The story of how we moved away from the teachings of Jesus about animals is a long and sad one—too long for us to go into at this time. However, in the past few centuries (basically since the Industrial Revolution, interestingly and ironically enough), some visionary and prophetic individuals have said, written, and done things that hold out hope for all animals and for all those who care for them. The following are just a few examples.

1. If I had to pick a single event from which to date the modern animal welfare movement, it would be the publication in 1776 of The Duty of Mercy and the Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals by the Rev. Dr. Humphrey Primatt, an Anglican priest. Primatt died young and wrote only one book. Its five chapters appear to be edited versions of sermons that Primatt had delivered from the pulpit. These chapters draw extensively on the Bible, and are heavily footnoted with citations of chapter and verse. The Duty of Mercy is a deliberate and direct Christian refutation of the claim maintained from Paul through Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to Martin Luther that we have no direct moral duties to animals. Primatt’s conclusion is one of the most eloquent calls for compassion toward animals ever proclaimed :

Make it your business, esteem it your duty, believe it to be the ground of your hope, and know that it is that which the Lord doth require of thee—to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God. See that no brute of any kind, whether entrusted to thy care, or coming in thy way, suffer through thy neglect or abuse. Let no views of profit, no compliance with custom, and no fear of the ridicule of the world, ever tempt thee to the least act of cruelty or injustice to any creature whatsoever. But let this be your invariable rule, everywhere, and at all times, to do unto others as, in their condition, you would be done unto.

2. In 1789, the English Enlightenment philosopher Jeremy Bentham elegantly refuted St. Thomas Aquinas’s argument against considering animals our neighbors with these words : “What else is it that should trace the insuperable line [between beings who are entitled to moral consideration and those who are not] ? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse ? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail ? The question is not Can they reason ? nor Can they talk ? but Can they suffer ?

3. John Wesley, founder of Methodism, wrote : “In recompense for what they [animals] have suffered, when God has ‘renewed the face of the earth’ and their corruptible body has put on incorruption, they shall enjoy happiness suited to their state without alloy, without interruption, and without end.”

4. Inspired by Primatt, the Rev. Arthur Broome assembled a group of Britain’s leading social reformers to form an organization that would investigate and prosecute animal cruelty cases. Thus was born the world’s first animal protection organization, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals—which in 1840 would receive the patronage of Queen Victoria and be rechristened the Royal Society for the prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). In 1838, one of their inspectors, James Piper, became the first person in history known to have given his life for animal protection, when he was beaten to death by a gang of cock fighters in Middlesex.

5. Henry Bergh (1813-1888), son of a socially prominent New York family and diplomat, found his calling as an advocate for the powerless when he saw horse-cart drivers mercilessly beating their overloaded animals. One day in 1863, a St. Petersburg driver was merrily lashing his horse. Suddenly, Bergh’s carriage pulled alongside and Bergh bellowed to his coachman, “Tell that fellow to stop !” Obediently the Russian driver dropped his whip. Bergh nodded approval and set out in pursuit of other inhumane drivers. Once back in New York, his habit earned him the nickname “the great meddler.” In 1866 in New York, he addressed a large gathering of the city’s movers and shakers. “This is a matter purely of conscience,” he told his audience. “It has not perplexing issues. It is a moral question in all its aspects.” That same year, an animal protection statute was enacted that granted the newly-minted American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals the authority to enforce it. Thus the ASPCA came into being, which is now a feature of American life.

6. That respecting animal rights is a way of living with humility according to God’s plan is an idea expressed by the saintly Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov, the masterpiece of Russian Orthodox novelist Fyodor Dostoyesvsky : “Love the animals : God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble them, do not harass them, do not deprive them of their happiness, do not work against God’s intent.”

