Today's Guest Author: Charlie Talbert
A Sermon
Charlie is a former board member of the Unitarian Universalist Animal Ministry. He is currently board president of Alliance For Animals and the Environment, a Wisconsin education and animal advocacy group, and serves on the organizing Committee for Mad City Vegan Fest, an annual event in Madison, WI.
Sermon description: Who has worth and dignity and who doesn’t? Why has the answer to this question expanded
over time, with Unitarians and Universalists often at the forefront of the
struggle for greater inclusion? This sermon suggests how our heritage of advancing moral
progress can help us discern a moral imperative of our day, to recognize that
humans are not the only beings whose worth and dignity are inherent.
Animals,
Empathy, & Moral Progress
Unitarian
Universalist Church of The Lakes – Elkhorn, WI
March 23,
2014
Good
Morning. I’m Charlie Talbert. Thank you for inviting me to speak here this
Sunday. Although I’ve been to Elkhorn
many times and have seen your church from the outside, it’s good to be inside
with you today.
I’ve been a
UU for 21 years, most of that time in Kenosha.
I fondly recall the exciting milestone year that our churches share,
1993, when both Unitarian Universalist Church of the Lakes and Bradford
Community Church UU were able to purchase our own buildings.
Three years
ago when I retired my wife Vicky and I returned to Madison, where we now belong
to First Unitarian Society.
I’m a
former board member and still active in Unitarian Universalist Animal Ministry,
a national organization of ministers and lay people who seek to bring
compassion for animals onto the moral agenda of our denomination. You may have
seen some of our ads in the UU World or our exhibit at General Assemblies, this
year in Providence.
We advocate
for companion animals, wildlife, animals in entertainment and others, but my
short talk today is mostly about farmed animals. They’re the ones who suffer in the greatest
numbers, and also the ones whom people are most empowered to help.
I’m
currently board president of Alliance For Animals and the Environment, a
statewide education and advocacy organization based in Madison.
Your theme
for March’s sermons, empathy, is a timely one to consider at this critical
point in our history, when the sustainability of our life on the planet is in
such peril. If ever we needed clearer
understanding of those around us, and more insightful connections to others,
it’s now.
Over the
last fifteen years or so I’ve come to see that the individuals of other species
are much like us in the ways that matter. Every one of us – not just humans –
either against the most improbable odds, or with some cosmic design, have found
ourselves plopped here, alive and kicking, on this outpost in the cosmos that
is the planet Earth.
While we’re
here, many of us – and in my experience, that’s a great number of UUs – make
what seems like a modest request of life: that it make sense and that it be
fair, at least on the big things.
But one
morning in 2002 while leisurely reading the Sunday paper I came across a report
of routine operating procedures in the animal agriculture industry – all legal,
all approved by the care guidelines of the industry’s veterinarians – that seemed to me like a big thing … that
made no sense, at least no moral sense to anyone with a conventional view of
decency and mercy.
And
fairness hardly seemed a serious question. The story was An Animal’s Place, in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and this
was one of its troubling passages:
From everything I've read, egg and
hog operations are the worst.
The American laying hen passes her
brief span piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage whose
floor a single page of this magazine could carpet. Every natural instinct of
this animal is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioral "vices"
that can include cannibalizing her cagemates and rubbing her body against the
wire mesh until [she] is featherless and bleeding. Pain? Suffering? Madness?
The operative suspension of disbelief depends on more neutral [industry]
descriptors, like "vices" and "stress."
Whatever you want to call what's
going on in those cages, the 10 percent or so of hens that can't bear it and
simply die is built into the cost of production. And when the output of the
others begins to ebb, the hens will be "force-molted"—[they are] starved
of food and water and light for several days in order to stimulate a final bout
of egg laying before their life's work is done.
For many of
us, this is an alarming description. It quickens our pulse a little with a
desire to somehow help alleviate the systematic suffering it describes. It may anger us at whomever or whatever is
causing it. It’s an emotional
connection, not an intellectual one. It
springs from empathy.
This
feeling of connection is like the one you may have experienced in the
springtime or early summer when a fledgling has fallen from his nest, with his
frantic parents crying out, hopping and winging branch-to-branch nearby. Usually we can’t help, but strong feelings
make us want to.
And
“nearby” proximity is not required to trigger our emotional connections to
other animals. The internet’s social
media are awash in heartrending stories from afar of animals in distress, and
we’re touched to see individuals, sometimes from other species, coming to their
aid:
a baby goat
goes in too deep and bleats for help, and a baby pig swims in and nudges him to
shore;
or the
hippo who protects an injured impala,
or the
lioness who saves a human from a lion’s attack.
