A few years back, outrage erupted when California State Fair officials slaughtered a nine-year-old child’s goat. Legally, the state owned the goat through the 4H program. Unfortunately for the little girl who had raised the goat, she had become attached to it. But how could the officials be so heartless as not to let the girl keep the goat? The public felt that the goat should not have been slaughtered because the state officials knowingly caused grief to the child. This goat was more valuable alive as an emotional companion than as a slaughtered meat source. What then is the value of the billions of animals who have no one to grieve their deaths in slaughterhouses?
Grief is the price we pay for love. When a loving relationship ends, the separation from that love causes profound heartache. Love that helped sustain us disappears from our life, leaving us feeling empty and adrift. A vital, life-giving part from our past is cut-off from ourselves, and the future appears bleak, even hopeless.
When my high school students discussed God’s presence during suffering, the grief at the loss of pets was a common example of suffering in their young lives. People commonly connect with animals at an almost human level such that their deaths are a cause of immense grief. People also grieve at the deaths of animals who are not their pets: while watching movies such as Bambi or at the sight of roadkill.
The grief at the deaths of animals we had no relationship with shows that we have an innate sense of connection with animals. In scripture, animals being slaughtered is meant to evoke a sense of grief and pity. Saint Paul writes “for your sake, we are being slain all the day; we are looked upon as sheep to be slaughtered” (Romans 8:36). The Suffering Servant in Isaiah, who Christians understand is a prefigurement of Jesus, is compared to “a lamb led to slaughter who did not open its mouth.” (Isaiah 53:7) The slaughter of innocent animals is meant to evoke a sense of pity in us through the grief we experience at the death of innocent animals.
In his recent book A Moral Life, Jesuit moral theologian James Keenan notes that grief reveals the breadth and depth of human capacity for relationality. The process of grieving opens our eyes to a new appreciation of our relatedness with others. Applying Keenan’s notion of grief in human relationships to those with animals, we realize that we are interconnected with them at a level deeper than merely sharing the same space in the universe. We share an intersubjectivity with animals that goes beyond the utilitarian relationship of raising them for food. Many people have chickens, cows, and pigs as pets. For instance, the nine-year old in California clearly demonstrates the emotional ties any pet owner shares with their animal companions.
It is not just humans who grieve. Animals are also capable of grieving the deaths of fellow animals. Famously, we know elephants mourn the death of a herd member for long periods. Numerous animals alter their behavior when a companion dies or goes missing from their surroundings. Research shows that cows can be best friends with particular members of the herd and display behavioral changes when the friend is taken away.
Lest we try to explain away these behaviors as hard-wired evolutionary traits, Zoe Cormier, a British zoologist and journalist, writes that “When mourning, both animals and humans behave in a variety of ways that are simply not useful to survival: withdrawing into solitude, retreating from socializing, sleeping less, eating less, foraging less, mating less, and in spending time tending to a corpse, exposing oneself to pathogens and making oneself vulnerable to predators.” Such expressions of grief that have no survival benefit remind us that animals, like humans, are much more than automatons that behave only according to hardwired evolutionary instincts.
Grief shows us that we are connected to others, opening us to be responsive to them. According to Keenan, this recognition of our responsiveness to others awakens within us an identification with the other and acknowledges the other as in relation to ourselves. I extend Keenan’s notion of recognition to our connection with animals. Non-human creatures are not merely material entities with whom we can do as we please. Once we identify our connection with animals through our grief at their deaths, we ought to realize that these animals are in relation with us. Thus, as a party to whom we are connected, we owe something to animals just like we would with any other human. This connection with the other ought to draw out a response of love towards the other.
We cannot shy away from this call to love that arises out of our relationality with others. James Keenan asks, “What would happen if, like the Gospels, theological ethics would turn its gaze to human suffering and equally, to turn to sin as the failure to love?” I invite Catholics to expand our gaze of compassion to include all animals because we know that animals can experience love and compassion. Just as with humans, this circle of compassion ought to include animals with whom we do not have any personal relationships. It is their capacity to cause grief in us that underlies our duty to show compassion to them.
What would happen if we turned our gaze of compassion toward the immense suffering that humans inflict on animals? If God cares about the birds in the sky such that not one of them falls to the ground without His consent (Matthew 10:29), then we ought to ensure that not one animal in our care is harmed with our consent. We cannot fail to be bothered about the ways we hurt animals.
The Pope’s prayer intention for June was that the world grows in compassion. Compassion for the suffering is a natural part of the human experience. The Pope is right. We have plenty of room to grow in our compassion for others, especially for animals.
During the Easter season, Saint Ignatius Parish in Boston decorated the sanctuary with open bird cages signifying Jesus’ victory over the tyranny of sin and humanity’s freedom from death. Through His Death and Resurrection, Jesus freed us from whatever holds us back from full communion with God. The open bird cages were a powerful metaphor for this freedom from the bondage of sin. In a happy coincidence, there was a beautiful homily at the weekly theology school Mass about Jesus, the Prince of Peace. All that was quickly forgotten sometime during the ten-minute walk to lunch where compassionate people dined on fried chicken from birds raised in tiny cages and brutally slaughtered on factory farms. It was an abject failure to bother to be compassionate towards others.
If we witnessed the miserable lives and violent slaughter of these birds, would we experience grief? Would that grief remind us of our connection to chickens and other farm animals? How would this connection with animals move us to compassion and to shun the products of violence? We must answer these questions honestly. Keenan argues that sin is a failure to bother to love. Ignoring these pressing questions might cause us to fall short in our moral obligations as Christians.
