Read Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World Online
Authors: Kathy Freston
Tags: #food.cookbooks
Linzey, Dear, and Berry are speaking for many other Christians past and present who also have found a link between the spiritual life and a life of compassion for animals. The Christian teaching of compassion for animals was especially emphasized by Francis of Assisi. Saint Francis not only spoke eloquently about compassion for animals but also (like Linzey, Dear, and Berry) taught that kindness to animals is good spiritually and promotes peace among humans. “Not to hurt our humble brethren, the animals, is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission: to be of service to them whenever they require it. If you have people who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity you will have people who will deal likewise with other people.”
It feels like this is what was meant when God said we have “dominion” over animals. Rather than exploiting them and using them for our every whim, perhaps we are to take care of them, or at least not to hurt them. In other words, kindness to animals whether expressed in diet or other ways is an essential part of one’s spiritual life. This has become my experience in very concrete ways.
For example, after learning the truth about how animals suffer on today’s industrialized “farms,” I faced a kind of spiritual choice. I could press the facts from my mind and pretend that the violence I was supporting by eating animal products was someone else’s responsibility. Had I made that choice it would have shaped the person I am today and my spiritual life in important (and unfortunate) ways. Instead, I listened to my better instincts, and I’ve found that when you learn to do that with the foods you choose, you learn to do it in many other parts of your life as well. One good deed leads to another.
My friend the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, who was inspired to commit to vegetarianism by the birth of his first child and wrote a wonderful book about it called
Eating Animals
, put it this way: “Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty… change[s] us.” Aligning my diet with my beliefs has helped me become more like the person I want to be.
It’s not surprising, really, that when the world’s single most influential spiritual leader, Pope Benedict XVI, was asked to comment on the factory farming of animals, he began by saying, “That is a very serious question.” If the rest of his answer weren’t so insightful, I would be tempted to stop there. It’s such an important point: what we choose to eat is “a very serious question.” Yet, many of us never ask it. The pope continues, “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.” Yes, such practices are indeed degrading to living creatures, but they also degrade our own humanity. Who are we if we not only allow this to happen, but if we purchase the end results of such a miserable process?
Jewish Traditions
What the pope calls a “relationship of mutuality” between humans and animals sounds to my ears similar to the ideal relationship with animals I found expressed in Judaism’s rabbinic tradition. Rabbi Moses Maimonides, also simply called Maimonides (1135–1204), was the greatest Jewish scholar of his time. It is said of him that “from Moses to Moses there has been no one like Moses.” In Maimonides’ most important work, a spiritual guidebook he entitled
The Guide for the Perplexed
, he spends considerable time on the virtue of compassion for animals. Explaining the reason for biblical laws that require a person to show sensitivity to the bonds between mother hens and their chicks, Maimonides explains that there is “no difference… between humanity and the other animals” in relation to the pain a mother experiences if she sees her young harmed. “For the love and the tenderness of a mother for her child is not consequent upon reason but upon the activity of the imaginative faculty, which is found in most animals just as it is found in humanity.”
Maimonides is not just speaking his own mind here, but representing an ancient and contemporary practice of compassion for animals that the Jewish tradition has known as
tzaar baalei chayim
. Traditionally
tzaar baalei chayim
has not been interpreted as absolutely requiring vegetarianism, but in the age of factory farming numerous rabbis are going vegetarian and citing this venerable principle. One such rabbi is David Wolpe, the senior rabbi at one of the largest synagogues in the world, Temple Sinai in Los Angeles, who was recently celebrated by
Newsweek
as the “number one pulpit rabbi in America.”
Rabbi Wolpe has emphasized that the spiritual benefits of vegetarianism and compassion for animals don’t just apply to nonhuman animals. Consider Rabbi Wolpe’s discussion of the passage from Maimonides just cited above:
There is a Jewish law that you’re not allowed to take the eggs from a nest without shooing the mother bird away. First you have to get rid of the mother bird so that she won’t see you collecting the eggs from the nest. It’s a law that’s explicit in the Torah. And there are two interpretations of that law. One interpretation following Maimonides is that it is because the bird itself has feelings and you don’t want it to see you taking the egg. The other interpretation following Nachmanides is that you shouldn’t be so coarse, so insensitive, so cruel, as right in front of a mother to take its young. Both of those interpretations are at play here. It’s not only that we shouldn’t inflict this kind of pain on animals; it’s that we shouldn’t be the kind of people who would do it.
I love this idea. Veganism doesn’t just mean we are kinder to animals; it allows us to be more like the kind of people that spiritual traditions have always encouraged us to be.
The rabbis I spoke with explained that today many Jews are vegetarian out of concern for animal welfare
,
but
also
simply as a way to participate in an ancient Jewish practice meant to transform eating into a spiritual activity, the kosher diet. As it turns out virtually all the kosher laws deal with regulating animal products—for example prohibitions against eating pigs or shellfish, or the laws of Jewish religious slaughter.
It’s very easy for a vegetarian to keep kosher and even easier for vegans.
Veganism doesn’t just mean we are kinder to animals, it allows us to be more like the kind of people that spiritual traditions have always encouraged us to be.
For millennia, Jewish sages have found a teaching in this: the practice of eating kosher is not simply a concession on the vegetarian ideal. A kosher diet is meant to gently lead people back to vegetarianism—back to Eden.
This is where the question, “Well, kosher is at least humane, isn’t it?” comes up. To answer this, I spoke with a couple of people who have firsthand experience in today’s kosher slaughterhouses. One of the most knowledgeable was Philip Schein. This is his story in his own words.
