Excerpt from Dominion by Matthew Scully

Serious and respectable people warned against cruelty to animals long before there was ever an animal rights cause. Usually they were the more religious-minded people, from Francis of Assisi to Moses Maimonides and others in the Jewish tradition. Today we tend to view it the other way around, the secular rights activists concerned about animals, and the more religious-minded folk standing guard over sound, sensible tradition and the moral wisdom of the ages. I was amazed to come upon this prayer from Saint Basil, the bishop of Caesarea, circa A.D. 375:

Oh, God, enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with all living things, our brothers the animals to whom Thou gavest the earth in common with us. We remember with shame that in the past we have exercised the high dominion of man with ruthless cruelty so that the voice of the earth, which should have gone up to thee in song, has been a groan of travail.

I once asked a friend who is prominently involved in the animal rights movement what it was that got him started. He said that from the time he was a child, he could not bear the thought of animal suffering, of the helplessness of any creature subjected to cruelty. He is not a religious fellow, traces his thinking on the subject to Peter Singer and other theorists, and shares with other rights activists a general skepticism of traditional religious ideas regarding animals. And yet that original motivation, that basic conviction common to so many people in the rights cause, perhaps runs deeper than any theory they might profess. Another age would have recognized in such feelings the signs of a vocation. It was never better expressed than by Saint Isaac the Syrian, a mystic writing in the seventh century. "What is a charitable heart?" he asks:

It is a heart which is burning with love for the whole creation, for men, for the birds, for the beasts...for all creatures. He who has such a heart cannot see or call to mind a creature without his eyes being filled with tears by reason of the immense compassion which seizes his heart; a heart which is softened and can no longer bear to see or learn from others of any suffering, even the smallest pain being inflicted upon a creature. That is why such a man never ceases to pray for the animals...moved by the infinite pity which reigns in the hearts of those who are becoming united with God.

It is true that you have to look hard to find such passages in the history books and religious texts of old, yet find them you will. There is a long tradition of benevolence to animals lost on us today as we haggle over the rights and science of animal life.

Islam has its principle that "Whosoever is kind to the creatures is kind to Allah," and Buddhism its credo of "Peace to all beings," counting benevolence toward animals with tolerance, truthfulness, liberality, and purity among the virtues. Plutarch, the first-century Greek philosopher, wrote of the farm animals of his day that "For the sake of a little flesh we deprive them of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being." In Saint Thomas More's Utopia the slaughtering is left to the slaves in fear that when citizens do it "the practice of mercy, the finest feeling of our human nature, is gradually killed off." Sport hunting in Utopia is forbidden as "unworthy of free men." The Utopians "would not believe that the divine clemency delights in bloodshed and slaughter, seeing that it has imparted life to animate creatures that they might enjoy life." Tolstoy in Resurection envisions a world of people trapped in prisons of their own making, unable to see that "every man and every living creature has a sacred right to the gladness of springtime."

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, outdid them all, finding "a plausible objection against the justice of God, in suffering numberless creatures that had never sinned to be so severely punished." In his sermon 'The General Deliverance," Wesley even wondered if some divine mercy might await mistreated animals on the other side: "But what does it answer to dwell upon this subject which we so imperfectly understand? It may enlarge our hearts towards these poor creatures to reflect that, vile as they may appear in our eyes, not a one of them is forgotten in the sight of our Father which is in heaven." As late as a century ago we find Cardinal John Henry Newman, counted among Catholicism's great figures, asking:

Now what is it that moves our very hearts and sickens us so much at cruelty shown to poor brutes? ...They have done us no harm and they have no power of resistance; it is the cowardice and tyranny of which they are the victims which make their sufferings so especially touching. Cruelty to animals is as if man did not love God....There is something so very dreadful, so Satanic, in tormenting those who have never harmed us, who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power.

When did you last hear any Christian minister caution against cruelty to animals? It comes up about as often as graven images, even though animal welfare actually began, in both the United States and Britain, as the cause of nineteenth-century Christian reformers who founded the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and its American counterpart. Often they were the same people, such as William Wilberforce, Anglican priest Arthur Broome, Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, behind the abolition of slavery and child labor. "I was convinced," wrote Cooper, known as the Earl of Shaftesbury, "that God had called me to devote whatever advantages He might have bestowed upon me to the cause of the weak, the helpless, both man and beast, and those who had none to help them.”