Guest Editor’s Introduction
Religion and Other Animals: Ancient Themes, Contemporary Challenges

Paul Waldau (1)

Religion is, by any definition, both for and about animals since, scientifically speaking, humans are animals. It is unlikely, however, that many readers of this special theme issue of Society and Animals will take the word "animals" in the phrase "religion and animals" as a reference to humans. Today, almost all readers take "animals" to mean something like "nonhuman animals," and thus the phrase, "religion and animals" ends up meaning religion and its relation to nonhuman animals."

The study of religion and animals in this narrow sense engages both (a) religious believers' and institutions' multifaceted relationships with and effects upon all the other living beings on this planet, and (b) the impact those nonhuman beings have upon various aspects of humans' religious experience and imagination. These are complicated topics for both obvious and peculiar reasons. Bias for or against religious ways of being in the world all too often has dominated the study of "Religion," a complicated, internally diverse subject area. Many people, in light of their own belief in some form of religion, remain overwhelmingly inclined to read religion as a benign phenomenon, denying even the obvious shortcomings of certain religious claims and practices. Conversely, though often in identical ways, others so virulently oppose religion that they cannot— because of their own fundamentalism—see that from an ethical standpoint some religious traditions have had, and will continue to have, remarkably important features.

Minding and Mining the Difficulties

Even when pre-existing prejudices do not overwhelm discussion or study of religion, subject matter is inherently difficult. Great debate continues in the American Academy of Religion, the world's largest gathering of scholars who study religious traditions regarding core issues—the value of attempts to define religion, the nature of religious phenomena, and what approaches best honor the depths, experiences, and the collective and individual insanities that can be found in today's religions. Scholars today understand religion as an internally diverse collection of interests, concerns, and approaches. Reflecting the complexities of the subject, nontheistic religious traditions such as Buddhism and Jainism contradict the public’s often-facile tendency to equate religion with belief in God.

Ignorance and caricature—even if common among those who study religions—have been far more prominent in the study of nonhuman animals. We could say about those who study nonhuman animals what Montaigne once said about philosophers: "There is nothing so foolish but that some philosopher has not already said it." Similarly, about nonhuman animals there may be nothing so foolish that someone won't assert it.

Consider claims that dismiss and support nonhuman animals. On the dismissive side, Descartes' uninformed and arrogant views regarding nonhuman animals still are often cited as if they had some authority. Equivalent absolute dismissals of all nonhuman animals, often clothed in the vocabulary of modern philosophy, continue to be advanced by those who fail to hear the common sense of respected Oxford historian Thomas (1984): "That there are some footsteps of reason, some strictures and emissions of ratiocination in the actions of some brutes, is too vulgarly known and too commonly granted to be doubted" (p.124).

On the other side, claims about all organisms, at times including plants and viruses, confound even the most inclusivists of human minds. For example, the moral insight that all life is of value is sometimes transmuted into the radically different claim that any kind of life is of equal value to any other kind of life. The implications, often more rhetoric than substantive claims, are radical and controvert every moral system known. Rarely, however, do the proponents of such theoretical radical egalitarianism protest the use of antibiotics or other medicines to save an imperiled mammal—a stranded whale from a rare species with an easily cured bacterial infection of the inner ear of a white rhino who suffers from intestinal worms. The rhetoric of total equality of all life—lettuces or chimpanzees, bacteria or viruses (not normally considered "living" in the classical sense), fungi or protoctists (1) can mislead. It obscures what all human cultures and moral systems have recognized: that given the value of all forms of life, some forms, animals, take ethical priority over others.

In general, the depth of ignorance and prevalence of caricature in the views that each of us has acquired regarding nonhuman animals can deeply impoverish our thinking and speaking about "the others," as Shepard (1996) referred to nonhuman animals. It takes relatively little engagement with contemporary views to recognize that the prevalence of caricature, bias, and misunderstanding regarding other animals is astounding. In fact, these shortcomings as fully characterize both the views of nonhuman animals in those countries said to be "developed" and the views prevailing in those countries not advantaged by modern, technologically sophisticated education systems. Ironically, caricatures and one-dimensional understanding of nonhuman animals are no less common in certain scientific traditions and institutions: behaviorism and certain research institutions that continue to deny that their experimental subjects can feel pain or emotional stress. Tragically, the caricature and bias found in some scientific traditions can rival that of the least responsive of religious traditions.

