consumption
Animals in the billions are used in the U.S. alone each year for human purposes including entertainment, clothing, research and most of all food. And while God gave us permission throughout the Bible to use animals for our benefit, he did so expecting us to care for them and treat them with dignity in the process (see stewardship). Such an approach is by the far the exception rather than the rule today, in all animal industries.
But most of our society, including our Christian community, continues to benefit from inhumane practices without knowing what they involve, let alone questioning them. Knowing that God cares deeply for all animals (see creation), how can we turn a blind eye, and conscience, to these issues? This section hopes to help inform where many of our animal products come from, and even begin to ask whether there might be better alternatives, for ourselves as well as the animals involved (see redemption) ...
food - research - clothing
To say that animals play a huge part in our food industries and personal eating habits would be an understatement. Over ten billion animals are farmed annually in the U.S. for their meat and other products, including dairy and eggs, and the vast majority of them do not live on the quaint family farms we grew up hearing about as children. Instead, all but a fraction of the cows, pigs, poultry and other animals in our country are funneled through the "factory" farm system: one of the most degrading and debilitating environments imaginable for any of God’s creatures, let alone billions of them.
Many of them are kept in cages barely larger than their bodies, living in remnants of their own waste, and neurotically acting out their captivity or succumbed to lifelessness. They’re fed a diet (often including hormones and other medication) which gives them the greatest production capacity rather than meet their natural nutritional needs. And so they live out a miserable existence, often (maybe thankfully) only a matter of months, until they’re forcibly herded into trucks to take them to slaughter, where they're “harvested” by mechanized processes which don’t always make sure they're fully unconscious first. Please see our resource page for more on animal farming and other food-related issues.
food resource pg ...
Experimentation on animals for research purposes, traditionally called vivisection, is one of the most complex issues in animal advocacy because the welfare of human beings is often closely linked to it. While there may be legitimate human health causes which research involving animals helps contribute to, there are far too many instances where experimentation on animals is unwarranted and superfluous. We need to distinguish between the two carefully, because experimentation on animals causes great discomfort and often incredible agony to them, and they are virtually always discarded afterward.
Without discrediting the potential value of research on animals for significant human concerns by default, there is considerable debate as to how relevant the findings are to human physiology. In any case, there is far too much duplication of testing, as corporations and other institutions refuse to share results or draw from existing data, and the adoption of viable non-animal testing methods is slow. It is estimated that over 100 million animals are used and destroyed in research each year, and many experiments are done out of scientific curiosity instead of necessity, including the extensive amount of testing which is done on behalf of cosmetic and household product development.
research resource pg ...
Designer furs may not be quite the status buy they once were, but millions of animals are still used for a wide range of luxury and everyday clothing items. This is unnecessary when you think of all the excellent alternative materials which are available today, let alone the misery which animals used for clothing endure. In many cases, smaller animals such as minks and foxes are forced to spend their entire existence in filthy wire cages, only to be inhumanely harvested for their fur when fully grown.
In far too many gruesome instances some animals, including dogs, aren’t even fully unconscious when skinned alive, and others suffer agonizingly for prolonged periods of time in traps set in the wild. Many more millions of animals which are also farmed for their meat and other food products, in any range of conditions (see food), are also asked to contribute their wool, feathers and hides along the way with varying degrees of discomfort and pain resulting, or postmortem.
clothing resource pg ...
