All Creatures Great and Small
Animal Rights Are Human Rights
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Greg Mileski
Tutsis referred to Hutus as “cockroaches.” Jews hiding from Nazis recounted feeling “hunted.” American slaves were routinely named “stock,” as they were sold and purchased. Acts of mass violence have often employed animal imagery to dehumanize victims. While the value of animal life permeates the Judeo-Christian scriptures, there is nonetheless reserved a privileged place for human beings with respect to non-human life. This has resulted in affording animal life a secondary ethical value: animals are to be protected but only inasmuch as human supremacy is maintained. The victims of mass violence have alerted us to how complicit this hierarchy can be in the establishment of the degrading power dynamics of mass violence. This paper is informed by voices of victims. Abolitionist Frederick Douglass, poet and activist Aimé Césaire, and the narratives of victims of American slavery and the Holocaust (collected by Beverly Eileen Mitchell) first alert us to the ways animal imagery is used to create a dehumanizing power differential. The seminal work of Carol J. Adams’s, The Sexual Politics of Meat, then reveals the ease with which we elide the value of animal life, while the work of sociologist Leslie Irvine illustrates the ways our self-identities are already entangled in the lives of nonhuman animals. Given that a distorted view of the value of animal life has been too often utilized to facilitate mass violence, this paper concludes by suggesting that a revaluation of animal life can contribute to the prevention of future acts of mass violence.
Considering Our "Next of Kin": Constructive (Eco)Theological Anthropology and Other Species
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Robert M. McDonald
The majority of humans on the planet identify with some or other religious tradition or "lifeway." This is true even of those who identify as "atheists" and "agnostics," in as much as they live their lives according to particular narratives and metaphysical beliefs. What is most interesting, however, is the fact that Christianity, the largest major religion in the world, has either failed to adequately take into consideration the facts of the natural and social sciences, or Christians have grossly misinterpreted said facts (e.g. Michael Behe and others). What is of special interest is how Christians (and non-Christians) frequently understand the relationship between humanity per se and other species on our planet. Assuming both the Thomisitic and Anselmian the definitions of theology (i.e. "the Queen of the Sciences" and "fides quaerens intellectum"), this paper seeks to establish an (eco)theological anthropology which recognizes the inherent value--the "imago Dei"--present in non-human creatures. Only then, it is argued, can we hope to truly and fully address anthropogenic climate change.