That the public’s ignorance and bias about religion is surpassed by an even more woeful and pervasive ignorance about nonhuman animals will come as no surprise. The result is that the discourse about other animals that dominates religious and other circles is often as misleading as it is demeaning. There is, from the vantage point of religion, a very distinct irony in this, given that questions about nonhuman animals could be said to be an ancient concern of religious traditions. Some religious traditions contain empirically rich data such as the Jatakas, the animal stories of the Buddhist tradition. Such information shows that the authors of these engaging stories—even if not, in the modern sense, "scientific" about the information—were familiar with some of the day-to-day realities of various animals portrayed.

Developing the Engagement

Ancient though the concern may be, only now do we find any systematic development of questions regarding other animals in those circles where the study of religion is pursued seriously and with a healthy combination of candor, openness, respect, and rigor. Openness to a more careful, respectful engagement with the realities of other animals is going forward. It is sometimes framed in terms that are novel and challenging, especially when linked to critiques of injustice to humans (Adams, 1994).

Dismissals of any serious questions regarding other animals, however, (2) remain in institutionalized circles of the major religious institutions that dominate European, American, and other parts of the "developed" world. In fact, some religious institutions are principal supporters of negative views and even absolute denials of the moral significance of any nonhuman animals.

Yet, negative views are by no means the whole story. Careful assessment of the internally diverse, cumulative tradition of any religion reveals that at least some believers, both traditional and non-traditional, have worked out their religious experience by valuing of, and direct relations with, nonhuman living beings. Scholars now commonly point out that respect for at least some nonhuman animals characterizes many indigenous traditions. Indian subcontinent religions, through doctrines such as ahimsa (nonviolence) and specific ethical vows repudiating killing (as in the Jain and Buddhist traditions), have long promoted ethical and cultural values that effectively protect nonhuman animals.

As some articles in this special issue point out, subtraditions within the allegedly anthropocentric Abrahamic traditions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam also profoundly affirm some nonhuman lives. (3)

In general, then, those who paint portraits of human/nonhuman animal relationships and impacts within religion will, if they are patient and observe carefully, end up with busy canvasses. As often is the case when traditional subjects expand to new frontiers, the complexities that underlie questions about "religion and animals" energize the entire developing field. In recently renewed discussions about, say, some religious tradition or denomination and other animals, We encounter both creative and reactionary evaluations. The mere act of asking questions about the moral considerability of some nonhumans challenges entrenched "speciesist" views, views claiming that, of earth's creatures, only humans deserve basic moral protections because membership in the human species is both a necessary and sufficient condition of being inside the moral circle.

Such challenges have both practical consequences and contain explicit and implicit ethical, political, legal, cultural, economic, and existential implications. Questions about other animals open our minds, forcing us to confront the misleading and debilitating effects of the mainline European traditions' anthropocentric ethics. Since the 1970s, the most obvious effects of these challenges in the developed world and its intellectual circles have been the philosophy-driven critiques of traditional ethical systems’ arbitrary bases for excluding nonhuman animals from fundamental protections. In many ways, the environmental movement also has supplied relevant insights. By no means, however, have the voices been univocal. Some have appealed on behalf of all nonhuman life while others have focused specifically on the more complex nonhuman animals—large-brained, social mammals who typically communicate in a way suggesting cognitive and other mental complexities. The science-driven development of empirically verifiable data about the actual realities of many nonhuman animals has backed these findings. The resulting critique—intellectually sophisticated and grass roots-based—has called into question the developed world's cultural dismissals of other animals under the reasoning that "it's just a dumb animal." (4)

Questions about, and concerns for, nonhuman animals frame fascinating inquiries. Some extend logically to the nature of religious belief and, in particular, views of human superiority. The result has been a growing concern to study "religion and animals."

Consequences of an Impoverished Heritage

Given that neither religious traditions nor nonhuman animals are particularly well understood and given that caricature, ignorance, impoverished concepts, and analyses have been bequeathed to us, startlingly difficult complications face those interested in the juxtaposition of these two subject areas.

An area that needs systematic development is creative work on the nature of references to nonhuman animals found in everyone's personal past. Particularly fascinating is the role of story in understanding other animals. Animal stories abound in every culture and every religious tradition. Although such accounts can be surpassingly beautiful, they also can be positively misleading about the realities of other animals.

