SOF 47 / May 2001 et anesxees4zernaeae Aron eraAEIR As Britain struggles with the awesome consequences of foot-and-mouth, swine fever and mad cow disease, and town and country argue over hunting with hounds, TREVOR GREENFIELD looks at ‘humans, animals and the theology of relationship’ holy cows, and tally-ho!
Relationships are on today’s agenda. Newspapers and magazines devote huge amounts of space to dissecting the marriages of the rich and famous. They offer advice on how to transform your relationship with your partner, and should that fail there are now a growing number of trained, and presumably busy, relationship counsellors to help couples who are experiencing particular difficulties. “We don’t murder animals, or kill them, or put them to sleep. We have a special word. We cull them” have souls and so, broadly speaking, didn’t matter. The primary focus of sacredness was on an individual's relationship, not with the world, but with God.
Following the development of this structure, however, the search for God in the Christian world has largely been one of descent, and increasingly today men and women no longer look heavenward when seeking divinity. Rather, God is now the ground of our being, our postmodern narrative or our ultimate concern. And what could or should concern us more than our lives on earth and life on earth? But if this is soa woman or man in isolation is not in essence a religious or spiritual being. Men and aa a women become religious or spiritual Notwithstanding the current obsession with Posh ‘n’ Becks or the emergence of a popular culture that at times seems to quantify human relationships in terms of a marketable commodity, the focus on how we can lead better lives, be better people and relate more fully to each other is surely a development to be welcomed. Particularly so if a lasting effect is that we equate religion and spirituality more in terms of engagement with the world and with our relationships with each other. But I would suggest that the spiritual or sacred nature of relationships should not be seen solely in human-to-human terms. Rather, we should re-assess the nature of the relationship of human beings to animals and even that of animals to other animals.
Historically the idea of relationship has meant different things when used in terms of human-human and humananimal. A human-human relationship has traditionally been seen as blessed by God and as a spiritual union. The human-animal relationship, however, has nearly always been seen in terms of economics. There are, of course, notable exceptions. The relationship between humans and domestic cats and dogs, for example, has been granted an elevated status that is expressed in terms of companionship, though never (or rarely) in terms of the spiritual or sacred.
So in human terms relationships are three-tiered. Humanhuman is spiritual, human-domestic animal is symbiotic and human-other animal is economic.
The structure upon which this relationship model was built was the medieval Christian worldview. God created the earth as a resource for humanity to husband and harvest. Human beings, be they risen apes or fallen angels, possessed souls and were understood to be in special relationship with God. Other animals were thought not to SOF 46 / March 2001 through relationship with deity or with other women and men.
But if we can recognise sacredness in human relationships and are no longer tied to medieval constructs that govern the way we view other animals, then we also ought to recognise sacredness in relationships that occur between humans and other species. So what represents an authentic human response to the animal kingdom per se?
One initial idea I’d like to offer, although it’s not the line I intend to pursue, is that if we can recognise the sacred nature of the relationship between human beings and between human beings and other species, should we not also recognise the sacredness of other species relationships?
What, for example, would be the implication for farming if a cow and her calf were understood not as separate economic commodities but as sentient beings whose familial relationship should be respected?
Questions such as this, of course, are highlighted by the tragedy of foot and mouth and our response to it. No one denies it is an unpleasant and virulent disease that needs to be successfully eradicated. But what represents an acceptable cost in terms of animal life? The answer to that seems to lie in the linguistic context in which the discussion is placed. Farm animals have an economic relationship with humans and as commodities their lives are accordingly reframed. Thus the rising body-count of fit, healthy animals placed on funeral pyres is mitigated by the idea that a million die to save fifty million others. And the slaughter is further emotionally sanitised because the animals aren't murdered, killed, or even put to sleep; they are culled.
Culling has no equivalent meaning in human terms but the idea the word evokes serves a convenient double purpose. It suggests that mass slaughter equates to an act of . necessary husbandry whilst at the same time it distances us from the reality of an individual animal’s life and death.
Certainly the process has its own compelling internal logic, but ultimately one asks for whose benefit, animals or humans?
The line I do want to pursue is what represents a valid relationship between humans and other species and I’d like to do it through an analysis of the human activity of hunting. Humans have hunted animals for the whole of recorded history. Is hunter and hunted a valid relationship?
