Golden Calves and Veal Crates

Since the dawn of time, humans have objectified animals, and we’ve tended to move between two extremes: we either revere them, or we abuse them. To wit: we live in a country that spends more money on its pets than it does on music, movies, and sporting events combined (pets are a multi-trillion dollar industry), and yet this same country sustains factory farms, an institution so morally corrupt that it is off limits to the public. And think about that: you can tour a nuclear reactor, prisons, the Federal Mint, even the White House if you’re fortunate enough, but one thing in this country is so top-secret, so inaccessible to the public, so off the radar that it literally takes undercover agents to penetrate its walls. When’s the last time you heard of a school field trip to a factory farm? After all, wouldn’t it be instructive for the kids to see where their meat and eggs come from?

Not a chance.

In the Hebrew scriptures, we read how the Israelites grew impatient with God, so they constructed a golden calf to worship instead and threw all restraint to the seven winds. And God was not amused. In Paul’s letter to the Romans in the New Testament, Paul points out that the essence of all sin is what we worship creation (that is, ourselves, our ingenuity, our cleverness, each other) instead of the Creator.

Then we have the biblical story of Balaam’s Ass (as we called it when I was a kid—always caused a twitter) in the book of Numbers, where the clear and apparently only moral of the story is that animal abuse is strictly forbidden by God. Balaam beats his donkey until an angel puts an end to it.

Clearly, the bible prohibits both extremes of objectifying animals: we ought not worship them, nor should we abuse them. And there’s a connection: that which we worship we often end up objectifying. Just look at the vendors outside the Vatican with their Jesus bottle openers and glow-in-the-dark crucifixes.

And yet, the objectification continues at both extremes, from the Paris Hiltons of the world whose dogs are simply another fashion accessory along with their pearls, to the Michael Vicks, whose dogs are nothing but fighting machines; from the prosthetic testicles that can be implanted in a neutered dog (presumably it’s someone’s else’s testicles who are metaphorically being augmented) to the factory farm and veal calves chained by the neck to their crates (read "coffins").

You might have thought that we’d come a long way since the days of Moses and his 40 years in the wilderness. But apparently we never left. We have lost our way and have grown impatient with the inefficiency of compassion. You might have thought that in the several thousand years between us and the wandering Israelites we would have learned a thing of two, but no. We’ve simply moved from golden calves to veal crates and, once again, thrown all restraint to the seven winds.

And God is not amused.