7. On Good Friday in 1841, John Henry Newman preached a sermon. An Anglican priest at the time, Newman later became a Roman Catholic, a priest, and a Cardinal. He was beatified a few years ago by Pope Benedict XVI. In that sermon, Newman poses the question : “how are we to feel pain and anguish at the thought of Christ’s suffering ?” He offers three ways in which this can be done, the first of which is by reference to the suffering of animals. His text is from Isaiah 53:7, which compares the coming Messiah to “a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth.” Newman notes that Christ was “as defenceless and innocent as a lamb is,” and states that since scripture compares Christ to this “inoffensive and unprotected animal,” so “we may without presumption or irreverence take the image as a means of conveying to minds those feelings which our Lord’s sufferings should excite within us.”
But Newman does not stop there. He specifically addresses the issue of cruelty and
makes a remarkable claim :
I mean, consider how very horrible it is to read the accounts which
sometimes meet us of cruelties exercised on brute animals. Does it not
sometimes make us shudder to hear tell of them, or to read them in some
chance publication which we take up ? At one time it is the wanton deed
of barbarous owners who ill-treat their cattle, or beasts of burden ; and at
another, it is the cold-blooded and calculating act of men of science, who
make experiments on brute animals, perhaps merely from a sort of
curiosity. I do not like to go into particulars, for many reasons ; but one of
those instances which we read of as happening in this day, and which
seems more shocking than the rest, is, when the poor dumb victim is
fastened against a wall, pierced, gashed, and so left to linger out its life.
Now do you not see that I have a reason for saying this, and am not using
these distressing words for nothing ? For what was this but the very cruelty
inflicted upon our Lord ? He was gashed with the scourge, pierced through
hands and feet, and so fastened to the Cross, and there left, and that as a
spectacle.
What is significant about this passage is not the particular sympathy shown to animals as such, but Newman’s placing of animal suffering within a Christological context. With the question, “For what was this but the very cruelty inflicted upon our Lord ?” he posits nothing less than a moral equivalence between the suffering of animals and the suffering of Christ himself. The issue is not just about the physical similarity of the torture inflicted ; Newman goes on to explain the rationale for our abhorrence of cruelty in both cases :
Now what is it that moves our very hearts, and sickens us so much at cruelty
shown to poor brutes ? I suppose this first, that they have done no harm ; next,
that they have no power whatever of resistance ; it is the cowardice and tyranny
of which they are the victims which makes their sufferings so especially
touching. . . . There is something so very dreadful, so satanic in tormenting
those who have never harmed us, and who cannot defend themselves, who are
utterly in our power, who have weapons neither of offence nor defence, that
none but very hardened persons can endure the thought of it.
And to make the parallel exact, he continues :
Now this was just our Saviour’s case : He had laid aside his glory, he had
(as it were) disbanded his legions of angels, he came on earth without arms,
except the arms of truth, meekness and righteousness, and committed himself
to the world in perfect innocence and sinlessness, and in utter helplessness,
as the Lamb of God.
And Newman concludes : “Think then, my brethren, of your feelings at cruelty practiced upon brute animals, and you will gain one sort of feeling which the history of Christ’s Cross and Passion ought to excite within you.” Newman is doing much more here than using our feelings about cruelty as an aid to religious reflection. He is explicitly recognizing a moral equivalence between two kinds of suffering—that of animals and that of Christ. Moreover—and this is the crucial point—in so doing, Newman uncovers the all-important rational ground for positing that such cruelty is nothing less than (in his word) “satanic.”

8. At 30 years of age, Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) was a renowned organist, a musicologist, a Unitarian theologian, and a professor of philosophy and theology at the prestigious University of Strasbourg. In 1905 he gave it all up to study tropical medicine and surgery and become a medical missionary in French Equatorial Africa. There, he established a hospital for Africans. There, except for brief periods, he remained until his death at the age of ninety.
He searched for the ultimate moral principle that would express universal empathy for all living things. He found it in the concept of reverence : “I am life which wills to live, in the midst of life which wills to live. . . . Ethics consist, therefore, in my experience the compulsion to show to all will-to-live the same reverence as I do to my own. . . . It is good to maintain and encourage life ; it is bad to destroy life or to obstruct it. . . . Because the extension of the principle of love to animal creation means so great a revolution for ethics, philosophy shrinks from this step.”

9. Polish-born Jewish-American writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1978 Nobel laureate and the most compassionate champion of animals in modern literature who lost many members of his own family in the Holocaust, wrote in a short story : “In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis ; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.”

10. The philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903-69), a German Jew who was forced into exile by the Nazis but returned to Germany after the war to a professorship at Frankfurt University, wrote : “Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks : they’re only animals.”

