Christianity has a terrible record in relation to animal rights. The religion does not even consider animal suffering when trying to work out how an all-good God might allow evil to happen.
People assert that animals largely kill other animals, especially more vulnerable ones, for food and survival. That is a way of silencing their own conscience. If it is seen as natural, then humans feel entitled to abuse or condone abuse.
Survival implies desperation, so why are cats not eating other cats? The urge to use the defenseless for food is there underneath it all and is stronger than the need for food as such. It’s about domination and then nourishment. Cats torture mice when they are bored. And a dog that enters another dog’s territory will be attacked. Animals torture and kill for their own sake even as they scavenge for food. We indulge mostly in animal flesh—usually the animal dies a terrible death—just for indulgence.
We slay and hurt animals for food, clothing, fun, and virtually anything.
In the past, aristocrats believed they should act with nobility towards commoners.
It is impossible to deny that our treatment of animals is evil. Killing an animal, even painlessly, is using a conscious being for our benefit. It is taking away its happiness and its opportunity to be happy. It implies that we cannot object if some alien being comes along and eats us on the grounds that it is a being better than us. The atheist may eat meat and even kill animals. That is evil. But the atheist does not make the situation worse by acting as if God approves of their behavior. Religion deepens vice.
The meat of the more intelligent animals should only be eaten when there is nothing else to eat. The less intelligent animals should only be eaten when it is necessary for the health and life of the supreme animal, humankind. And those who don’t know that they are alive should be eaten without any such limitations. But no avoidable suffering should ever be inflicted on an animal. Peter Singer agrees with my conclusion: unless animals are eaten out of necessity, it is wrong. He infers that animals are just there to be used as objects, which is wrong, for they can be happy and so should be (page 134, Practical Ethics).
An atheist tolerating the evil of hurting animals for food is bad enough. But at least he is not invoking the sanction of God. It is one thing to be bad, but to claim that an all-good being—a God of infinite love—approves of your evil is horrendous. If a Christian eating meat is worse than an atheist doing it, then true respect for animal rights requires opposing and discouraging belief in God.
It is generally taken for granted that animals are not personal beings. Those who say that animals are impersonal claim this is so because they do not have free will. But even persons do not have free will all the time, assuming they have it at all. Take drunks, for example. Religion has refused to admit the possibility that animals are personal, for it refuses to care about them properly. It forbids abortion in case embryos are persons, and then it allows worse to happen to grown animals, which have a better claim to personhood than a month-old human fetus! Scientists have shown that the adult pig is at the same mental and conscious level as a child of two or three.
When an unintelligent human being can be a person, an animal can as well. We don’t know if animals are persons; therefore, it is wrong to be cruel to them. When an animal is about to kill a human, the human’s life comes first, for we are more sure that humans have a right to life than we are that animals do. Even if animals are known to be persons, the human being can live the longest, so the animal has to be regrettably sacrificed, as its life is shorter and far more under threat than our own. We must not prefer animals to humans.
The Christian Church teaches that animals do not have immortal souls. The idea is that they have souls that die with them, or no souls at all. Either way, the question is not considered important. The main point is that they do not have souls that make them equal to people or as important as people. Jesus made it clear that Heaven is a feast and a wedding, but it is so joyous simply because we are delivered from harm, and from the harm sin does and from sin itself. The ultimate cause of all evil is sin. To summarize—Heaven is bliss because sin is eradicated. The bliss happens by default when sin is extinguished. Some say the default is just being numb, so God gives you the gift of bliss. Sin is not there to block the gift.
This teaching is contradicted by those who say that Heaven is about happiness: if you love your dog or cat, it will have to be there! This suggests that God cannot make you happy unless he restores your dog or cat, making God obligated to do so. So it is a sin to complain about Heaven unless your pet rat is there! Jesus said that earthly family ties end at death, and if you lose a family member, you will gain countless ones in her or his place in Heaven. This explains how mothers can be happy there while knowing their child is roasting in Hell or on the way to matching Satan in evil. He said that whoever puts parent or child before him is not worthy of him.
Some say that we must avoid causing needless harm to animals not because they are like us, but because they are not. That makes the issue one of human duty, not animal rights. It does not counsel us to treat, say, a chimp the same way as a cat, or a cat the same as a budgie, or a budgie the same as a goldfish. The more "primitive" the animal, the lower down the scale it goes. So, if you have to choose between killing a budgie or a goldfish, then kill the goldfish.
Animals cannot value justice or love like we do. They have no concept of justice at all. It is because we have those concepts of justice and love that our needs come first.
Somebody wrote, "It is an expression of human self-loathing, a deep misanthrope that would ultimately subvert human rights and be inimical to human thriving" in the name of pretending that animals have equal rights with us and we with them. I like that point, for animal liberationists, for the most part, are likable, kindly people, but that does not change the fact that they are resisting their misanthropism. After all, they will win no friends for their cause if they give in to it. They are as bad as those who value God most and people less than God.
Some say that affirming animal rights is too close to making animals as important as people. If dogs and monkeys as individuals are not equal to a person, that does not mean that if you have a collection of dogs or monkeys, a person's life and well-being still do not outweigh them.
Some fear that animal equality with humans will lead to humans being used in experiments instead of animals. Humans would be better anyway. Peter Singer says animal experiments are wrong. He also says some animals should have the same rights as humans. Read between the lines: he may proscribe experiments, but he would have to affirm, “If experiments are a necessary evil and cannot be avoided, then it is best to use humans.” The "if" is there, whether experiments will happen or not. FINALLY:
Christianity has historically marginalized the moral consideration of animals, treating them as objects for human use rather than beings with intrinsic value. Religious texts and practices—such as animal sacrifice, dietary rules, and the sanctioning of meat consumption—reflect this instrumental view. While modern perspectives within Christianity may acknowledge limited animal welfare, the tradition largely prioritizes human interests and frames animals as subordinate. True respect for animal rights requires questioning these religious justifications and recognizing that causing unnecessary suffering to sentient beings is ethically wrong, regardless of divine sanction.
APPENDIX - THE BIBLE
The way the Law of Moses, in the Bible, commands animal sacrifice implies that humans and animals are equal in value. The punishment for sin was death, and the animal had to die in the place of the sinner. That makes the sacrifices murder as far as intention goes. Yet animals have no rights—they are things. If you can kill an animal—take its precious life from it—it’s hard to see why you can’t be cruel to it. It is better to suffer and live than not to live at all.
The Bible God requires that animals be bled cruelly, for it was forbidden to eat blood. It demanded cruel sacrifices of animals to God. Killing animals for food is bad enough unless it is necessary, but killing them for sacrifice is criminal. No true Christian can care about animal rights.
The Jews held that it was unclean to eat certain animals. They forbade it. The animals would have been happy about that if they knew. But Jesus, if the Church is to be believed, comes along and abolishes the prohibitions, thus giving a huge boost to the popularity of cruelly slaying animals for food.
CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, Veritas, Dublin, 1995
CORRECTION AND DISCIPLINE OF CHILDREN, John R Rice, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 1946
EUTHANASIA, MERCY KILLING OR MURDER? Dom Peter Flood, Faith Pamphlets, Surrey, 1973
GOSSIP GOSSIP GOSSIP Jean E Laird, Liguori, Missouri, 1980
HUMAN RIGHTS, Michael Bertram Crowe Veritas Dublin 1978
PRACTICAL ETHICS, Peter Singer, Cambridge University Press, England, 1994
WHAT BELONGS TO ANOTHER Richard H Brenan SJ, Irish Messenger Publications, Dublin, 1983