God Gave Us Animals to Eat!
As a vegan, I have been presented with this question as a challenge on more than one occasion from Christians who eat meat and I decided to answer it.
“Why did God make animals?”
If you are a “dairy” cow, God made you so humans could confine you for your entire life in spaces so small you barely have room to turn around, pump you with hormones (because God made you mature too slow), fill you with antibiotics so these conditions won't make you die prematurely, artificially inseminate you, take your baby away to turn him into soft leather gloves and veal cutlets, take the milk meant for your baby, and then, you know, eat you as hamburgers when your milk slows.
If you are an elephant, God made you so you could be beaten, shocked, and whipped until you learn how to stand on two legs, do headstands, or walk a tightrope in the circus because nothing spells family entertainment quite like animal abuse.
If you are an “egg-laying” hen, God made you so you could be born along with hundreds of others on a conveyer belt while you watch your brothers (whom God made useless as they can never give us eggs) be ground alive or thrown into a trash can to die of suffocation. Then, as God made your beak too long and capable of pecking other hens while you are confined in your tiny section of the wire cage, humans will kindly cut off part of your beak to avoid this unfortunate pecking problem. Then you will spend your life practically stationary, unable to lift even one of your wings for lack of space, because God made your wings for decoration and never intended for you to be able to use them. Your muscles will become weak, your bones brittle, your feathers stuck in the wire cages, but, sorry, God wanted humans to have scrambled eggs for breakfast.
If you are a duck, God made you so you could have a feeding tube stuffed down your neck for thirteen days while 200 grams of corn are forced into your stomach daily, until your liver has swollen to ten times its normal weight, so humans can enjoy the delicacy of foie gras.
If you are a pig, God made you so you could, as a baby, have your tail cut off, your testicles ripped out, and a notch cut into your ear to help identify you. God wanted you to enjoy a life of concrete floors and metal bars and prefers when you don't have enough room to turn around. As you are hanging upside down at the slaughterhouse, pray that you are unconscious before you hit the scalding tank.
If you are a “broiler” chicken or a turkey, welcome to genetic modification. God couldn’t make you big enough, so we have to help him out. Never mind that your legs can't handle the unnatural weight and may crumble underneath you, or that your heart and lungs aren't developed enough to support the rapid weight gain. If you are a turkey, forgive that the modifications have removed your ability to reproduce naturally (don't worry, we'll artificially inseminate you). Just be thankful you won't be alive to realize where we are shoving the bread at Thanksgiving.
If you are a “beef” cow, you will be marked with a hot iron brand so we don’t forget to whom you belong. Your horns will be cut off because "oops," God didn't mean for you to have those. You will spend the last few months of your life crammed with hundreds or thousands of your closest friends into a feedlot filled with mud and manure while your grass-fed stomach is fed an unnatural diet of corn, soy, fish, and blood to fatten you up. Then, hopefully, you will be rendered unconscious before you are hung up by your hind legs and bled and cut and divided into convenient little grocery store packages.
If you are a lamb, you may be a symbol of innocence throughout the Bible, but you won’t experience much peace on Earth. God intended for you to be forced onto your back with your legs secured between metal bars as large chunks of skin and flesh are carved out from your body (we call it mulesing). While it might hurt, we are doing you a favor as we try to keep flies from laying eggs in the folds of your skin. When you produce less wool than we’d like, you’ll actually get to watch the knife slit your throat.
If you are a dog, God might have made you so you could spend your life inside the small wire cage of a puppy mill so humans could breed the cutest combinations of companion animals while countless other dogs died homeless and unloved for the crime of being less cute.
If you are a shark, God made you because your fins taste delicious in soup. Don’t mind us as we slice them off and cast your living body back into the ocean so we have plenty of room left on the boat for more fins. As you slowly sink, unable to swim, you’ll wish God gave you the ability to survive without fins.
If you are a sea turtle or a seahorse, God made you so you could be yanked from the ocean and hoisted quickly through the various sea levels by the enormous commercial fishing nets. Don't worry, the fishermen will eventually find you and, as you are the unwanted by-catch, cast your now dead body back into the ocean.
I think you can find all of this in Genesis 3:1, right before we get kicked out of the Garden of Eden for eating an apple.
Or maybe, just maybe, animals were created with wings so they could fly, feet so they could walk, and fins so they could swim. Maybe they were meant to feel the sun on their faces, the grass beneath their feet, or the water on their backs. Maybe they were created to know companionship and love, to enjoy the beauty of the world, and to work intricately together to help create the balance of nature.
When Christian meat eaters ask me why God made animals, they want the answer to be “for us to eat them.” But that isn’t the answer. Most of us don’t dine on tigers, coyotes, rats, giraffes, rhinos, peacocks, penguins, kangaroos, or countless other species. We chose a select few: those we can breed and who won’t fight back. Ones so tame and kind that they won’t hurt us even while we do unspeakable things to them. We are bullies, and what we do to them is horrifying.
If we are following what God intended with our current Western diet then everything I wrote in this essay would have to be accepted and acceptable. We’d have to believe all of this is what God intended. How many Christians could support the practices listed here in the name of God’s love? Being Christian and being vegan aren’t mutually exclusive. Use your love and compassion and extend it to all creatures.
Written January 11, 2013