Each of us has inherited a set of these accounts, although often we see them not as story but as realistic accounts of the beings outside our species. Hearing these stories subjects us to a profoundly important dynamic. We learned them in our youth, and authority figures backed by the awesome power of tradition told them to us. As with all cultural heritages, this combination can make those who hear the story insist that such narratives must be true. As in so many matters, views inherited from our ethical traditions and cultural authorities, whether religious or not, are seen as the order of nature.

When the stories are found within essential parts of a religious tradition—oral stories or dances passed from generation to generation or written scriptures held to be sacred and even infallible— there is great potential for resistance to counterfactual information available from other cultural perspectives or from rigorous, empirically based findings. In some cultures, the prevalence of compassionate stories leads the human community to treat individual, nonhuman animals well while the prevalence of negative, deprecatory stories in other cultures provides a basis for justifying the extraordinary cruelties perpetrated today under the rationale of tradition and economic "necessity." (5)

Religion, Science and Other Animals

Religious constructions of the importance or non-importance of nonhuman animals can have a very long half-life. The scientific revolution that began in the sixteenth century in the western world is commonly said to have supplanted religious values. In important ways, however, central tenets of the religious outlook have simply have gone underground and now appear in disguised form. For example, arguments stated in a vocabulary that we normally associate with scientific matters or even purely secular values often advance ideas that are eminently religious in origin and nature. Consider the evaluations driving the common arguments that certain food animal practices are acceptable because they produce a profit and thus are a matter of economic "necessity." Although phrased in the allegedly " value-free" terms of economics and law—in particular, the property concepts that dominate many contemporary legal systems—such arguments equate "making a profit" with "necessary." In such arguments, proponents often are naive about the religious origin of affirmations of the supreme importance of all human interests—even minor ones—relative even to the most fundamental interests of any nonhuman animal.

Similarly, proponents who attempt to justify certain biomedical experiments on complex nonhuman animals such as chimpanzees as "necessary" for improved human health, ignore the fact that the underlying assumptions are based not on the allegedly value-free approaches of science, but instead on an eminently pre-scientific ethical anthropocentrism that favors the human species over any other species. Similar observations regarding the morality of using nonhuman animals for humans' education and entertainment might also be made. These justifications comprise a value system that approaches nonhuman animal individuals and human individuals in qualitatively different ways—what Nozick (1974) described as "utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people." (6) When scientists and secularists accept such valuations, they are promoting speciesist valuations advanced originally in western culture by mainline traditions of the major western religions. The irony in such claims is, of course, that economists and scientists openly deny that they are advancing an agenda that is religious in nature.

We Are What We Eat

Another complicating factor in the contemporary approach to "religion and animals" is the nature of modern treatment of food animals. Religions have, in the main, been carriers of ethical awareness and thus have traditionally offered restraints on cruelty to other animals. Modern food animal production involves some practices that ancient pastoralists would have roundly condemned as inhumane. Ancient practices could be very harsh, but the prevalence and continuing expansion of intensive rearing systems ensure that today more animals are treated more harshly than ever was the case in previous times. Known euphemistically as "factory farms," intensive food animal systems are predicated on tightly packed living conditions and heavy usage of antibiotics. They are, notoriously, economically efficient despite high mortality rates and undeniable suffering.

Such a system of rearing animals as mere commodities is radically different from, and has left far behind, the ancient husbandry contract under which the mentality of "we take care of them, and they take care of us" flowed naturally. Farmers who violated the "logic," as it were, of this arrangement suffered because their animals did not produce. As self-interested as the ancient contract may have been, it produced less harsh conditions than those prevalent in the intensive food animal industry, and it permitted certain credible rationalizations about how well the food animals were treated. The current system offers virtually no redeeming features from the vantage point of food animals and thus is open to some profound challenges reliant upon views of the sacredness of life. Nonetheless, no major religious institution in the western world is on record as challenging any of the intensive practices of modern factory farming.

The Interdisciplinary Road: Moving to Creative, Sympathetic Interpretations

If we are inclined to engage other animals in terms of their realities rather than on inherited caricatures, certain features of modern "knowledge" push us to a set of inquiries usually described as "interdisciplinary." Information about, and perspectives on, other animals are widely found through society and the university. Many specialties through which scholars have been engaging some particular aspect of humans' relations with other animals have their own distinctive vocabulary, worldview, and range of central concepts. Attempting to engage the different insights available, especially as this exposes us to non-religious perspectives, will result in what seems at first a challenge to certain features of religious claims about nonhuman animals. This is so because some religious traditions claim a kind of certainty in their views regarding nonhuman animals, and they accept no criticism on this subject from the secular world in general or from its specific sciences, academic and cultural studies, philosophical traditions, or even other religious traditions.

