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Man, do not exalt yourself above the
animals, they are without sin, while you defile the
earth by your appearance on it ...
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Fëdor Dostoevsky, The Brothers
Karamazov
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Churches, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, have historically
denied that animals have any rights. This view was buttressed
by the Christian doctrine that animals do not have souls, and
the belief that God gave mankind absolute power over animals:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:
and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over
the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the
earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the
earth. Genesis 1:26
God was not interested in animals or the cruelties perpetrated
on them by humans. God himself had drowned innumerable innocent
animals when he flooded the world to punish humankind. Samson,
one of the Hebrew judges appointed by God, burned down his enemies"
crops, vineyards and olive groves by tying hundreds of foxes
together, tail-to-tail in pairs, setting light to them, and
letting them loose in the fields (Judges 15:3-5). "Doth
God take care for oxen?" asked St Paul (1 Corinthians 9:9),
inviting an answer in the negative (his point is that divine
laws about oxen are made for the benefit of man). God might
be aware of every sparrow, but in the Bible he cares little
for the welfare of them or any other animal. God frequently
instructed the Jews to kill not only his enemies but also their
animals. Jesus himself was responsible for the deaths of around
2,000 animals, when he caused a herd of someone else's pigs
to rush into a lake and drown (Mark 5:11-13). As a Cambridge
don noted in the eighteenth century, if Jesus had done that
in Cambridgeshire, the law of England would have required him
to swing for it.
Up until the latter part of the twentieth century the teaching
of all Christian Churches has been that animals exist for the
benefit of humankind, and humankind is at liberty to treat them
as it likes. The behaviour of Luis Caldera, a Franciscan missionary,
was entirely in keeping with Christian teachings. As he could
not speak local American languages he illustrated the doctrine
of Hell by putting animals into ovens and then lighting fires
underneath them. The cries and howls of the tortured animals
terrified the indigenous inhabitants — exactly as he intended.
No Christian found this practice at all unethical.
The Church has always smiled upon barbarous practices perpetrated
upon animals. It has sometimes associated itself with them,
courting the popularity as a patron of this form of entertainment.
Some popular ones included bear baiting, bull baiting and badger
baiting. Throughout western Europe cocks were bred for fighting
each other. Dogs were bred not only for baiting such animals
but also for fighting each other. They were also exploited as
draught animals into the second half of the nineteenth century:
Many forms of animal torture and cruelty were so much part
of ordinary everyday life of the people that it was almost
impossible to get anyone to admit that they were not justifiable.
Thus the use of dogs as draught animals, which for generations
was a scandal and a disgrace to Christian England. The animals
were worked to death without the slightest compunction. They
were compelled to pull full loads far beyond their strength;
they were flogged till they dropped dead or dying by the roadside*.
Conditions in Roman Catholic southern Europe were worse, and
remained so for much longer. The enjoyment of blood, gore and
suffering fitted with the sensual obsessions with broken flesh,
blood and suffering that are such a prominent feature of Christianity
in the Roman Church. The Puritans tried to stamp out such practices;
but not for any genuinely moral reason. As Macaulay put it "The
Puritan hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the
bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators".
In the Middle Ages, when the Church was at its most powerful,
more imaginative sports had been widespread. It was, for example,
considered fun to tie a cat in a bag or leather bottle, hang
it on a tree, and for archers to use it for target practice.
Cats seem to have had a poor time of it, for when it became
unfashionable to go around killing Jews at Shrovetide, European
Christians took to killing cats instead. The Germans called
it Judasstürtzen. In England it was customary
to stone cockerels to death on Shrove Tuesday. Another seasonal
favourite was for small boys to go out on St Stephen's Day and
stone to death as many wrens as they could find. They did this
to remember the stoning of St Stephen (and also to forget the
wren's importance in pre-Christian Celtic religions). This practice
continued in Roman Catholic Ireland until well within living
memory.
The Church deduced that because animals did not possess souls,
they were akin to automatons. Like machines, they could feel
neither emotion nor pain. They were disposable toys provided
for mankind's amusement. Activities in which animals were tortured
for sport were recorded without any hint that there might be
anything wrong with them. Christopher Columbus and his crew,
on their transatlantic mission from God, were typical. They
delighted in wounding and partially dismembering a newly discovered
animal, then seeing if it would still fight*.
As animals were mere toys, one can imagine the glee of the Christian
sailors who discovered that on Mauritius God had provided them
with birds so trusting that they would walk up to their Christian
visitors to be killed. Their meat was found to be unpalatable
so the birds were clubbed to death by Christians just for fun.
Within two hundred years dodos were extinct.