Last year
researchers discovered that lab rats – at least some lab rats: it’s best not to
stereotype individuals – would free a fellow rat trapped in a cage with no
expectation of reward from the researchers; and some of those rescuer rats even
saved some of their own chocolate stash to give to their fellows whom they had
freed.
And
recently a heartwarming story making the rounds was of a baby chicken who’d
been rescued after two young skateboarders purposely ran over her.
In the
endearing post-op picture, her tiny legs are in splints and she is a napping
feather ball in the palm of a caring attendant.
The text tells us that after her orthopedic procedure at a clinic, she
was taken to the Humane Society for extra care, and there she was named Nan. The Humane Society director explained, “Our
mission is to render aid to those who need it the most, and there is nothing
more vulnerable than a baby bird.”
Yet these
empathetic connections that weave through the web of life – the experiences of
others that trigger feelings of recognition in us – are not present either all
the time or in every place.
This is not
because some of us are empathetic and others of us are not. Rather, it’s because most all off us are selectively empathetic. And
selectively so – sometimes – for good reason.
Try to grasp the feelings of too many individuals and you’re unlikely to
connect meaningfully with any of them.
Or as Mother Theresa put it, “If I look at the mass I will never act.”
Of course,
empathy by itself, in its basic definition, does not require us to act at all,
but merely to understand the emotions and feelings of others.
Cognitive empathy is our intellectual ability to identify and understand others’ emotional
states. Affective empathy is our own sensations
and feelings that we experience, like eyes tearing up, in response to
another’s emotions.
It’s this
latter one, affective empathy, the kind we sometimes feel as if it were an
emotional contagion, that often stirs people to act, or to want to act.
That
response – more like a reflex, to act from empathy – is so hardwired in us that
psychologist and author Paul Ekman identifies action as a third type of empathy.
He terms it “compassionate empathy” and with it we not only understand
and experience another’s feelings, we are spontaneously moved to help, if needed.
Help like
that given by so many to the baby chicken, Nan, run over by skateboarders.
Others are
not so fortunate. Elsewhere here in the
U.S., baby chickens, on a massive scale, are suffocated in plastic bags,
gassed, or tossed alive into grinders, about 200 million of them every
year. In other words, 11,400 in the time
it takes for my talk this morning. Their
fate normally tugs at no one’s heartstrings, nor warrants a single post to
Facebook.
The
magnitude of this suffering is incomprehensible, even if we wanted to
comprehend it. Understandably, though,
many people don’t want to think about, let alone comprehend, what’s done to
these victims.
They are
the “waste products” of the egg industry, in other words, the babies
unfortunate enough to be born male at the hatcheries that supply virtually all
egg operations in the U.S. – big and small, organic and conventional, caged and
cage-free, the ones that call themselves humane and the ones that don’t. The gruesome methods may vary, but killing male
baby chickens is the common practice across all the market niches that the egg
industry uses to sell itself and its products.
This is but
one example among many within the animal agriculture industry where economic
calculation trumps even the most minimal standards of compassion, where animals
are treated only as commodities, in the words of Matthew Scully, to be cramped
together until they’ve grown to maturity, and then butchered and disassembled
along hellish factory lines where profit counts for everything and suffering
for nothing.
Scully is a
conservative and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. And he’s the author of Dominion: The Power of
Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. His eloquent book – I recommend it – is one
example of many that shows that this concern for compassion and mercy
transcends politics and ideology.
And this
issue transcends religions, too. Questions and concerns about the treatment of
farmed animals are increasingly being raised within many faiths.
That said,
our Unitarian Universalist denomination has a uniquely powerful role to play in
dismantling this institution of suffering and injustice. This role has been passed to us by our robust
heritage of challenging entrenched traditions and cultural group-think that
rationalize and institutionalize moral wrongs.
This
heritage – which the Sources of Our Living Tradition describe as confronting
powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion and the transforming
power of love – flows largely, I believe, from both our discernment, and from
our optimistic faith, that a wave of moral progress is radiating through the
eras of human history.
Nineteenth
century Unitarian Minister and Abolitionist Theodore Parker put it this way, in
words adapted by Martin Luther King, Jr. in the twentieth century, that the arc
of the moral universe bends towards justice.
This
metaphor of a bending arc suggests that as vantage points change from
generation to generation, so may conventional views about what is just.
Indeed, in
our day, Parker’s push to abolish slavery seems so justifiable that it bears no
serious question in our public discourse.