Yet, if we want to know about their realities, that is, about the actual day-to-day realities of specific nonhuman individuals, we are pushed to areas not now dominated by religious approaches. Thus, if we are concerned to learn whether an animal has such prized features as intelligence, emotional depth, or a social life characterized by communicative interactions with other complex individuals of the same species, we must explore disciplines that have been, on the whole, not explicitly guided by religious considerations or expressed in terms compatible with religious claims.

An Archeology of Views

To understand religious traditions' views and claims about nonhuman animals, including those of our own religious or secular tradition, we need to be aware of the history of such views and claims. We need to do an archeology on the layers within such views. Many statements about other animals found in even the most revered scriptures of religious traditions are no more about the animals mentioned than the New Testament admonition, "the love of money is the root of all evils" is about botanical matters. (7) A religious tradition's truest insights about other animals may well be found in places other than its writings. Art, dance, and other media often reflect connections to, and portrayals of, nonhuman animals fundamentally different from the word-dominated portion of the tradition such as scriptures, theology, and moral philosophy.

The archeology of views approach also helps us see many important features of secular-based statements about other animals—often as ignorance-driven as the most fundamentalist claims of the narrowest religionists. Good examples are facile claims, passed along as factoids, about the quality of human intelligence relative to the mental abilities of some or all nonhuman animals or claims about the nature and significance of species membership such as it involves possession of some unique, Platonic-like essence that defines the being in question. Questions designed to probe the genealogy of religious claims about nonhuman animals can, when used broadly, thus shed light on anyone’s views of nonhuman animals.

We Are What We Speak

Most speakers of contemporary English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, and other languages use the phrases about "humans and animals" as an integral part of their ordinary discourse. We do so as if these phrases have no illogical qualities and are helpful, scientific, and unbiased. Consider one sense in which such usage suggests that we are in flight from our own animality. Even if our connection to other animals is not often explicitly claimed, there are abundant clues that we are fully aware that we, too, are animals. For example, we are not shocked upon hearing Aristotle's observation that a human "is by nature a political animal" (Politics). These clues help us see that the phrase, "humans and animals" is, upon reflection, actually illogical and misleading if taken as a descriptive, rather than a prescriptive, term. The phrase is illogical because, in a technical sense, the two components are not logically equivalent to each another. The problem is a simple one—the second component ("animals") encompasses the first ("humans"), while those who employ such phrases subtly imply that the categories are exclusive of each other.

When presented with other, logically equivalent phrases, such as "prisoners and people" or "whites and ordinary humans," we easily recognize such shortcomings, as well as the implicit agenda. Nevertheless, we continue to employ the phrase, "humans and animals" as if it were an accurate, unproblematic description. Yet, even if the phrase, along with the separation mentality and agenda it promotes, remains fully entrenched in our vocabulary today, such usage is not unbiased. The dualism advances a value-laden distinction, and its use remains eminently unscientific. That scientists, allegedly committed to a value-free view of the universe, continue to use this dualistic terminology provides a fascinating exemplification of the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. (8)

Some religious traditions have been similarly bewitched by their own heritage of talking about, and thus seeing, humans as radically separate from other animals. As noted above, however, and in the articles that follow, exclusivist views—promoting only human goods and excluding all interests of nonhuman animals— hardly have been the only perspectives on other animals found among religious believers. Compassionate views have been common in religious traditions, though to be sure these often have remained subordinated, marginalized voices relative to mainline interpretations of some of the most powerful and widely followed religious traditions.

Ethical Animals in a New Millennium

Whatever our view of other animals, claims about "them" have typically been invested with complex existential and ethical overtones, historically ranging from the frighteningly narrow to the astonishingly biocentric. As has happened so often in history when the religious imagination has been called upon to support racist, sexist, and other exclusivisms that obviously harmed marginalized humans, religious themes can lend themselves to obscuring and justifying the marginalization of nonhuman lives. As noted above and in articles in this issue, religious traditions offer plenty of "resources" for countering such trends. Palmer and Frasch note in their respective articles that scholars today see important links between, on the one hand, human harms against other humans and, on the other, some humans' exclusion of nonhuman lives.