11. In 1975, Australian philosopher Peter Singer published Animal Liberation which devoted much space to descriptions of the suffering of animals on factory farms and in laboratories ; these were a revelation to the general public. A reasoned, coherent argument against animal enslavement and slaughter, it was the right book at the right time. It has continued to provide the roiling, contentious animal rights movement with a coherence and intellectual respectability that transcend ideology or strategy. The book maintains its high status to this day because its call to treat animals as our moral equals galvanized a generation to action.

12. The Rev. Dr. Andrew Linzey, Anglican priest, professor of theology in the University of Oxford, and founding director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, opened up an animal rights dialogue within the Christian community by publishing Animal Rights : A Christian Perspective ; Christianity and the Rights of Animals ; Animal Theology ; Animal Gospel ; and Why Animal Suffering Matters—among other books. In these works, he develops a compassionate and sophisticated theology of animal rights which remains a high point of Christian thinking about animal creation. He believes that “Christians whose eyes are fixed on the awfulness of crucifixion are in a special position to understand the awfulness of innocent suffering. The Cross of Christ is God’s absolute identification with the weak, the powerless, and the vulnerable, but most of all with unprotected, undefended, innocent suffering.”

13. Everyone who knows Pope Benedict XVI well is aware that he is a huge animal lover and even had to be reminded that he could not take in stray cats from the surrounding Roman streets. Not long before he became pope when he was in charge of safeguarding Catholic doctrine, he was asked by a journalist, “Are we allowed to make use of animals, and even to eat them ?” His response became the basis of a PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) advertisement : “That is a very serious question. At any rate, we can see that they are given into our care, that we cannot just do whatever we want with them. Animals, too, are God’s creatures. . . . Certainly, a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible.” Benedict will go down in history as the first “Green Pope.”

14. In Laudato Si’ (On Care for Our Common Home), Pope Francis writes the following (among many statements about animals) : “The Bible has no place for a tyrannical anthropocentrism unconcerned for other creatures” (sect. 68) ; “Even the fleeting life of the least of beings is the object of his love, and in its few seconds of existence, God enfolds it with his affection” (sect. 77) ; “The ultimate purpose of other creatures is not to be found in us. Rather, all creatures are moving forward with us and through us toward a common point of arrival, which is God, in that transcendent fullness where the risen Christ embraces and illumines all things” (sect. 83) ; “It is enough to recognize that our body itself establishes us in a direct relationship with the environment and with other living beings” (sect. 155) ; “The human person grows more, matures more, and is sanctified more to the extent that he or she enters into relationships, going out from themselves to live in communion with God, with others, and with all creatures.”

15. Here are some of the major national and international organizations that exist to help animals.
• ALDF.org (Animal Legal Defense Fund)
• AAVS.org (American Anti-Vivisection Society)
• ASPCA.org (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals)
• CIWF.org (Compassion in World Farming)
• Dawn Watch.org
• Effective Altruism.org
• FARM.org (Farm Animal Rights Movement)
• FarmSanctuary.org
• HFA.org (Humane Farming Association)
• HumaneLeague.org
• HSI.org (Humane Society International)
• HSUS.org (Humane Society of the United States)
• Humane Society Division of Faith Outreach : www.humanesociety.org/about/departments/faith
• IDA.org (In Defense of Animals)
• IFAW.org (International Fund for Animal Welfare)
• MercyforAnimals.org
• OxfordCentreforAnimalEthics.org
• PETA.org (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals)
• PCRM.org (Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine)

If you sign up to receive their news, alerts, etc., you will probably be asked to donate money. If you can, that’s great. They’re appreciative for even the smallest gifts. Whether or not you can afford to give money, you can sign their petitions, which they also greatly appreciate. Over the past decade, I’ve signed well over 15000 petitions online for all these organizations. It’s fast (takes no more than about 30 seconds to sign a petition), easy, costs nothing—and you will be doing something to help, and that will make you feel very good ! And every once in a while, you’ll get an email about an animal issue saying something like “Victory !” And you will have been a part of that victory. Go for it, for the sake of God’s creatures who need your help !