Where is the human compassion for Animals at Christmas
Lanka WebShenali D Waduge 2013-12-26
December 24-- Except Buddhism and Jainism all other religious festivities are celebrated by denying the life of animals. Buddhists and Jains are the only religions that has festivities without culling animals as sacrifice or for food. Celebrations for Abrahamic religions of Christianity and Islam means to slaughter animals and deny them their right to life so that human beings enjoy their right to rejoice. Thus throughout the year, every celebration has meant millions and millions of animals being slaughtered to be consumed as food.
The 5th commandment says ‘you shall not kill’ does this then not refer to animals? The Roman Catholic Church permits and supports slaughter of animals for food. If animals are created by God, just as man is, where does it say that animals are to be sacrificed? How did the RCC determine that animals were created to be consumed as meat? Is it because the Church excommunicated vegetarians in the 6th century AD? Those who became vegetarians in order to save animals from slaughter were sent to hell to suffer everlasting torment while those who tortured animals were rewarded with heaven.
The Church supports stockbreeding which is also a key component of environmental pollution as an enormous amount of greenhouses gases are released from the livestock industry which are 18% higher than what issues from transportation. These greenhouse effects eventually causes floods, hurricanes, droughts and other forms of disasters we see rising all over the world. The Church should seriously address their role in helping these disasters by encouraging stockbreeding. It may be a better option to encourage compassion towards animals as it would also save the environment. Moreover, consumption of meat has been the cause of a rise in a number of diseases amongst humans and these are affecting people’s health and their purses.
What does Christmas means for animals?
Approximately 20million turkeys are killed in the UK each year and around a third of them are slaughtered for the Christmas table. Britain’s biggest turkey producer processes 100 birds a minute in the run-up to the festivities
The majority (90%) of turkeys reared for their meat are kept in windowless sheds, with some containing as many as 25,000 birds. Turkeys have to endure a number of routine mutilations, such as beak trimming and toe cutting. Beak trimming is mostly carried out to prevent or control behaviour which could result in injury. It involves slicing off about one-third of the beak, usually with a red hot blade when the turkey is around five days old (breeders may be de-beaked again at 14 to 18 weeks). This can be extremely painful for the bird and studies on de-beaked chickens have shown pain to be prolonged and perhaps indefinite. The natural lifespan of a wild turkey is around 10 years, but they are normally slaughtered between 9 and 24 weeks old, depending on the size of bird being produced.
Around 9.8 million pigs were slaughtered in the UK in 2011. 2m Pigs are reared primarily for bacon, ham, pork and sausages. Sows are first mated when they are six to eight months old, with the majority of sows in the UK being serviced by artificial insemination.
Geese are bred for their meat, feathers and fat, with around 15 million geese and ducks killed in the UK in 2011
In all, 62 billion animals died to feed Americans in 2010.
Over a lifetime, this amounts to 16,000 animals per meat eater.
An article written by Deborah Jones titled ‘Christmas without cruelty’ http://www.all-creatures.org/gcm/articles-christmas.html calls upon people to refrain from killing animals
"What a witness it would be to the birth of the Prince of Peace if all Christians were to desist from colluding in the slaughter of millions of fellow sentient creatures – and replace the 'Christmas' turkey/goose/duck with a perfectly delicious vegetarian alternative.’
Her message is one that all Christians may like to read:
But the Bible has to be seen in its entirety. It has been put together as a collection of writings with a beginning, a middle and an end. Creation and the Garden of Eden mark the beginning; the coming of Christ on earth is the central event; and finally, there is the revelation of a new creation, when Christ will come again at the end of time. The natural world, so damaged by sin and destruction, is to be wonderfully renewed and the original harmony restored ‘at the end of time’. This new creation, the kingdom of God in its fullness, is to be one of justice, love and peace.
A sign of that kingdom to come is to live as if it were already here – in other words, to live lives of justice, love and peace. To take part in the deliberate killing of any part of creation, especially for the excuse of simply ‘liking the taste’ of a dead animal or bird, is a sign, not of the Kingdom, but of this fallen, sinful world.
One principle which most people, Christian or not, would support is that we should try to ensure that the least harm is committed in the world, the least violence inflicted and the least stress and pain suffered as possible. So it is consistent to propose that, where plants can serve human need, plants, not animals, should be destroyed for food.
The refusal to kill and eat animals has a long Christian tradition. The early monastic movement embraced total abstinence from meat. The monks modelled their lifestyle on Jesus’ forty day sojourn in the wilderness, which he spent peaceably in the company of ‘the wild beasts’. As Athanasius said of Antony of Egypt: ‘His food was bread and salt, and for drinking he took only water. There is no reason even to speak of meat and wine, when indeed such a thing was not found among the other zealous men.’ St Ambrose’s homilies on Genesis included the following exhortation: ‘We ought to be content to live on simple herbs, on cheap vegetables and fruits such as nature has presented to us and the generosity of God has offered to us.’ Such a modest life-style would also be good for the environment and for enabling more of the world’s poor to have enough to eat. It would even benefit the health service, as the over-consumption of meat, dairy and fatty products is one source of poor health in the prosperous West.
In terms of rights, I propose that the right to choose to eat animals simply for pleasure, for taste or by convention should give way to the duty to preserve the life of animals; and the right to produce animals for meat should give way to the duty to provide sufficient healthy food for the world’s entire human population. For anyone who does claim the right to kill animals for food, Dr Marie Hendrickx, a leading Vatican theologian, asks:
"Does the right to use animals for food imply the right to raise chickens in tiny cages where they live in a space smaller than a notebook? Or calves in compartments where they can never move about or see the light? Or to keep sows pinned by iron rings in a feeding position to allow a series of piglets to suck milk constantly and thus grow faster?"
The birth of the Christ-child at Bethlehem inaugurated a whole new creation: the Kingdom of God to be experienced in its fullness by the whole of creation. In acts of loving-kindness, in gentleness, in beauty, in compassion, we can glimpse facets of this new creation. Let us celebrate Christ’s birth in a manner consonant with the values of the Kingdom; let it not be the cause of yet more suffering, more blood shed, more cruelty. Let this year see a bloodless, happy Christmas for all God’s creatures. We can pray that this is so.