A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science and Ethics (review)

This volume arose in the context of a conference on religions and animals at Harvard University in 1999. It contains nearly fifty articles, including two interviews. The authors are specialists in a wide range of fields: religion, theology, philosophy, cultural studies, ethics, biology, zoology, veterinary science, psychology, and law. The editors of the volume are Paul Waldau, who is director of the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, and Kimberley Patton, who is a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside.

The volume is divided into eleven main parts. They include articles about animals in the different world religions, in myth, in ritual, and in art. The authors discuss cultural constructions of animals that cover real animals as well as animals used as metaphors. The final parts of the book are concentrated on contemporary ethical questions relating to animals. Animal consciousness, animal agency, justice for animals, pastoral ethics versus factory farming, and the use of laboratory animals are among the topics discussed.

The introduction and the articles in Part I, written by the two editors, present the enormous complexity of the subject. They stress some vital points, for instance, that views of animals are constructed and that a multiplicity of views of animals exist within a particular religious tradition (13). The editors present the classical argument that treatment of animals is linked to treatment of humans: “The oppression of one kind of living being seems to lead to the oppression of other kinds of living beings” (15). They further accentuate the important point that one cannot explore religions adequately without coming to terms with their ideas of animals and the believers’ treatment of them (14–15).

The volume represents a profound knowledge of animals and religion as well as an intention to move ethical concerns exclusively from the human sphere to encompass the natural world and other species. It promotes a perspective on the relation of humans toward animals as a “communion of subjects, not a collection of objects”—a quotation from the cultural historian Thomas Berry’s keynote address at the Harvard conference, which is included in the volume. The quotation implies, according to the editors, to evoke “the numinous dimensions of the natural world” (2) and, according to Berry, to recognize the spirit mode of all being, not only of humans. Several of the authors actively relate themselves to this perspective. However, there is a tension in the volume between authors who, by means of critical methods and ancient or contemporary sources, try to give a picture of how animals were conceived of and used in specific religions; theologically inclined authors who offer somewhat flattering pictures of the conception of animals in their own religious traditions; and authors who discuss how animals ought to be conceived of and how they ought to be treated. In other words, these articles represent a mixture of what really was, what one wishes to have been, what one thinks the relationship between animals and humans is today, and what one would like it to become.

Some of the articles praise a primordial time when humans felt a greater solidarity with animals than they do today. Skeptically inclined readers may nourish a certain doubt if there ever was such a time, even if some animals in some cultures obviously have been conceived of as bearers of the numinous. Systematic comparisons between various cultures and their construction of animals are in any case more scholarly fruitful than mystifications of animals and of primitive human’s relationship to them. Reflections on how hunting-, farming-, industrial-, and late-modern societies construct animals differently are valuable and figure prominently in several of the articles.

Theologians who want to use their tradition to support animal friendly attitudes run into problems because their traditions, when all is said and done, have often not been especially animal-friendly...