In sum, religion has done it all—good and bad—with regard to animals, whether human or otherwise. Stories and perspectives that originated within religious traditions regarding nonhuman lives persist in countless ways—even if some of them have gone underground while they continue to guide ethical decision-making in sciences, legal systems, economics, and the academy. But what religious believers have ultimately "thought," "believed," "held to be true," or "said" about nonhuman animals may not be the ultimate or even most important consideration. Rather, the true test of what a religious believer really felt (or now feels) about other animals is arguably displayed most fully in that person's treatment of natural world individuals. As Gandhi said, "The act will speak unerringly." (9) This simple insight suggests how ethical issues, as well as those implicitly and explicitly ecological, are central in any inquiry about religion and the earth's animals. (10)

From the vantage point of a new millennium, perhaps we will see better the complex patterns in the many ways religiously inclined humans individually and socially have included and excluded nonhuman animals from ethical considerations. We will be helped in this by the tremendous ferment that is now going on with regard to our views of nonhuman animals. As this journal has so well shown, values and views are changing. As with all change, there is reaction, professed astonishment and outrage, and counterrevolution.

Possibly, we have reached a turning point as lay people, scholars, and even some religious authorities now engage nonhuman animals more fully and sympathetically and express some interest in their realities. A forceful and critical analysis still has to be written, however, of the many ways in which the dominant strands of the western cultural and intellectual traditions have obscured, caricatured, deprecated, and dismissed any living being who was not human, even as various subtraditions recognized that humans' moral abilities naturally extend well beyond the human species line. Such an analysis would show not only that our mainline cultural and intellectual traditions have debased all other animals and in the process ourselves and our connections to ecological wholes.

The Continuing Role of Religion

"Religion" will, no doubt, continue to be a major player on this stage. In many centuries, religion has been in too many places a rather empty phenomenon, advancing existing social and cultural traditions as if they were absolute reality, not subject to any critique. At other times and in some historically crucial ways, religious awareness has soared, taking off on flights of imagination that prompted an expansion of justice and ethics. Such is the case with early Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, all of which in their respective spheres contributed to a broadening of protections for some marginalized humans—lower and out-caste members in the case of Buddhism, slaves in the case of Christianity, women in the case of Islam. The revolutions were hardly complete, to be sure, given the complicity of these traditions in subsequent episodes of elitism, classism, slavery, and patriarchy.

Recently, however, these traditions and others have shown signs of an interest in the nonhuman worlds through creative engagements with ecological issues (see endnote 10). This trend suggests the possibility of established religious traditions’ again re-invigorating the religious imagination, expanding the ethical sensibilities of reactionary religious institutions throughout the world. (11)

The Present Special Theme Issue

The ensuing five articles open only some doors to the vast edifice that is "religion and animals." Space limitations set several challenges because the material and possible perspectives are overwhelmingly diverse. Four academics at North American and English universities and a practicing U.S. lawyer wrote the articles. Of the five main articles, three are written by women, two by men. Two of the authors live in England, two in Canada, and one in the United States. I, the special guest editor, am a white male with some now-obscured Spanish and American Indian heritage. The principal outside reader was a white female academic in the United States. The only non-European person, in terms of genetics, involved intimately in this production is an Asian-born scholar at Cambridge University. These realities, out of which those involved in this special edition must necessarily write, suggest some potential for a Eurocentric bias in what follows.

Note also that the principal focus among the five main articles is on one tradition—Christianity. This resulted from a late decision based on one prospective author's personal schedule that prohibited submission of a promised article. The constellation of the following five articles nonetheless offers, serendipitously, a concentration on Christianity that helps each of us see this one tradition in ways that could, in turn, be applied to other traditions. In other words, this special issue on "religion and animals" also could have been illustrated by a similar constellation dealing with Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, the Hindu or East Asian traditions, or some group of those diverse traditions often referred to collectively as "indigenous traditions."

Rod Preece and David Fraser describe how scholars can carefully mine a religious tradition to show that many previous generalizations about it are one-dimensional, over-simplified, and perhaps even crass. The Christian tradition, because it is the tradition that has dominated the cultures of the Western world, has been heavily studied but still is not often recognized as having great breadth in its views regarding nonhuman animals. What is said in this article about Christianity might, with careful and sympathetic work, be said as well of Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and the East Asian traditions. Each of these is a complex, cumulative tradition rich in "resources" for both positive and negative views of nonhuman life, all of which foregrounds the importance of historically accurate and balanced scholarship when attempting an interpretation of the tradition as a whole.

