Animal Sacrifices

1. Introduction: Religions and the Rights of Animals

1 Introduction: Religions and the Rights of Animals John Bowker Almost exactly a hundred years ago, in March 1885, John Ruskin wrote to the Vice Chancellor ofOxford University in order to resign from his position as Slade Professor of Fine Art. The immediate cause was the vote in the University on March 10 which, in Ruskin's phrase, "endowed vivisection." 1 In a speech the previous December, he had said: These scientific pursuits are now defiantly, provokingly, insultingly separated from the science of religion; they are all carried on in defiance of what has hitherto been held to be compassion and pity, and of the great link which binds together the whole creation from its Maker to the lowest creature.2 As he wrote to Joan Severn: "I cannot lecture in the next room to a shrieking cat, nor address myself to the men who have been-there's no word for it."3 In fact, Ruskin's resignation was not as simple as those two passages make it appear; but his abhorrence ofvivisection was one of his two reasons, and there is, at least, no mistaking the passionate note in those words. And now, a hundred years later, the same note of passion is unmistakable in the purpose and the preface of this book- "Let us all hope that the 'sleeping giant' will be roused!" Regan is right to regard religion as a giant, whether slumbering Copyrighted Material 4 John Bowker or not: it is the case that by far the majority of people alive today live religiously in some way and usually have some connection with religious systems and traditions that long precede them. The power of religion in human life can easily be seen in the many political disputes that seem particularly insoluble and intransigent, and in which the religious component is unmistakable. As I have said and written on many occasions ,4 virtually all the apparently intransigent and insoluble problems in the world have a deep religious root; not that religion alone is the cause of enduring hostilities or hatreds in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, South Africa, Cyprus, India and Pakistan, the Philippines, and so on, but it has its part to play. There is, therefore, an urgent wisdom in Regan's recognition that the discussion of any global moral issue must take seriously the religious context in which so many people live, and from which they form, at least in part, their judgments. But what is obvious, and what is clearly illustrated in this book, is the fact that "the religious context" is not a single, undifferentiated whole. Exactly the opposite: there are many different religions, all of which are capable of holding sharply different (sometimes murderously different) views on almost all important issues. There is no way in which people speaking fr~m different religions are going to come up with a single, unanimous opinion on animal rights and the uses of animals in scientific research. But does that put the matter too strongly? There is one sense in which it does. It is possible to get religions to agree on certain major principles, goals, or ideals, or to find such agreement in their texts or traditions. Thus, to give an example , UNESCO celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by "publishing a collection of quotations, drawn from a wide variety of traditions and periods, which, with their profound concordance enhanced by the very diversity of their origins, would illustrate how human beings everywhere, throughout the ages and allover the world, have asserted and claimed the birthright of man."5 Copyrighted Material Introduction 5 But on a more detailed level, religions do not even agree on what constitutes human nature, and still less, therefore, on whether there are rights attached to or derived from the fact of being born. All religions would probably assent to a general proposal that we should love our neighbor and live at peace with him or her, "so far as in us lies." But when we ask what it means in practice and in detail to be loving toward our neighbor (what counts as loving behavior), the answers are very different indeed. And if we ask whether war is ever justified, all religions (including Buddhism) will say that sometimes it is; but the reasons they give and the circumstances they specify are extremely different. So if religions have radically different anthropologies (accounts...