REFLECTIONS ON THANKSGIVING
“Tell
the people: ‘Consecrate yourselves in preparation for tomorrow, when you will
eat meat. The Lord heard you when you wailed, “If only we had meat to eat! We were
better off in Egypt!” Now the Lord will give
you meat, and you will eat it. You will not eat it for
just one day, or two days, or five, ten or twenty days, but for
a whole month—until it comes out of your nostrils and you loathe it—because you
have rejected the Lord, who is among you, and have wailed before him, saying, “Why did we
ever leave Egypt?”’”
~ Numbers 11:18-20
One of
my seminary professors, after one of my end-of-semester presentations on why
what we’d spent the semester studying was relevant to animals, commented to me,
“You are always so apologetic when you talk about this. You don’t need to be.” With that
encouragement in mind, I offer the following thoughts. It is not my desire to ruin anyone’s Thanksgiving. My family is as hide-bound as the next when
it comes to holiday menus – and turkeys figure largely at both Thanksgiving and
Christmas. Allowances are made for my eccentricities. But, as Matthew Scully has pointed out, we
don’t answer to tradition, we answer to a God of mercy. So, as we recover from one feast and speed
headlong to the next (hopefully taking some time out for Advent reflection), I
offer these thoughts.
Thanksgiving
is a time of mixed emotions for me, as it is for many vegans. I have so very much in my life to be thankful
for, and I enjoy the opportunity to gather with friends and family, or to get
away from it all and reflect – and I enjoy a wonderful meal. But because this holiday, like no other,
centers on eating meat, it is in many ways a painful time, as well.
It has been estimated that Americans consume 46 million turkeys on Thanksgiving. As the name of the holiday suggests, this is a day set aside for giving thanks to God for His bounty and to recognize the many gifts we have received. It is a great irony that we do this by taking 46 million lives unnecessarily.
More
even than that, these are lives which have never known happiness and which in
many cases have known horrific cruelty.
Year after year after year after year, animal welfare organizations
undertake undercover investigations of factory farms – the source for nearly
all meat in the United States, including all those millions of turkeys – and
year after year after year after year, those investigations reveal workers at
these farms throwing animals against walls, stomping on them, kicking them,
throwing things (like bowling balls) at them, leaving them to die with
untreated illness or injuries. In 2010
and 2011, Mercy For Animals conducted back-to-back investigations of Butterball operations and in both instances horrific cruelties were revealed, with no
changes or improvements from one year to the next.
After
each of these investigations, the companies associated with these operations
put out statements decrying the cruelties revealed, announcing that such
behavior is inconsistent with company policy, and sometimes dismissing the
employees caught in the act. Sometimes criminal
prosecution even results. But year after
year after year after year, the cruelties continue.
Nor should we be surprised. Even without these specific acts of cruelty,
life on a factory farm is pretty awful for the animals. Please visit the Farm Sanctuary, the Humane Society of the United States, or any one of a number of
other sites to learn about this. Charles
Camosy, a Christian ethicist at Fordham University, has called factory farming
“a social structure of sin.” When we ask
people to work in these situations – to do for us the dirty work of getting
meat to our plates – they cannot be expected to endure seeing animals living in
these conditions without either becoming desensitized to their suffering or
losing their minds. If they no longer
see the animals as living creatures capable of suffering, why should they not
mistreat the animals? If the animals are
objects, what is the difference between slamming them against the wall while
they are living and, for example, using their carcasses for bowling (described
as a “wonderfully whimsical event” for fundraising)?[1]
In the Book of Numbers, the Israelites
cry out to God for meat in their ingratitude, believing that what God has given them is not enough.
This always strikes me at Thanksgiving because it seems to me we fail to see the astonishing plant-based bounty God has given us and insist on our turkeys, with no regard for – or even seeming awareness of – the lives
misbegotten, mistreated, and unnecessarily ended in thorough disregard of
Biblical teaching on our right relationship animals. We make a great play of the Presidential “pardon” of a turkey or two,
trivializing the 46 million who are killed[2] then we sit down and ask God's blessing.
God has, indeed, been bountiful to us. There are so many food options available to
us. I was thankful for so many things this
Thanksgiving; among them was the fact that no one – human or animal – had to
suffer for my feast.
[1] Contrast this with Genesis
9:1-7, when humans are given meat to eat, with the important restriction that
the blood of the animal – it’s life – be poured out on the ground and returned
to God. Scripture allows the eating of
meat only with restrictions and only with the recognition that our meal comes
at the cost of a life loved by God.
[2] Even those “pardoned”
hardly go on to live anything resembling a “natural” life because they have
been bred to die quickly and their organs are incapable of supporting the
grotesque amount of meat they carry. http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/27/politics/pardoned-turkeys/
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