No Christian saw anything wrong in exterminating hundreds of
species around the world. Neither was there any objection to
the brutality. In the middle of the nineteenth century Pope
Pius IX forbade the opening of an animal protection office in
Rome on the grounds that human beings had no duties to animals.
This sort of attitude has persisted to the present day. Only
a few years ago an Italian archbishop stated that it was not
a sin to starve or beat a dog*.
How could it be if dogs did not have souls?
Hunting guns and other instruments of death are routinely blessed
by clergymen, and not only Roman Catholic ones. In Norway Lutheran
ministers continue to bless whaling ships. When secular thinkers
had started to think seriously about the moral question of human
rights over animals and human obligations to animals, Christians
were still taking for granted that it was absurd to think of
such things. When T. H. Huxley lectured in Edinburgh on the
relationship between humankind and the lower animals, the Presbyterian
Witness not only attacked it as a blasphemous contradiction
to biblical narrative and doctrine but also added the suggestion
that attendees should have formed a Gorilla Emancipation Society,
clearly intending this as a insult.
Although
they did not possess souls or feelings, animals were nonetheless
responsible for their actions, and were subject to the will
of the Church. At Troyes there was a service for banishing caterpillars
(not used unless the peasants had paid their tithes). Citing
biblical authority (Exodus 21:28-32).
Church courts tried animals for all manner of wrongs: a sow
was mutilated and hanged at Falaise in 1386 for biting a child,
and a horse was hanged for killing a man at Dijon a few years
later. In 1451 the Bishop of Lausanne excommunicated leeches
for killing fish in Lake Geneva. In 1474 a hen mistaken for
a cock was burned at Bâle in France for the crime of laying
an egg. In 1557 a French pig was found guilty of devouring a
child and was sentenced to be buried alive.
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Execution of a convicted
dog
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Animal pests openly ignored the secular authorities, but even
the smallest creature was subject to the authority of the Church.
As a canon lawyer explained, insects would only laugh if court
cases were brought in secular courts*.
The only penalty they recognised was a sentence of anathema,
imposed by the Church. Animals were also held responsible for
their complicity in the crime of bestiality. At Montpellier
a mule found guilty of bestiality was
sentenced to be burned alive in 1565, and because it was guilty
of another offence its feet were mutilated before it was burned.
In 1581, one George Schörpff was beheaded in Nuremberg
and his body burned along with a cow, having been found guilty
of unnatural acts. At New Haven, Connecticut a cow, two heifers,
two sows, three sheep and a man named Potter were all executed
together in 1662 for committing bestial acts*.
Suspected animals were tortured to elicit cries that could be
interpreted as admissions of guilt.
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"A Cat hung up
in Cheapside, habited like a Priest"
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  Since
there was no wrong in it, clergymen have always taken delight
in killing animals. In the Middle Ages all of the higher ranks
of European society had a specific type of hawk for falconry:
that for a priest was a sparrow hawk*.
In Britain the hunting clergyman is a classic character in art
and literature*. Chaucer's
pilgrim monk was keen on hunting*.
The Reverend John (Jack) Russell, known as "The Sporting
Parson", was an enthusiastic fox hunter who bred terriers
in the early nineteenth century to help find and kill foxes
run the earth. These terriers are still known as Jack Russells.
In Roman Catholic southern Europe many medieval forms of animal
torture are still performed annually as part of annual Christian
blood festivals, often using a local church. In one Spanish
village, Villanueva de la Vera near Cáceres in Extremadura,
a donkey is tortured each year on Shrove Tuesday. In Manganeses
de la Polvorosa, it is customary to drag a live goat up the
church tower and throw it down to its death in front of the
assembled faithful*. This
is not untypical. In Tordesillas in Castile blindfolded teenage
girls use swords to hack at chickens trussed up and suspended
for the occasion. This has been done at a number of blood fiestas
in recent years to raise money for the local San Vincente chapel.
 At
the festival of San Juan, in Coria, Extremadura a number of
bulls are drugged, tortured and killed each year. Thousands
of Christians assemble to watch meat hooks being plunged into
the living animals. Men with blowpipes shoot metal darts in
them, aiming for the vulnerable parts — the eyes, mouth,
nose and testicles. The animals are clubbed, and a long pole
with a metal spiked end is thrust at their anus and testicles.
Each animal typically lasts for three or four hours. When dead
(sometimes while still alive) the testicles are cut off and
awarded to one of the brave Christians who have participated
in its torment. Local priests are mystified that anyone should
find this reprehensible.
 Other
towns boast fire bull runs, which are similar, except that the
bulls are terrified by having burning hemp tied to their horns.
It is difficult to imagine entertainments such as these, or
even conventional bull fighting, being tolerated in any modern
society except a strongly Roman Catholic one. Catholic priests
certainly see nothing wrong in bull fights and on occasion raise
Church funds by organising and taking part in them*.