The Cambridge scholar Chien-hui Li, exemplifies how we can focus on a specific place and limited time frame and thereby elucidate the internal diversity and non-static nature of a tradition. This study is important in its own right because it deals with religious dimensions of the seminally important nineteenth century animal protection movement in England, which yet has to receive the full attention of historians. This detailed analysis also is precisely the kind of work that challenges caricatures of religious traditions as having but one view about nonhuman animals and their place relative to humans. The article's careful consideration of specific sources illuminates well an episode in Christian history where voice was given to the side of Christianity that is clearly amenable to a fuller engagement with nonhuman animals. Those who read this scholarly explication will see that the contemporary animal protection movement in England, now viewed as a secular movement, has deep roots in certain values and subtraditions important to the Christian tradition.

The English philosopher Clare Palmer changes the focus to a single thinker. Certainly one of the most talented and synthetic of modern thinkers, Alfred North Whitehead was nonetheless a proponent of a narrow story about nonhuman animals. Whitehead's work, to be sure, reflects his recognition that humans are animals, and he was, relative to his contemporaries, well informed regarding other animals. His analyses, however, contain none-too-subtle repudiations of the connection between humans and other animals. In effect, Whitehead's generalized conception of “animal,” that is, “nonhuman animal,” represents a kind of cultural myopia that thrived on ignorance-driven caricatures that were, typically, immune to criticism or counterfactual information. As Palmer's essay makes clear, this is also the dynamic found in the marginalization of "uncivilized" peoples. The article thus provides a good example of how even the most talented of human thinkers can be impoverished by insensitive generalizations that purport to describe well, even exhaustively, the nonhuman and non-"civilized" world. The article also sounds a theme discussed in greater detail in the volume’s closing article, namely, the link between the marginalization of nonhuman animals and various exclusions and failures to understand certain human lives.

Taking a different approach, Wesley Jamison, Caspar Wenk, and James Parker use a title theme drawn from the Gospel of Matthew (10:29) and describe committed activists who are one part of the contemporary movement seeking greater protections for nonhuman animals in some form or another. By dealing with the "on the ground" situation of a very committed portion of the contemporary movement, these authors compare activists' commitment and experiences with some general notions and definitions of religion. There is, of course, irony in the comparison, for it has been noted often that contemporary institutional religion is distinctly uninvolved in the animal protection movement (12) Among the many interesting features in this analysis is their use of categories commonly associated with traditional, institutional religion to illuminate important features of the activists' lives and a movement commonly thought of as a secular phenomenon.

Pamela Frasch shifts the focus to some subtle features of the interaction between religion and the English and U.S. legal systems. Law, like religion, politics, academia, and economics, is one of the privileged areas of discourse in the contemporary world in that pronouncements from the legal world are widely discussed and its institutions seen as seats of influence and power. Highlighting the sometimes acknowledged, sometimes hidden presence of religious factors in legal analyses of the treatment of nonhuman animals, the article suggests the centrality of religion in both conceptualization and resolution of disputes involving abusive practices toward nonhuman animals. Fittingly, this article concludes with a comment about the future. It is clear that religious institutions will inevitably play some role, and likely a central one, in the developing story of "human/animal" relations. As Frasch and the other authors point out, religion has long been a major participant at the table where such issues are discussed, and it must be so in the future as well.

Each of these articles reveals that to an extraordinary extent the past guides our vision of humans' relationship to nonhuman animals, indeed to the entire nonhuman world,. The essential lesson is, of course, that we see the inheritance for what it is, not only its tradition-backed strengths but also its tradition-backed weaknesses. If we would see the vast range of "religion and animal" issues clearly or find our bearings to make recommendations or demands for change, we must look for more than the approaches and vocabularies—relevant though they are—of the empirical sciences. We also must engage religious and other ethical views of nonhuman animals. Projects involving evaluations of past and contemporary practices at the very least will need to rely on and play out against value-laden features of the attitudes toward humans and nonhumans that currently dominate human religions throughout the world.

References

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Chatterjee, M. (1983). Gandhi's religious thoughtt. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press.

Desai, M. (1968:1972). Day to day with Gandhi. Varanasi, India: Navajivan.

Girardot, N., Miller, J., & Xiaogan, L., (Eds.). (in press). Daoism and ecology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions.

Grim, J. (Ed.). (in press). Indigenous traditions and ecology: The interbeing of cosmology and community. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions .

