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A perfect prelude to the question we'll continue to look at in the coming days of whether animal welfare is a valid and biblically grounded cause for Christians to care about, courtesy of Nancy Janisch ...
Did it ever strike you as odd that Christians can affirm God’s care for and love of creation, and simultaneously give next to no thought about how our faith might influence how we treat animals and the rest of creation?
Last winter we ran an extended series on companion animal shelter and rescue efforts, and some of the many dynamics which confront them, including the very vital discussion taking place around the "no kill" ideal. I wanted to share an important reflection from Nancy Janisch on the same subject, applied to severely psychologically damaged pets in particular.
You may not agree with Nancy at every point, and from the outside looking in I wonder myself about the availability of other options. But, as always, she wrestles honestly and graciously with very difficult scenarios, and my hope is that any comments on her post will reflect the same.
"The Sad Story of Oreo the Dog" begins with a pit bull mix who survived being thrown off a New York City roof last summer, but still ended up being put down by the ASPCA in November for severe behavioral reasons (be sure to read the article to familiarize yourself with all that went into the decision):
I'm grateful to Nancy Janisch, our resident voice of prudence on matters of science and animals, for looking into the following, very dubious, developing prospect in animal agriculture:
Over the past few months there has been some discussion about genetically engineered pain-free farm animals. Adam Shriver, author of an article on the same subject in the journal Neuroethics, recently discussed his proposal in a New York Times op-ed piece.
Good friend Nancy Janisch sent me the following thoughts in response to my reflections on Bubba's sickness and passing, and generously granted permission to share them here ...
To say I enjoyed your posts on the loss of Bubba would not be correct, but I did appreciate them. They brought back a lot of memories for me, memories from the "other side" of the exam table. Your series reminded me how hard it was to tell someone we couldn't set up a payment plan because we'd been burned too often. It's true. People would tell us the saddest stories about why they couldn't pay, and how they would either be right back (and never come), or leave 'x' amount and make further payments (and never do so).
With Nancy Janisch's touching post this evening, "Talking to Animals on Christmas Eve," I couldn't resist posting a couple of renditions of "The Friendly Beasts." It'd be hard to imagine a better tribute to the presence of animals at Jesus' birth, and both of these videos celebrate the song through a child's innocent eye, and voice.
First, Sufjan Steven's delightful version of the hymn (from his Songs for Christmas collection) is accompanied by charming illustrations from Ethan (courtesy YouTube user robdougs):
Updated on December 26, 2009 by
Ben DeVries
From our good friend Nancy Janisch, a perfect complement for 'the night before' ...
When you were young, did anyone ever tell you that animals can talk at midnight on Christmas? I don’t remember who told me, but I do remember looking expectantly at our family Dachshund for several years on Christmas Eve. For the record, he never said anything. At least not in a human language.
Updated on May 7, 2010 by
Ben DeVries
Ok, so I was badly tempted to title this post "One Dancing (Cockatoo) Fool," but I opted to give Snowball more of the respect he deserves! If you haven't heard about this feathered and funky phenom yet, you'll get a tremendous (leg) kick out of the following video:
Nancy Janisch's post is up at Deep Church, and be sure to catch both parts. She makes a compelling case that the imago dei, the image of God in humanity, means something quite different for our relationship to animals than it has often been taken to mean:
We won’t understand our relationship with animals until we understand who we are as human beings. And oddly enough, we won’t understand who we are as human beings until we understand our relationship with animals.
This post concludes Nancy Janisch's series following up, and significantly building, on the recent swine flu headlines (see the beginning of the series):
In the last post we talked about industrial farm animal production and the problems it has produced in the US. In the one before that we talked about zoonotic diseases, and about the need to feed families which causes people to move more deeply into previously (humanly) uninhabited regions of the world. In this last post I would like to put these two topics together, and consider food production on a global scale.
Continuing Nancy Janisch's excellent and thorough series in response to the swine flu headlines, this is part three of four, and one of the most pointed for the not one sparrow community yet:
Part of my reason for writing about the H1N1 influenza outbreak, epidemiology and industrial farm animal production is to make the case that people of faith need to be paying attention to these things.
May 18, 2010