Doing Enough for Animals
“The livestock population of the United States today consumes enough
grain and soybeans to feed over five times the entire human population of
the country.”
“We feed these animals over 80% of the corn we grow, and over 95% of the
oats. Less than half the harvested agricultural acreage in the United States
is used to grow food for people. Most of it is used to grow livestock feed.”
–John Robbins, Diet for a New America
"One man's meat is another man / woman / child's hunger."
This slogan is part of the "Enough" campaign, with its aim of reducing meat
consumption. The campaign highlights the waste of resources involved in
feeding grain to animals:
"Every minute eighteen children die from starvation, yet forty percent of
the world's grain is fed to animals for meat."
Vegetarianism for a trial period is advocated to "help the hungry, improve
the environment" and "stop untold animal suffering." Vegetarianism is also
recommended on health grounds. This campaign actually has the support
of organized religion.
Ronald J. Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action, in his 1977 book, Rich
Christians in an Age of Hunger, pointed out that 220 million Americans were
eating enough food (largely because of the high consumption of grain fed to
livestock) to feed over one billion people in the poorer countries.
The realization that meat is an unnecessary luxury, resulting in inequities
in the world food supply has prompted religious leaders in different
Christian denominations to call on their members to abstain from meat on
certain days of the week. Paul Moore, Jr., the Episcopal Bishop of the
Diocese of New York, made such an appeal in a November, 1974 pastoral letter
calling for the observance of “meatless Wednesdays.”
A similar appeal had previously been issued by Cardinal Cooke, the Roman
Catholic Archbishop of New York. The Reverend Eugene Carson Blake, former
head of the World Council of Churches and founder of Bread for the World,
has encouraged everyone in his anti-hunger organization to abstain from
eating meat on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
“Is this not the fast I have chosen? To loosen the chains of wickedness,
to undo the bonds of oppression, and to let the oppressed go free? Is it not
to share thy bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the
homeless? Clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on
your own.”
—Isaiah 58:6-8
“Honourable men may disagree honourably about some details of human
treatment of the non-human,” wrote Stephen Clark in his 1977 book, The Moral
Status of Animals, “but vegetarianism is now as necessary a pledge of moral
devotion as was the refusal of emperor-worship in the early church.”
According to Clark, eating animal flesh is “gluttony,” and “Those who still
eat flesh when they could do otherwise have no claim to be serious
moralists.”
“Clark’s conclusion has real force and its power has yet to be sufficiently
appreciated by fellow Christians,” says the Reverend Andrew Linzey, author
of Christianity and the Rights of Animals. “Far from seeing the
possibility of widespread vegetarianism as a threat to Old Testament norms,
Christians should rather welcome the fact that the Spirit is enabling us to
make decisions so that we may more properly conform to the original Genesis
picture of living in peace with creation.”
Father Thomas Berry, a Catholic priest, author, and founder of the Riverdale
Center of Religious Research in New York, wrote in 1987 that “Vegetarianism
is a way of life that we should all move toward for economic survival,
physical well-being, and spiritual integrity.”
In 1992, members of Los Angeles’ First Unitarian Church agreed to serve
vegetarian meals at the church’s weekly Sunday lunch. Their decision was
made as a protest against animal cruelty and the environmental damage caused
by the livestock industry.
The Reverend Marc Wessels, Executive Director of the International Network
for Religion and Animals (INRA) made this observation on Earth Day 1990:
“It is a fact that no significant social reform has yet taken place in this
country without the voice of the religious community being heard. The
endeavors of the abolition of slavery; the women’s suffrage movement; the
emergence of the pacifist tradition during World War I; the struggles to
support civil rights, labor unions, and migrant farm workers; and the
anti-nuclear and peace movements have all succeeded in part because of the
power and support of organized religion. Such authority and energy is
required by individual Christians and the institutional church today if the
liberation of animals is to become a reality.”
Go on to: Do Secular Arguments Overrule Religion?
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