Hessel, D. T., & Ruether, R. R. (Eds.). (2000). Christianity and ecology: Seeking the well-being of earth and humans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions.

Margulis, L., Schwartz, K. V, & Dolan, M. (1994). The illustrated five kingdoms: A guide to the diversity of life on earth. New York: Harper Collins College Publishers.

Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, state, Utopia, New York: Basic.

Peek, C. W., Konty, M. A., & Frazier, T. F. (1997). Religion and ideological support for social movements: The case of animal rights. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 36(3), 429-439.

Shepard, P. (1996). The others: How animals made us human. Washington, D.C., and Covelo, CA: Island Press/Shearwater Books

Thomas, K. (1984). Man and the natural world: Changing attitudes in England 1500-1800 . London: Penguin.

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Notes

0. Correspondence should be sent to Paul Waldau, Department of Environment and Population Health, Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, 200 Westboro Road, North Grafton, MA 01536-1895. E-mail paulwaldau@aol.com

1. An accessible summary of current thinking on the different kinds of organisms can be found in Margulis, Lynn, Karlene V. Schwartz, and Michael Dolan 1994. The Illustrated Five Kingdoms: A Guide to the Diversity of Life on Earth, New York: HarperCollins College Publishers.

2. For example, the text of the 1994 Catholic Catechism quoted in the Frasch article below.

3. "Anthopocentrism" here means human-centeredness in ethical matters affecting which earth creatures get the protection of moral systems. This claim should be distinguished from the occasional assertion that Christian and some other theology is not anthropocentric but, instead, "theocentric" (that is, centered on God rather than humans).

4. Although many take the words "dumb brute" to mean "an unintelligent animal" (a common position in western intellectual history), the term "dumb" in this phrase was originally a translation of the Latin mutus, which means "dumb" in the sense of "unable to speak," as in the phrase "deaf and dumb." Despite Descartes' fallacious equation of the two, being "dumb" in the sense of "without human speech" is not, of course, the equivalent to being "dumb" in the sense of "without or of low intelligence."

5. See the Frasch article below for comments by Francione on the changing meaning of "necessity" in the U.S. legal system when used in connection with, respectively, human and nonhuman animals.

6. Nozick, Robert 1974. Anarchy, State, Utopia, New York: Basic, at 39. Nozick was not advocating this position, calling it rather a "too minimal" position.

7. 1 Timothy 6:10, Revised Standard Version translation.

8. The phrase is from Wittgenstein's definition of philosophy as "a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1958. Philosophical Investigations, 3rd edn, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe, New York: Macmillan, Paragraph 109, page 47.

9. I am indebted to John Hick for this quote. Cited in Margaret Chatterjee, Gandhi's Religious Thought (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1983), 73. The original quote is from Mahadev Desai, Day to Day with Gandhi (Varanasi: Navajivan, 1968-1972), vol. 7, 111-2.

10. A related set of publications has come out of a series of conferences on religion and ecology convened by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim at Harvard University's Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR). The series included separate conferences on ten different religious traditions from 1997-1999. Six volumes of conference proceedings (published by CSWR, Cambridge, MA) have been, or are scheduled to be, published as of the writing of this article. These are (1) Tucker, Mary Evelyn, and Duncan Ryuken Williams, eds, 1997. Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds; (2) Tucker, Mary Evelyn, and John Berthrong, eds, 1998. Confucianism and Ecology: The Interrelation of Heaven, Earth, and Humans; (3) Hessel, Dieter T., and Rosemary Radford Ruether, eds., 2000. Christianity and Ecology: Seeking the Well-Being of Earth and Humans (Religions of the World and Ecology, 3), Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions; (4) Chapple, Christopher, and Mary Evelyn Tucker, eds, 2000. Hinduism and Ecology: The Intersection of Earth, Sky, and Water (forthcoming September 2000); (5) Grim, John, ed., 2001. Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community (forthcoming January 2001); and (6) Girardot, Norman, James Miller, and Liu Xiaogan, eds., 2001. Daoism and Ecology (forthcoming Spring 2001). Updated information on this series and the significant follow-up effort is available at the website for the Forum on Religion and Ecology, http://environment.harvard.edu/religion.

11. A very forceful statement of this position appears in Berry, Thomas 1999. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future, New York: Bell Tower.

12. *Peek et al. comment (at 429) that “the animal rights movement” is “a new social movement noted for its participants’ lack of ties to traditional Judeo-Christian religion.”
 

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