Curiously the Church had once tried to ban bull fighting throughout
the world except where it was most popular — in Spain and
Portugal. In the 1560s Pope Pius V published a document that
purported to abolish bull fighting throughout Christendom —
but it was not published in the Iberian Peninsula on the grounds
that it would bring the Holy Mother Church into disrepute.
The traditional Christian approach to animal cruelty was formalised
as a philosophy by René Descartes (1596–1650). His
Discourse (1637) and Meditations (1641) informed
Catholic attitudes about animalsl into the 21st century. Descartes
proposed a mechanistic theory. For him, and for his Church,
animals are nothing but complex automata, with no souls, minds,
or reason. They can see, hear, and touch, but they are not,
in any sense, conscious, and are unable to suffer or to feel
pain. In lectures he would torture and dissect animals, asserting
over their cries of pain, that these cries were merely automatic
reactions. Voltaire, whom the Church regarded as its greatest
enemy, was horrified by such displays:
Hold then the same view of the dog which has lost his master,
which has sought him in all the thoroughfares with cries of
sorrow, which comes into the house troubled and restless,
goes downstairs, goes upstairs; goes from room to room, finds
at last in his study the master he loves, and betokens his
gladness by soft whimpers, frisks, and caresses.
There are barbarians who seize this dog, who so greatly surpasses
man in fidelity and friendship, and nail him down to a table
and dissect him alive, to show you the mesaraic veins! You
discover in him all the same organs of feeling as in yourself.
Answer me, mechanist, has Nature arranged all the springs
of feeling in this animal to the end that he might not feel?
Voltaire (1694–1778), Bêtes, Dictionnaire Philosophique.
Only with the coming of secular ideas did anyone think to criticise
the abuse of animals. Following Voltaire were philosophers like
Locke, Butler and Bentham, all of whom were criticised by the
Churches, and all of whom were regarded as atheists. Here is
Bentham, forseeing a time when humankind might take a more enlightened
view of animal rights as it might take a more enlightened view
of the practice of slavery:
The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not
yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under
the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly
upon the same footing, as, in England for example, the inferior
races of animals are still. The day may come when the rest
of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never
could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny.
The French have already discovered that the blackness of the
skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without
redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come
to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity
of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons
equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the
same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable
line? Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of
discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison
a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than
an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose
the case were otherwise, what would it avail? the question
is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they
suffer?*
 Other
sympathetic voices included writers like Sheridan, while Hogarth
helped with engravings such as his Four Stages of Cruelty.
Christian voices opposing cruelty were few and late, though
there were exceptions, including Wesley and Wilberforce. As
in so many areas of reform, it was Quakers who were quickest
to join the secularists and Utilitarians, and most effective
in affecting public opinion. One of the most effective contributions
in the nineteenth century was the book Black Beaty (1877)
written by the Quaker, Anna Sewell.
Objections to vivisection were first raised by atheists such
as Charles Bradlaugh in Britain, and Robert Ingersoll and Samuel
Clemens (better known as Mark Twain) in the USA. Again opposition
to cruel sports was initiated by freethinkers, not Christians,
and the concept of animal rights was developed not by theologians,
but by secular philosophers in the 1960s.
Now that animal rights have become a popular issue, the mainstream
churches are shifting their ground. Churchmen have even suggested
recently that animals may have some sort of embryonic soul after
all. St Francis is presented as evidence that the Church has
been kind to animals all along. It is true that some followers
of St Francis did adopt a sympathetic attitude to animals, notably
the fourteenth century Fraticelli, or Spiritual Franciscans;
but they were executed by the Church authorities as heretics,
so it might look a little hypocritical now for the Roman Church
to claim the Fratricelli's record as its own.
 Animal
welfare has not been a concern of the Church, at least until
the late twentieth century. Vegetarianism was a heresy, and
people were burned alive for it in the Middle Ages. In the nineteenth
century vegetarianism became associated with atheism, largely
because God had made animals for us to eat. In the 1990s a British
cabinet minister and committed Christian (John Selwyn Gummer)
reafirmed publicly that it was a God-given duty to eat meat.
Vegetarianism is still considered by many Christians to be ungodly.
As usual the Protestant countries have responded to secular
opinion faster than Roman Catholic ones. Nevertheless Catholics
have already seen the benefits of associating themselves with
the Green movement. In 1990 the Pope proclaimed St Francis of
Assisi the patron saint of ecology. Astute though this may have
been, the traditional position of all mainstream Churches is
much better represented by the Franciscan nuns who live near
to Manganeses de la Polvorosa, the site of the bull torturing
festival mentioned above. It is they who make the decorations
and streamers for the instruments of torture*.
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