Not so in Parker’s day. Then,
many of the critics of slavery – most of them, actually – wanted to reform slavery, not abolish it.
Many of those
who wanted to replace traditional slavery with a more humane type – with
shorter hours in the fields, less severe punishments, fewer families broken up
in the commerce of buying and selling – were part of a movement called “Christian
Slavery”.
These
reformers considered themselves to be – which they were – compassionate,
fair-minded, compromising, and reasonable people; and they considered the
abolitionists to be radicals in a tiny minority, which they were.
But today,
just 16 or 17 decades later, do you know any compassionate or fair-minded
people advocating for “Christian Slavery” or anything like it? And although slavery still exists in pockets
around the planet, all civilized societies seeks its abolition, not its reform.
What
happened? What the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said of the stages of
truth can likewise be said of the stages of moral progress: first it is
ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third it is accepted as being
self-evident.
Several
years ago the magazine The Economist had this to say about humanity’s moral progress:
"Historically,
[humans have] expanded the reach of [their] ethical calculations as ignorance
and want have receded, first beyond family and tribe, later beyond religion,
race, and nation. To bring other species more fully into the range of these
decisions may seem unthinkable to moderate opinion now. One day, decades or
centuries hence, it may seem no more than [what] 'civilized' behavior
requires."
And the L.A.
Times, in its critical acclaim of Matthew Scully’s book, said this about the
progress of our ethical obligations to other species: “In fifty years, we will look back in shame
at what Dominion catalogs.”
“Really?”
we might ask. Fifty more years before
people realize that brutalizing these other beings is for nothing, when you get
right down to it, but custom and a taste preference?
Because
we’re most assuredly not eating animals for our health. A growing body of
scientific evidence, like that reported by Cornell professor of biochemistry,
T. Colin Campbell, in his comprehensive epidemiological book, The China Study,
shows the increasing incidence of cancer, cardiovascular disease, hypertension,
diabetes, and even osteoporosis in groups that increase the amount of meat,
dairy, and eggs in their diets.
You can see
him along with noted cardiologists and other physicians in the 2011 film, Forks
Over Knives, that lays bare the myth that animal products build strong
bodies. In fact, not eating them can
actually reverse heart disease and Type II diabetes according to studies
published by the Physicians’ Committee For Responsible Medicine and other
physician groups.
These days,
rarely if at all, do physicians, nutritional professionals or others support the
claim that animal products are needed for our health; except, that is, those
the industry pays or, like the USDA, it lavishly lobbies.
The Kaiser
Permanente Medical Group, the nation’s largest, last year announced its
recommendation of a plant-based diet, no animal products, for everyone, not
just its patients with disease. So does
prominent Kenosha cardiologist, Dr. Kevin Fullin, who has made presentations
last year and this year in Kenosha County and Milwaukee on the health benefits
of this diet.
And we’re
not eating animal products for the health of our environment, either. 80% of all the agricultural land in the U.S.
– that’s almost half the total land mass of the lower 48 states – is used to
raise animals for food and grow crops to feed them.
It takes
this much land because animals are not efficient converters of calories,
protein, and other nutrients from plants: cows must consume up to 15 calories
of grain to provide 1 calorie for human consumption.
The U.S.
EPA reports that 1,000 gallons of water are required to produce 1 gallon of
cow’s milk – water needed for her to drink, for the crops that feed her, for
the water disposal systems that hose away her waste.
Livestock
waste pollutes our waterways more than all other industrial sources combined. It’s polluted more than 27,000 miles of
rivers and contaminated groundwater in dozens of states, including Wisconsin,
as has been much reported in the news recently.
The United
Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the FAO, has reported that animal
agriculture produces more greenhouse gasses than all of the planet’s cars,
trucks, trains, planes and other forms of transportation combined.
And the 95%
or so of all farmed animals – those on factory farms – do not on average eat
less, drink less, or poop less than their counterparts in the smaller,
so-called sustainable and humane operations that may be closer to home. That explains in part the findings of
Carnegie Mellon researchers that we do more for the environment by foregoing
animal products, even just one day per week, then by switching to an entirely
local diet.
So, why do
we allow this harm to us, the environment, and these animals to continue? Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at
Princeton University, whom many credit as the founder of the modern animal rights
movement, reminds us that it is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our
grandparents, from which our parents freed themselves. But that it is more difficult to distance
ourselves from our own views, so that we can dispassionately search for
prejudices among the beliefs and values we hold.
Problem is:
this dispassionate search that Singer challenges us to make is all too often
sidetracked or even blocked.