It certainly seems valid in nature. No-one condemns a lion for bringing down a zebra. So what about when men and women hunt?
There are, of course, hunter-gatherer communities. Is their kill and eat relationship with other species a valid one? I would argue that it is, primarily because of the way hunter-gatherers understand the world. The relationship of the hunter-gatherer to the world is one by which they reside essentially within its governance. They live by acquiring knowledge of how the natural world works; they exist as a fundamental part of it and participate in its natural process.
In this respect their kill and eat relationship with other animals simply echoes nature and is neither ethical nor unethical.
But what of our community, the advanced agriculturally based urban community of Europe? Historically our modern society, which developed out of the original IndoEuropean agricultural communities that displaced huntergatherers and drove them to the inhospitable regions they now inhabit, developed a crucially different way of understanding the world. As a consequence we do not endeavour to live by knowing the world and by participating in nature; rather, we endeavour to live by transforming the world, by making it what we want it to be.
At the heart of this philosophy, that the world is what we make it, lay the myths of imperialism and dominion.
Agricultural Man controls the world and has power over it, but this in turn requires a secondary aspect of justification (our transformation makes the world a better place) and a moral dimension of control (we have dominion over the world and so must look after it).
Here then is an irony; despite spending literally thousands of years developing a world in which hunting is presumably not required, millions of individuals choose to hunt. There would seem to be three primary reasons: pleasure, food and control. Hunting for pleasure in a world of our own making, in a world where we actually devised the ethical requirement to care for nature, seems philosophically indefensible. Here the relationship between hunter and hunted becomes seemingly perverted by the idea that man’s dominion requires some form of generic husbandry where individual animals don’t matter, just the vague notion of the preservation of species.
But, as I’ve tried to argue, it’s in the very nature of the relationship between individual beings that sacredness occurs. If we choose to make the world and the ethics that underpin it, then the killing of an animal by a human for pleasure must either represent a crime or demand a philosophical acknowledgement that we need to change the world again.
So, what about hunting for food? At face value it doesn’t seem unreasonable. We can appeal to the examples of nature and to our primeval instinct to hunt and provide. But in doing so, of course, we forget that we can’t appeal to nature because we live in an ethical world, not a natural one, and that really the primeval instincts indulged in hunting are actually tapping into our formative myths of imperialism and domination. Besides, if Europe is awash with food, hunting for more simply reduces down to hunting for pleasure, as there is no need to eat what you kill.
So what about hunting for control? Philosophically, by the simple fact that it’s linked to the notion that we are endeavouring to maintain the order of the world we created, it would appear to have something going for it. We set the limits or boundaries of our society. Beyond that lies wilderness or nature and by definition we're not responsible for that. On the contrary, we're responsible for ensuring it doesn’t encroach upon and threaten our created world.
Well you could think that, but you’d be wrong! Surely, philosophically, we should embrace the concept of wilderness as an essential function of society. You can’t have one without the other, and by defining one we in fact create the other as well. In creating the world in which we live, “Man gave names to all the animals”, both domestic and wild, and so must have responsibility for them. And, central to that responsibility must lie the notion that a relationship based on killing is an invalid one.
Certainly the development of a theology of relationship that includes animals encounters particular ethical dilemmas as well as problems of scope and definition. For example, I can't conceive of having a relationship with a fish or an insect, so they appear to be excluded from the compassionate imperative. At the point where comprehension of relationship breaks down, then, it seems necessary to build in an idea akin to Schwietzer’s “reverence for life”, or simply revert to good old-fashioned faith and believe “because it is impossible”. Either way, the idea that millions of species exist but it is acceptable to care about only some of then) seems equally absurd. So how should we care?
The development of a spirituality that recognises all relationships as deriving from the sacred creative act of living would offer an opportunity for the reorienting of attitudes that have driven species to extinction, turned husbandry into industry and taken the culture out of agriculture. Religious humanists declare that life is God, Christian realists and nonrealists declare that God is love. That’s good. Let's love all life and all that life loves.
Trevor Greenfield is Associate Lecturer in the Study of Religions Dept, University College, Chichester. His primary research interest is the nature and function of Radical Theology.