The tradition of addressing the problem of inflicting cruelty upon animals reaches back, in the Western world, to pagan antiquity. The first thinkers to advocate the duty of kindness to animals were Pythagoras and Empedocles. “Holding the doctrine of metempsychosis, or the transmigration of human souls into the bodies of lower animals after death, these philosophers taught that animals share in human rights, and that it is a crime to kill them”—which ideas even found some expression in early Roman legislation.1 And it was Plutarch, the Greek-born Roman citizen whose absolute rejection of Epicureanism led him to write in the Moralia, “But for the sake of a little flesh, we deprive them [animals] of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being.”2
The Hebrew Bible urges kindness toward animals. The Hebrews were forbidden to muzzle the ox while it was treading out the grain (Deuteronomy 25:4) because it was deemed cruel to prevent the animal from eating the food that was so tantalizingly close to him as he worked. It was also forbidden to yolk together an ox and a donkey (Deuteronomy 22:10). In the early Hebrew scriptures, even domestic animals had rights. The New Testament has little to say on the subject of cruelty to animals, and the early Fathers of the Church are mostly silent about it. Nevertheless, Christian teaching and practice from the beginning (with the notable exception of Paul3) respect in a general way the scriptural ideal of righteousness : “The righteous know the needs of their animals, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel” (Proverbs 12:10).4 In Matthew 9:13 Jesus, citing Hosea 6:6, says to the Pharisees, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” And in Matthew 5:7, Jesus says, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.”
The hagiographical literature of medieval monasticism, which so deeply formed and guided the moral sentiments of the Christian world, as William Edward Hartpole Lecky sets forth with abundant evidence, represents one of the most striking efforts made in Christendom to inculcate a feeling of kindness and pity towards animals.5 We are also aware in our culture that such kindness characterized many holy people before and after St. Francis of Assisi, and that some carried this charity to a degree incredible to us. A surprising number of monks and nuns protected animals from hunters, releasing them from traps and snares and placing their own bodies between hunters and their prey.6
Medieval theologians never expressed doubts about the right of humans to exercise dominion over animals. St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the scholastic theologians, condemns cruelty to animals chiefly because of its injurious effects on the perpetrator.7 This anthropocentric argument still finds expression today, in The Catechism of the Catholic Church : “It is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly.”8 The doctrine of human dignity refers to the view that human life is infinitely valuable, whereas the lives of non-human animals have less value or even none at all. Another word for this doctrine is anthropocentrism. The doctrine obviously has important implications for the treatment of non-human animals. Our species has a long track record of treating other animals poorly and of discriminating against them because they do not belong to our species. This form of discrimination goes by the name of “speciesism.”9 Because speciesism has inflicted suffering on many more sentient beings than has racism or sexism,10 it is at least as morally objectionable as any other form of discrimination. Since a world with less suffering is better than one with more, it makes no moral difference whether the suffering creature is human or belongs to another sentient species.
But, as James Fox points out, “while the scholastics rest their condemnation of cruelty to animals on its demoralizing influence, their general teaching concerning the nature of man’s rights and duties furnishes principles which have but to be applied in order to establish the direct and essential sinfulness of cruelty to the animal world, irrespective of the results of such conduct on the character of those who practise it.”11 Pope Francis himself has clearly applied these principles in his encyclical, Laudato ‘Si : On Care for Our Common Home, which contains numerous statements forcefully rejecting a “tyrannical” and “distorted” anthropocentrism that would seek to justify thinking “of different species merely as potential ‘resources’ to be exploited, while overlooking the fact that they have value in themselves.”12

Lucille C. Thibodeau, p.m., Ph.D.
© 2016