The animal
agriculture industry and those who profit from it spend billions every year on
advertising and PR that misinforms and misleads consumers. And when that’s not enough, on lobbying for
legislation and regulations that keep its practices hidden from public
scrutiny.
They
present themselves as bearers of benign and pastoral traditions. Factory farm corporations like Smithfield
Foods, ConAgra, and Tyson label their products with friendly names like “Clear
Run Farms”, “Murphy Family Farms”, and “Happy Valley”, that mask the nature of
their industrial realities.
And they
deny that any mistreatment occurs at all within their CAFO’s and
slaughterhouses, except that is, in those rare instances when, with astounding
coincidence, there happens to be undercover footage that shows the staggering
scenes of violence and depravity that regularly make their way to the evening
news shows.
“Warning”,
the newscasters intone, “the scenes you are about to see may be troubling for
some viewers.”
But rather
than contest
that farmed animals are mistreated, the industry prefers not to talk about them
at all. Feminist author Carol Adams
writes of how dominant cultures marginalize their victims by denying, by what
goes unspoken, that they are anything but objects. And she cites as examples the subjugation of
women by patriarchal cultures and of farmed animals by speciesist ones.
And you
don’t have to travel far to see evidence of this denial. Seven weeks ago, on January 31st,
300,000 egg-laying hens were incinerated, burned alive in a four-alarm fire,
just northeast of La Grange, less than 12 miles from this church, at the
S&R egg farm.
S&R’s
press release doesn’t tell us if any of these 300,000 who perished might have
had names like Nan. In fact, it doesn’t mention the chickens at all. Instead,
the press release has happier news. Fire
claimed only one of the fourteen buildings of this self-described family farm,
where 2.4 million chickens are caged.
It tells us
there was no damage to the company offices or packaging and shipping
operations. And harm to anyone? The press release puts it this way, ”The
company is happy to report no injuries occurred as a result of this fire”
… by which of course it means no injury
to humans, the only individuals
endangered by the flames who matter.
Who
matters? Who decides who matters? An arc
bending towards justice suggests that the answers to these questions become
more inclusive over time. And seeking
to insure that each of us matters – expanding the circle of compassion, if you
will – is a hallmark of our religion.
We
celebrate this ideal when we teach our children in RE the examples of our
Unitarian and Universalist forebears, in movements with leaders like Susan B.
Anthony, William Ellery Channing, Dorthea Dix, Margaret Fuller, William Lloyd
Garrison, Horace Mann and others who spoke out against culturally-sanctioned
oppression: the injustices of racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and the other
–isms that justify exploitation for those who have power over those who don’t.
And it’s
not a new idea that speciesism belongs with these other “–isms” of oppression
that our faith and values call us to challenge.
In her book on the U.S. history of organized advocacy for animals, Diane
Beers has this to say about Unitarian Henry Bergh, nineteenth century founder
of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals:
“… [Bergh’s] plea for animals arose not from
any sentimental attachment to them, but rather from the moral teachings of his
religion, Unitarianism … for [him] the ethical recognition of nonhumans
involved no emotion, no complex theories, and no extraordinary intellect. It was a simple moral struggle between right
and wrong,” she writes.
If you’d
like to help, or just to learn more, visit our Unitarian Universalist Animal
Ministry website. You can subscribe to a
listserv there and connect with other UUs from around the country who are
talking about these issues.
We brought
along some handout bookmarks that show the link to the website as well as some
other resources.
A Life Connected, the last resource listed, is
a 12-minute, non-graphic video that very effectively summarizes the major
issues around animal agriculture that affect our health, our environment, and
of course the animals themselves. It’s
free to watch online. Its short length
makes it a good way to open a discussion group.
And
consider eating fewer animal products.
Just reducing average consumption by a quarter spares 20 animals per
year from needless suffering and slaughter. Take a step, whatever it can be,
whenever it can be.
I ask you
to consider this because we’ve reached what I think is an irreconcilable
dilemma for all of us: that we cannot
square the treatment of farmed animals with some key Unitarian Universalist
concepts, ones that have helped me, and probably you to identify and articulate
our ideals – ideas like “justice and compassion”, “respect for the
interdependent web”, and “inherent worth and dignity”.
And yes,
our first principle does attribute “inherent worth and dignity” to only “every
person”, but the animals whom I’ve been privileged to live with and know have
had worth and dignity too, and so have the ones that you have known. And we did not bestow worth and dignity upon
them – they have these inherently, just as do the hundreds of millions of
beings trapped in the cages and the machinery of our factory farms and
slaughterhouses now, at this moment. Out
of a connection, a connection of respect and sorrow for them, we will pause a
minute in silence.
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