This, from Henry Beston, a great nature writer and once farmer in Nobleboro:

“We treat them with condescendence for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having formed so far below us.” And in this we are wrong, and we are wrong greatly. Because we are not the measure of the animal. In a world older and more complete than our own, they evolve finished and complete, living through voices we will never hear. “They are not our brothers and sisters; they are not our subordinates; they are other nations, caught with us in the net of life and time, companions of the splendor and fatigue of the earth.”

Animals. Other Nations unto themselves.  Wondrous mysteries to us. 

And it was good, God said, it was good.

This morning I hope what I share you already know. But even if you do, we don’t often talk about animals—except our pets. And we should.

They were created before us. Genesis says this: we are to have dominion over them. Dominion: This word, so misunderstood, so abused. The Hebrew word is Radah, meaning to rule on behalf of God, as God would care for them in all their wondrous singularity, not see them as things, but to care as a shepherd cares for the sheep, as Jesus cares for each and all of us.

The Hebrew Bible often speaks of animals.  There are rules for keeping the sabbath holy:  rest, rest for farm animals as well as people. In Exodus 20, all are to rest: “sons and daughters, slaves, oxen, donkeys, livestock, immigrants…that they may rest like you.” Sabbath is the great day of equality among all God’s creatures. 

Job shows us God providing and taking delight in independent creatures beyond our human experience, and Job shrinks in the order of creation.

And the New Testament: Jesus shows respect for all animals. He rides the donkey gently on Palm Sunday, not burdening it with the hundreds of pounds of rocks I once saw in Marakkesh. Jesus weeps over Jerusalem as a hen weeps over her chicks. He is a mothering hen. And we, we are his sheep, not dumb sheep, but gentle sheep who wait for the sound of his voice to follow. Jesus never indulges, never eats too much, in fact we rarely see him eat or drink. Just enough. And, at the Last Supper it is bread and wine. He hurts nothing in all creation.

They were, of course, there before us at the manger, the animals. They knew who he was.

We know other cultures see some animals as sacred, the cow for the Hindus, for example.  Even if not seen as sacred, animals have always been close to us, maybe closer than they are now. So many had farm animals, some living in wings of their huts, for warmth. Facebook and Animal Planet bring animals into our homes now. For many of us it our companion animals whom we are so close to.   We would let nothing harm them.   I learned this with my dogs their wonderful otherness, and in their deaths I learned that something profound had left me, something I could not talk about.   One victim of the recent California fires had lost an earlier house to fire. But the only thing that grieved him about the loss of the second house was their shy little cat whom no one could save.   

But what about the rest of the animals, all those in our planet’s ark? It is them I want to hold up to you this morning. All the others. The great artist and utopian writer William Morris once said we cannot be happy unless we know others are. I think I cannot be fully happy unless I know all the animals are.

When Beston was writing about our complex relationship with animals, only 30% or so of Americans considered how we treat animals an important subject. Most saw animals as objects, as things to be dominated and used by us. Now, around 60% recognize them. A lot is changing. Animals are now in our minds and hearts more than they ever were.

But we are still not in a good place regarding animals and I grieve that I will not live long enough to see the end of animal suffering.  Any words on animals must speak to the elephant in the room, or the elephant in the planet.  Philosopher Christine Korsgaard says the way we treat animals is a moral atrocity of enormous proportion. We worship our pets, we, most of us, want to preserve wildlife and grieve their loss of habitat.  But in between are all the other domesticated animals, chickens, turkeys, pigs, lambs, steer. And they are not faring well especially in the US, not on factory farms anyway. If I were to detail what is going on there, and no one can get in legally to witness, the animals have no legal protection, being seen as property, you would be kept awake at night as I am. You have all seen the pictures. Let me just say that I grew on a farm, a chicken farm, an egg farm, and my relatives were dairy farmers. I know how these animals should be allowed to live, in the open, and how they should be killed if they are. I have lifted baby chicks out of their boxes, felt for an egg under a chicken, coaxed her into letting me take it. I have fed her from a pail in the yard and watched her peck. I have roamed in cow pastures, among large animals with kind faces and wonderful eyes that looked into mine. I often say to others, quoting Dylan Thomas, I am famous among barns. So I suppose my passion now to protect, love, honor all animals comes viscerally. 

How can we change big agra’s ways in the US of abusing animals in the quest for profit? Already there are signs, but too few. We must carry on in animals’ defense. I am always signing emails about kind transport, increasing inspections, etc. More of us now know about the pollution, the methane gas, the waste of water, these farms produce. We grieve for the workers. And of course articles, like one recently by Nicholas Kristof  in The Times, who showed a painful undercover video (the only way to do it) of the slaughter of a pig.  Some states, the ones without much big agra, have banned gestation crates in which pigs are confined, unable to lie down. Around the edges of big agra, despite the Florida governor’s attempt to keep them out for the farmers’ sake, are new companies growing meat from cells, meat without suffering. We have hope! I have hope your children live to see this. This science can help a starving world which doesn’t have the room or stomach for factory farms or the billions of acres needed if we all became vegan.

Europe is doing far better than we are, so here is a place to look: the meat industry hasn’t such a hold. Britain’s House of Lords recently introduced a bill which uses scientific research on sentience and emotion in animals as the benchmark for all policies affecting animals. Switzerland has banned killing lobsters by immersing them in boiling water, because they are sentient beings. They must be stunned either by electric shock or mechanical destruction of the brain before boiling. I have been guilty.

Do what you can and at the same time immerse yourself in the new animal research so that you open to the wonder of animals. Books on eels, owls, foxes, wolves, and on and on.   When we look we consider the ant, or Emily Dickinson’s narrow fellow in the grass.

Our news helps us here. A recent article in the NYT was entitled “cows are the new puppies.” A professor of psychology, who had been researching dog brains by urging them into MRI scanners and discovered their brains were like ours in their capacity for joy and love, got some cows. He says, While cattle are as intelligent and as lovable as dogs, I’ve found that they go through life at their own leisurely speed. Whereas dogs adapt to the rhythms of human society in all its varied forms, cattle don’t abide sudden movements or states of human agitation. By forcing people to adopt their pace, cattle connect us to the environment in ways that no other animal does. It may be time to take seriously the beneficial effects of cattle on our mental and emotional states, just as we do for other animals, such as dogs and horses.” When I was in the Outer Hebrides this May I saw that the cows, or coos as they are called, reign over the roadways, as do the sheep. We were advised, just wait if you see them.

I am not yet as close to pigs—not as close as I was as a child, when Petunia pig ate her chocolates. I look at a lot of pictures now, of pink baby pigs, clear baby pigs, smart, nuzzling people who pet them. I am learning they know empathy. In Holland, pigs who played happily listening to classical music (with treats) were joined by others who had not. Conversely, if the pigs became scared, the others did too. And this empathy occurs across species. Even tiny mammals, mice, appear to respond to others’ suffering. Can we change the ways we experiment on them? It is beginning.

Do animals have consciousness? We don’t know yet, and may never know. We know they have their own languages and that they sometimes understand ours. I would keep asking my dog as she aged, let me know when it is time. Each time I thought it might be, she resisted, until one day she didn’t. Lying on her stomach all day next to my husband, her head lifted when she heard the voice of her vet come in the room to end her suffering. She was ready. Do they really not fear their own death? We don’t know that either—many are averse to situations that they recognize as dangerous. We are only at the beginning of this research.

William Blake says,

Everything that lives is holy. 

And Jesus says, love and care for all of God’s beautiful world.

And so we must.