real risk as a kind of compassion fatigue sets in. But maybe we ought to measure success in smaller increments. If the ultimate prize is out of sight, beyond the horizon, any move toward it is good news. Calls to service do not always come with an assurance of success. Prophets are to speak though few listen to them (Jer 7:27; Ezek 2:5, 7), we’re to serve the poor even though poverty itself seems an undefeatable scourge (cf. Matt 26:11).

There is mystery here. Willingness to take up a task, even if not wholly successful on the surface, matters. Unlike the story of David’s exploits, what constitutes victory is not always so obvious as a dead giant on the battlefield. Trucks still roll down the highway leading to our school, but it seems our students have accomplished something big. Confronting any form of systemic violence with only a few small stones in hand takes courage. Their willingness to do something acknowledging the pains and distresses of farm animals is indeed a victory worth celebrating.

Michael Gilmour teaches English and biblical literature at Providence University College. His current research considers the convergence of animal welfare movements of the nineteenth century and animal-friendly creative writing. His most recent book is Animals in the Writings of C. S. Lewis.

Living with God’s Other Creatures

Adapted from a sermon delivered by David Clough at First Congregational United Church of Christ in Portland, Oregon on January 7, 2018.

Scripture

Romans 8:18-24: "I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creations waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but ty the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?"

Advent and Christmas

How was your Advent and Christmas?

I have to confess to you that Advent brings out a fundamental conflict among my family. My starting point is that the celebrations of Christmas begin on Christmas Day, which means my preference would be to put up Christmas decorations on Christmas Eve. My wife Lucy and our three children are keen to get things started sooner, so we have an annual tussle about when our decorations go up. This year we compromised on the weekend of the 16th December.

There’s another difference between us about expectation during Advent. The other members of my family are impatient for Christmas to come. I tend to be more aware of all the work I have to get done before Christmas, so confess that I sometimes find myself wishing it further away, rather than closer. It’s the same with my domestic preparations: I’m always late with shopping for Christmas presents, and deciding what we’ll eat, and what we’ll need to buy to cook it.

Traditionally, Advent was a time of repentance for Christians, second only to Lent, a time for Christians to consider God’s judgement and prepare themselves, to make sure they were ready to receive the Christ child. This has something in common with my more mundane sense of feeling like I’ve got a lot to get done before I’ll be ready for Christmas. But I’m sure I’m not getting Advent right: I spend too much time on the mundane jobs I need to do, and nowhere near enough time on preparing my heart for the coming of Christmas. That means I often have the feeling of being in church and unready to celebrate the coming of the Saviour, caught off-guard by a moment in a nativity service where we sing with our children a familiar song and suddenly the story fills my eyes with tears and sends a shiver down my spine, once again.

Epiphany: Living after Christmas

I hope you had a good Christmas. We did: everything did get done, somehow, we sang the final verse of ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ celebrating Christ born this happy Christmas morning and in the days that followed continued the celebrations with family and friends during Christmas and New Year. But that was a week ago.

Today is Epiphany, when we traditionally remember the visit of the kings to the Christ child, and Herod’s massacre of the male babies in Bethlehem.

Epiphany confronts Christmas with the realities of political power, and its cruel abuse of the vulnerable. The question Epiphany presents us with is, what does Christmas mean in the everyday world as we know it, the world where Christians are killed leaving church in Nigeria, where famine still threatens millions of lives, where controversies still rage about the exit of Britain from the EU, and where President Trump remains true to form in boasting about the size of his nuclear button amid growing evidence of mental incapacity?

Epiphany challenges us to consider how Christmas makes a difference in the real world. That’s our challenge this morning: what does it mean to live as Christians after Christmas?

Surely the transporting vision of our God taking on vulnerable creaturely flesh like ours and our celebration of God taking up the cause of God’s creatures by becoming incarnate in our world, should make a difference for how we live in it? How do we return from the holidays to our everyday life and bring what we have seen and felt of Christmas to the world as we find it?

Romans 8

I think the words we have heard from Paul in the 8th chapter of the Letter to the Romans can help us with the Epiphany challenge of bringing Christmas to the everyday. Paul is writing to Christians in Rome who were living through difficult times, subjected to persecution on grounds of their faith. Neither Jesus’s birth nor his resurrection had been an escape from tribulation for these early Christians. Their faith in the victory won in Christ was maintained amidst many signs that all was not yet right with the world. Paul acknowledges the depth of their sufferings. He compares what they are going through with the pain women feel in childbirth. I can only claim second-hand knowledge of this pain, through being with Lucy as she went through labour three times over. Paul’s experience of labour pains is likely to be one step further removed, but his comparison must be meant to acknowledge that the sufferings of the world are extreme, demanding, and costly, and call for serious courage and resilience to endure. To live in a world going through labour pains was never going to be comfortable.

But the comparison Paul makes is not just about the depth of the suffering involved. It links to our thinking about the progression from Advent to Christmas to Epiphany because it’s suffering with a meaning, with a direction, and with a trajectory. The groaning of a woman in childbirth is unlike the groaning of someone who has suffered injury because the pain is a result of something hoped for, the birth of a new child. The pain is almost unbearable, but the bearing of it takes place in the expectation that it is the means to bring about nothing less that the gift of new life. That’s what Paul means the Christians in Rome to know, too. Neither Christmas nor Easter means they are freed from the suffering of the world, but Christmas and Easter mean that this suffering is not the final truth about God’s world: these sufferings are the birth pangs of a new creation, liberated from its bondage to decay to be brought into the freedom of the children of God.

