Prisons and Plowshares

It used to be that farms in this country were owned by farmers whose well-being depended on the well-being of the animals they raised for food, and farming wasn’t so much a business as a way of life. Cows, pigs, and chickens were still raised for their meat (or eggs, or both), of course, but their lives were spent in relative ease prior to that fateful day. And yes, those lives were often spent in coops and barns, but at least the animals had room to move and knew the cycles of the seasons and when day would turn to night. Farms weren’t merely places where animals died, in other words. They were also places where animals lived.

Today’s factory farms are nothing of the sort. Animals are kept alive in these modern behemoths of production (and pollution), but it really can’t be said that these animals truly live any more than one can say that prisons are where people truly live. The only real difference between prisons and factory farms, it seems, is that the inhabitants of one have room at least to move around and stretch their limbs and are given balanced meals, while the inhabitants of the other are fed chemically altered slop and kept in cages so small they can never turn around their entire lives. Oh, yes, the other difference is that the former group of inhabitants are people who presumably did something wrong to get themselves in their predicament, while the other inhabitants are animals who… well, their only “crime” was that they were born with hooves and tails or beaks and feathers.

How we arrived at the place where animals face a fate worse than criminals for the sake of efficiencies of production and to satisfy our insatiable taste for meat is a long and sordid tale, and one that will be examined in future posts on this blog. Suffice it to say that we’ve unwittingly become a culture that prizes efficiency over ethics and mass production over morality. If it saves money, who really cares if it came from the sweat of impoverished third world labor or the blood of abused animals? When convenience trumps compassion, a culture has lost its soul.

The Psalmist says, “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The Lord is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made.”

If we, who were created in his image, do not likewise show compassion over all that God has made, are we then not marring God’s image in us? When we have fashioned the plowshares of our farms back into the swords of factories, and our pruning forks back into spears, have we not reversed the very call we’ve been given to be ambassadors of peace and compassion? Have we not, at that point, dispensed with our inheritance and, thus, forfeited our own souls?