Ecotheology: Animal consciousness and vegetarianism

This will be another series, but probably only 3 posts long this time.  I'm kind of doing this to wrap up a process I just finished, which was writing a great questions essay for the honors program at BYU.  The "great question" I wrote about was:  "Are humans the only animals with a consciousness?"  It's been a long process and a long journey, and it's affected me more than I thought it would.  The essay requires students to approach the topic from three different academic disciplines; one of my three was theology.  I found a lot of interesting materials detailing the position of several major world religions on the status of animals, and what I found still surprises me.  If you're interested, the full text of my final draft of the essay can be found here (it's a couple dozen pages, so set aside some time).

In a nutshell, animals know and experience a lot more than most people realize.  Apes especially, but dolphins, elephants, and African grey parrots (among other species) have done remarkably well in tests of self awareness, intelligence, learning, memory, planning, and creativity.  Individuals of multiple species have consistently shown the ability to recognize their image in a mirror as themselves, showing that they have a level of self-concept that many people categorically deny animals.  Chimpanzees and other great apes display remarkable proficiency in American Sign Language; several lab subjects have attained a vocabulary of several hundred words.  Dolphins have found ways to solve problems that no one had shown them before, suggesting evidence of planning and creativity.  And several African grey parrots, in research situations, have developed a habit of answering questions deliberately wrong because they were bored of the testing procedure.  I won't cite evidence here; references are available in the text of my essay.

What does theology say about the status of animals?  Most people are familiar with the Hindu and Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation, which basically demolishes any spiritual barriers between us and the other creatures.  Countless stories exist in theological legend about animals conversing with or instructing humans, including the biblical story of Eve being deceived by a serpent.  A closer look into the Hebrew text of the Old Testament suggests that God gave spirits to the animals, and Mormon theology is quite explicit about that (see Doctrine & Covenants 77:2 and Moses 3:5).  Historically, Christian religions have been most disposed to deny the consciousness or spirit of animals, but theologians like Andrew Linzey, an Anglican priest, seek to overturn Christianity's disrespect and feeling of dominance towards the rest of God's creatures.  I could go on, but suffice it to say that if you're religious, you have a lot more reason to believe in animal consciousness than you thought (check out Lisa Kemmerer's book "Animals and World Religions" if you want to learn more).

So why should we care?  One thing I really enjoyed about Kemmerer's book is that it included an appendix detailing the current status of animal cruelty in the American meat industry today (the book was published in 2012).  Before reading this, I was familiar with several activists' accounts of how animals were treated in slaughterhouses and such, but I simply assumed that it was a thing of the past.  Not so.  I won't go into detail, but current practice isn't much different from what it historically has been.  There's enough evidence to pretty solidly debunk Descartes' idea that animals don't feel pain.  There's plenty of suffering still happening to billions of them.  And if you study theology deeply enough, it gives you a reason to care about it, no matter what religion you belong to.

Outside of this blog post, I don't plan to become an animal rights activist.  Frankly, I don't know how effective any efforts will be to get the meat industry to change the way they do things.  But we can change how much we support the industry; namely, by changing how much of their products we buy and consume.

This is Graham Hill, an environmental activist of sorts.  This short TED talk is aimed towards people who have thought about being vegetarian before, but didn't think they would be able to do it completely.  In Hill's words, "Imagine your last hamburger."  For me, I think going vegetarian would be doable but difficult.  I don't know if I could ever go vegan; I enjoy dairy too much.  The reason I enjoy Hill's approach is this:  when I've heard other people's arguments for vegetarianism in the past, it frequently seems to be couched in language that suggest we should accept vegetarianism completely or not at all.  Go big or go home.  Hill realizes that this sort of rhetoric is counterproductive; what about all the people who see and agree with the good reasons for it, but don't want to go 100% (like me)?  All-or-nothing vegetarians are wasting their time and effort on them.

So he offers an alternative:  be a weekday vegetarian.  Monday through Friday, no meat.  Saturday and Sunday, eat what you want.  After all, he says, "If all of us ate half as much meat, it would be like half of us were vegetarian".  He doesn't cite any of the reasons why most people go vegetarian (check this out if you want to see the best ones), this talk is primarily to offer people an option besides complete vegetarianism.  This is something I plan to try out when I'm back in college.  Feel free to join me if you'd like.