Philip Schein’s Story:
The Question of Kosher Meat
I am a cruelty investigator for the world’s largest animal protection group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA. It’s a life I never could have imagined. I grew up eating meat, not protesting it. I am Jewish and I was always told that kosher meat was humane. I was told that how we treated those beings in our power mattered greatly, that it was what defined us as human beings. It was a way of approaching daily life that made me proud to be Jewish.
Today I have conducted more than ten undercover investigations at major kosher slaughter facilities from Nebraska to Uruguay. This firsthand experience on kill floors quickly shattered any naïve hopes I held out that kosher meant humane.
In South America, which supplies a large percentage of kosher beef to Israel and the United States, the standard method of kosher slaughter is the “shackle and hoist” technique, in which cattle are chained, tripped, and restrained on the ground while their throats are cut, and then they are hoisted immediately into the air to be bled out while still conscious and struggling. In the U.S., at what was at the time the world’s single largest kosher slaughter facility, I’ve seen workers systematically hacking out the tracheas and esophagi of conscious and wide-eyed cattle. I’ve seen workers shock animals in the face with electric prods and let animals languish for minutes as the result of sloppy religious slaughter techniques. All these violations are a matter of public record now and they were widely reported on in the media. You can see the videos at www.humanekosher.com. These practices are not standard and certainly not required by kosher law, but I’m ashamed how many other examples I could give of egregious cruelty at kosher facilities. And even more shameful than any of these abuses is the response to them by kosher certification authorities.
I expected these violations of the Jewish principle of compassion to animals to be condemned. I also expected that the meat from these slaughterhouses would be declared unkosher, but that is not what happened. Many in the Jewish community protested, but the leadership of the kosher industry insisted and still insists that the flesh of animals who die torturous deaths—even animals dismembered while conscious—can be perfectly kosher. It’s not that the situation is necessarily worse in kosher slaughterhouses than in conventional slaughter facilities—the problems with cruelty at mainstream slaughterhouses are arguably worse overall. But I expected kosher production to reflect a higher ethical standard. Sadly, what I witnessed in both kosher and nonkosher facilities is that suffering and cruelty is systemic in all forms of industrialized slaughter.
And regardless of what happens at the slaughterhouse, almost all the animals killed for kosher meat are supplied by the very same cruel factory farms that supply animals for conventional slaughter.
If kosher was once supposed to be an honorable compromise with the vegetarian ideal depicted in Genesis, it’s long ceased to be. I’m still proud of Jewish dietary traditions, but today it’s the growing movement of Jewish vegetarianism that I find inspiring. I’m not against kosher, but I am against what passes as kosher today. As the Nobel Laureate and Yiddish writer I. B. Singer put it, “I’m not against organized religion, but I don’t take part in it… when they interpret their religious books as being in favor of meat-eating…. [Vegetarianism] is my protest against the conduct of the world. To be a vegetarian is to disagree—to disagree with the course of things today…starvation, cruelty—we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it’s a strong one.”
The Jewish leaders I’ve researched unanimously agree that the ideal of kosher slaughter is to create a quick and painless death—something the laws of kosher share with the Muslim dietary laws, called Halal. They also agreed with Philip that the reality today is far different.
Muslim Teachings
The same unfortunate situation also exists in the production of Halal meat, even though Muslim tradition too has teachings exhorting its followers to compassion for animals. One tenth-century Iraqi religious tale even imagines the animals of the world issuing a lawsuit against humanity before the divine court because of humanity’s disregard for the natural world (an Islamic case for animal rights?). The animals explain that before the creation of Adam, “we were fully occupied in caring for our broods and rearing our young with all the good food and water God had allotted us, secure and un-molested in our own lands. Night and day we praised and sanctified God, and God alone.”
The animals protest that after the creation of human beings, they were treated mercilessly. “Whoever fell into their hands was… slaughtered and flayed…. [Humans] ripped open his belly, cut off his limbs and broke his bones, tore out his eyes; plucked his feathers or sheared off his hair or fleece, and put him onto the fire to be cooked, or on the spit to be roasted, or subjected him to even more dire tortures, whose full extent is beyond description.” It sounds like I’m quoting from an animal protection pamphlet, but this is a thousand-year-old Arabic text! Other tales tell of the Prophet Muhammad’s compassion for animals and his special affection for dogs.
Much more significant for Muslims, though, is a famous line in the Koran that beautifully expresses the idea that animals too are “good Muslims” and obey God in their own fashion. “There is not an animal that lives on the earth, nor a being that flies on its wings, but forms part of communities like you…. [T]hey all shall be gathered to their Lord in the end” (6:38). The word for “communities” used in this verse is the sacred Arabic word
ummah
, which is still today the common term used by Muslims to refer to
human
religious communities. Wherever the teachings of Muhammad, Moses, and Jesus may differ, they clearly agree that God enjoined humans to avoid cruelty to animals. They may not have advocated vegetarianism in their own day, but the real question is what these spiritual giants would say while standing in the shadow of today’s meat, dairy, and egg industries?
Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism
While the Abrahamic traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have championed values that lead one toward vegetarianism, the religious traditions that stem from India, such as Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism, have gone much further. In these traditions vegetarianism has not only been the theoretical ideal of the perfect world, but has been advocated as a basic part of the spiritual life. In America we are fortunate today that more restaurants are adding vegetarian sections to their menus, but meat-centered food is still the norm. In India today, the situation is often reversed. Instead of talking about “regular” and vegetarian food like we do here, restaurants are described as “veg or non-veg.” Eating animals is the aberrant diet!