The subject of this morning’s eight-minute Ö1 programme, Leporello, was a reading last week at Vienna’s Rabenhof-Theater. American author Jonathan Safran Foer and his German colleague Karen Duve read from their books, respectively titled “Eating Animals” and “Eating Ethically”. These two non-fiction books do not hide their purpose: to persuade their readers, by means of a bad conscience caused by the cruelty of factory farming of livestock, to reduce their meat consumption and to eventually change to a purely vegetarian diet.

I would like to start my comments on this subject with an up-front confession: I like eating meat, and my current regime for losing weight, slowly successful, is based to a large extent on meat products. I am not, therefore, entirely disinterested.

Nevertheless, despite these personal preferences I would like to present some comments on this subject.

It is clear that as Christians we are called to be good stewards of the creation God has entrusted to us — that is part of the commission in Genesis 1:28. Also, respecting animals as fellow creatures of God requires that, even though we believe that they have been given to us as food, we avoid any unnecessary cruelty in our treatment of them. For this reason I am all in favor of Christians using whatever influence they have to pass legislation to ensure that livestock and other animals are kept in a manner suitable to them, that killing and butchering take place without unnecessary cruelty, and above all, that such legislation is properly enforced.

However, the growing movement to present the eating of meat as immoral, and therefore to excert moral pressure on all who do not agree with this view, presents several problems. I will list some of them, starting with the most significant:

1. Without judging individual advocates of vegetarianism I note that the campaign agains eating of meat and factory farming of livestock, as well as the more extreme forms of animal protection in general, are a project of the same political/ideological camp which also strongly pushes women’s right to unrestricted abortion. Thus, we have here a movement whose members largely have no problem with the killing of unborn human beings, often in a very cruel manner; who even consider the right to do this a “Human Right”, but who reject the killing of animals and make every attempt to shame those of their fellow humans who don’t share this view. I am afraid that I do not see them on the moral high road at all.

2. As a Christian who claims to base his life on the Bible I see that God has given us at least some animals as food, and that animals are also part of the food chain of other animals.  Additionally, good stewardship of the creation requires the killing of animals for population control, especially where civilization has displaced carniverous animals. If we are going to kill animals, and we must, it is far better stewardship to then use their meat (and skin, etc) for food, leather, etc. I realize that this whole subject is linked to the Fall of Man, because death as such is linked to the Fall, but I see neither an instruction nor a justification in Scripture for the attempt to remove all effects of the Fall through our own efforts.

3. A major reason for the rejection of meat eating, as well as for the more extreme forms of animal protection, has its ideological origins in an unbiblical equation of mankind with the animal kingdom. Man is seen as but one animal among many, who all need protection because they all have “rights”.

4.  I do not think that the attempt to convert the majority of mankind to vegetarianism will succeed. For this reason an individual’s decision to refrain from eating meat will not lead to factory farming of livestock to be abandoned. I think it would be much more effective for those who are outraged by the cruelty of factory farming of livestock to engage in political lobbying to outlaw such methods of food production and to enfoce the existing laws. We can however, as consumers, influence things by purchasing not merely Fair Trade products, which avoid exploiting the people of the Third World, but also ethically produced meat products which avoid exploiting the animals grown and butchered for this purpose. It will be far easier to convince large numbers of our fellow citizens of such a course of action than of a complete move to vegetarianism, and this will, in the long run, make factory farming of livestock commercially unattractive.

Posted on: 24th January, 2011

Filed under: Blog English, Christian Living, Politics

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