This doesn’t make the suffering ok, of course, especially when its burden is unjustly redirected in our world by the powerful to the burden the powerless, by the rich to the poor, by men to women, by white people to people of colour, by straight to queer, and so on. We must continue to work to resist these injustices, while knowing that such efforts cannot bring the groaning of creation to an end.

Here is Paul’s answer to the Epiphany challenge of bringing Christmas into our everyday world: Christmas doesn’t mean killing will end, or famines will not take place, or leaders will not fight futile wars, or the strong will stop exploiting the weak, but it does mean that such dreadful woes are not the final truth about God’s ways with the world. Christmas means that Christians engage with those woes of the world in faith that in doing so they witness to the mighty work of God in redeeming creation.

Living with Other Creatures

After Christmas, we encounter the world anew in the context of a Christian hope that the coming of God into our world in the form of a baby means that God has taken up our cause and will not allow evil to reign triumphant. We are left, though, with the question of how we are to live as Christians in this post-Christmas world, and in the final part of my sermon I want to consider one particular aspect of the Epiphany challenge of bringing Christmas into our everyday life in the world.

When John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church to which I belong, preached on this passage from Romans in 1772, he was struck by the way Paul’s vision included not just human beings, but the whole of creation. He saw the plain sense of the passage as an affirmation that God would redeem all creatures, and was drawn immediately to reflect on the many cruelties he saw inflicted on animals in the streets. Christians who believed in a God who was their creator and redeemer have reason to oppose such cruelties in the strongest terms, he said.

There’s another link with Advent and Christmas here. Christians often recall the prophecy in Isaiah 11 during Advent, where Isaiah prophesies the Messiah coming from ‘the stump of Jesse’. The first sign of the coming of the Messiah is peace between humans and other animals, wolves, lambs, leopard, kids, calves, lions, and little children (vv. 6–9). This new peace is made present in the Christmas nativity scenes in which the animals in the stable are the first to recognize the coming of the Christ. One part of making Christmas present in our lives, therefore, might be to seek ways to witness to the peace God seeks between humans and other animals, and to the redemption of all creatures described by Paul.

But as soon as we acknowledge this connection between Christian Christmas faith and animals, we must recognize, just as Wesley did, that the ways we are currently treating animals are at odds with this Christian vision, subjecting them to many unnecessary cruelties. We have bred broiler hens to grow to slaughter weight in windowless sheds in just six weeks, suffering pain from legs too immature to support their unwieldy bodies. We ignore the complex social intelligence of pigs, and confine sows in stalls that do not even allow them to turn around, raising their piglets in monotonous sheds that prevent most of their natural behaviours. We raise cattle intensively in feedlots, subjecting them to castration and other mutilations without pain relief.

And, as Gretchen Primack’s heart-breaking poem reminds us, following the labour pains of their mothers, we take calves from their mothers, sometimes before they have even met, and force the mothers to eat constantly so we can take the milk meant for the calves we have killed, often keeping them confined without being able to graze grass, before they are culled for beef after 3 or 4 lactations when their milk yield drops. Those who live near dairy farms describe the loud groans of grief and protest from mother cows who have had their calves taken from them, which can go on for days. I can’t think of a more direct example of the groaning of creation Paul wrote about, and in this case, we’re the cause. These are modern animal cruelties, unknown in Wesley’s day, which should appal Christians today just as the eighteenth century cruelties appalled Wesley. It seems to me that we have sleep-walked into farming animals in ways that are a practical denial that they are fellow creatures of our God.

And it’s not as if it’s good for us, either. The unprecedented amounts of animal products we are eating are bad for our health as well as theirs, are wasteful of land and water resources, and are damaging to our environment. We currently devote 78% of agricultural land to raising animals and feed 1/3rd of global cereal output to them, when growing crops for human consumption would be a far more efficient way to feed a growing human population. And raising livestock contributes more to greenhouse gas emissions than transport globally, but has been largely ignored in climate change policy-making. Reducing our consumption of farmed animals would therefore be good for humans, good for animals, and good for the planet.

The good news is that this is an issue where our actions make a difference. I don’t know how to stop Donald Trump threatening Kim Jong-un, but I do know that if I and other Christians cut consumption of animal products, fewer animals will be drawn into the cruelties of intensive farming.

CreatureKind seeks to encourage Christians to take steps to reduce their consumption of animals and to move to higher welfare sources of any animal products they do use. Doing so makes a practical connection between our everyday practice of eating, our relationship to the wider creation, and our faith. I offer the possibility to you as a late Christmas present, the opportunity to reconceive even our ordinary eating as a sacramental. We have a six-week course for churches that would be ideal to run in Lent to help Christians think more about what their faith means for animals and how we treat them. Perhaps first steps could be communal, rather than individual: thinking how the food you share here at church could reflect the recognition of animals as fellow creatures.

Conclusion

So I’ve suggested that the challenge of Epiphany is how to bring Christmas into the everyday world, how to live a Christmas faith day to day. I’ve suggested that Paul’s vision of the groans of creation as labour pains of the new creation God is bringing forth can help us make sense of the suffering world we engage with as Christians. And I’ve suggested that as Christians we have reason to care about the suffering we currently inflict on farmed animals, and that we have faith-based reasons to stop contributing to its cruelty in our everyday life.

May God gift us this Epiphany with a new vision of how to live out an expectant Christmas faith in the everyday world we encounter and the disturbing and inspiring presence of the Holy Spirit as we seek to align our lives with God’s ways with our world. Amen.