Should Animals Have the Same Rights as People?

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Originally published in Santa Clara Magazine Online Edition. Downloaded by Opposing Views on November 6th, 2008.

In a Judeo-Christian view, animals are creatures, i.e., they exist because God the Creator willed—and still wills—for them to exist. Human beings have an innate sense of the moral value of animals as fellow creatures on an intuitive level: cruelty toward animals is felt to be both a sin and a crime. Why? Why would human beings sense that the imposition of unnecessary suffering on animals for sport or pleasure is morally wrong? It seems that humans recognize that animals suffer pain, and since animals cannot sin or commit crimes (because they lack moral agency and free will), animals are innocent. If the unnecessary suffering of animals is the unnecessary suffering of the innocent, then this per se is bad. Of course, it is sometimes necessary to inflict pain on the innocent for their greater good, as when small children are given inoculations against diseases, but to inflict pain needlessly on the innocent is an act of cruelty; it is a sign of either mental illness or moral deficiency. Further, cruelty towards the innocent is sinful because it is "unnatural"—it is a denial of our nature and that of the victim of our sinful intent and action.

The word "nature" is derived from the Latin root nasci, birth. It refers not only to the ongoing renewal of plant and animal life through the birth-death-regeneration cycle but also to the essential character of nature as "creation." Beyond naming the reality of the world as grace, as gift, the singular word "nature" points to the unity of the totality of creation—"God made everything that He had made, and indeed, it was very good" (Genesis 1:31). The singular pronoun "it" is the key to understanding the Hebrew conception of the created universe: the whole world, including human beings, is ordered by a single author and for a single purpose, to be good. The unity of nature, then, is ordained by God, who sets the laws of nature to this end. At the same time, the authors of Genesis recognize human preeminence over all other creatures and speak of the divine mandate to exercise dominion (Genesis 1:26) over all the other creatures. Dominion is not ownership; God remains king of the universe. Human beings are vice-regents, stewards who must be careful to obey the laws set by God. Indeed, the first "sin" is precisely a violation of a law that God had set in the natural order of the Garden of Eden, a law that regulated what the two humans were to eat and what they were to forego.

The authors of the Genesis account imported a creation story typical of the genre circulating in the ancient Near East and modified it to reflect theological insights unique to the Hebrew tradition about human nature, nature as a whole, and the nature of God. They held, for example, in contrast to many of their neighbors, that the world is good, and that the world’s goodness is dynamic rather than static, i.e., that history is linear rather than circular, and that all of creation is evolving towards its final end, a state of perfection that is more than merely a return to the pristine goodness of the beginning.

The Christian tradition built upon this theological inheritance in implicit as well as explicit ways. The Prologue of John’s Gospel (1:1ff) deliberately omits the article in Greek ("In [the] beginning…") because there are no articles in Hebrew. John does so to draw attention to the parallel between the Creation story in Genesis and the pre-existence of the Logos in his Gospel. The Johanine tradition carries forward this belief in the unity, dignity and holy destiny of all of creation to its projected eschaton: salvation history will end not with the passing away of all that was created but by its perfection, ("a new heaven and a new earth" Revelation 21:1ff).