Introduction

While I don’t personally work on animal ethics, I bring three foci that I think engage constructively with David Clough’s On Animals. First, I cannot do ethics that doesn’t stem from personal stories. And, after reading a number of vignettes about Cough’s family cat, and his encounter with different animals throughout the volume, I am clear that engaging a discussion on the ethics of some really troubling contemporary practices with respect to the treatment of nonhuman animals requires engaging with personal stories. Second, engaging in ethical reflection I often move from these personal stories to family and community life. Very honestly, I do Christian ethics from the perspective of a Christian mother trying to raise a Christian family. So all ethics has to make sense to me in that context. Third, this grounding on personal stories and the context of a Christian family means that I care deeply about consumption: of clothing, of natural resources, of political capital, of food, of medical resources, etc. I have studied and written about consumption in the United States for some time, and I think there are some interesting points of intersection between these studies and Clough’s central claims in his volume. And, finally, I am committed to writing and supporting the articulated goals of the New Pro-Life Movement, which seeks to address issues typically included in the “seamless garment of life,” and specifically elective abortions, through different language, strategies, and arguments than the traditional pro-life movement.1 I think some of Clough’s key theological and ethical arguments regarding what humans owe nonhuman animals can serve the purpose of transforming some of the conversations around what constitute pro-life issues, especially as we attempt to make a bold call for including things like climate change and mass migrations as key contemporary life issues.

For my discussion I would like to draw from Clough’s overall theological claim that other animals were “created, reconciled, and redeemed by a God who wills them to flourish, and in so doing glorify their Creator,” a claim that serves as the foundation for reviewing theological ethics on the basis of the ways in which human animals do or do not honor this holy created purpose of nonhuman animals. I will especially draw from what I think is one of Clough’s most keen ethical insights in the volume, that of irreconcilable conflicts as a category that helps us ponder where Christians ought to stand with respect to animal rights in general, but that I think is helpful in pushing Christian ethics to be more intentional about the grey areas of ethical conflicts, and on which perhaps we too easily yield to polarized and absolute conclusions. In the end, while Clough and I come to the same conclusions on the kinds of decisions Christians ought to make with respect to the treatment of nonhuman animals in food production, clothing, and research, I do not agree with his central premise that this is ultimately because of what we owe these creatures on the basis of their standing before God. This is not because it is not true theologically, but because I find it ineffective in ultimately shaping human behavior. Our best chance to achieve any sort of attitudinal change with respect to our patterns of consumption—which ultimately have to do with how we behave toward nonhuman animals—will require a human teleological argument about the kinds of persons we want to become, and how much blood we are willing to carry in our hands, or wear on our feet, or eat on our plates.

Can stories bring us a little closer to knowing who we want to become?

My stories, or really short vignettes, span from the more personal to the familiar. The first, I’ll call Bear, as this is the name of my dog—or perhaps taking a cue from Clough I should speak about him as the fur-bearing creature that currently resides in my home (xxiii). Bear and I talk a lot, and it’s quite easy with domestic animals dear to us to anthropomorphize their features and behaviors. It is no mystery to me, or my children, that Bear has a calming effect on me, therapeutic even, and that I for one am a much better human being to the non-fur-bearing creatures in the household because of the furry one’s presence. A recent discovery is that Bear actually wants to hear what I have to say to him. On occasion I’ve taken to whispering to him, quite low, and have found him drawing near to me, bringing his ear nearer to my mouth to hear whatever gibberish I am saying. Why would an animal that doesn’t understand draw closer to a whispering interlocutor, unless the animal sees it as a sign of friendship, that is, that they want to be able to make out whatever the friend is saying, even when it doesn’t make sense?

The second story is Blu. Blu is an emaciated cat that my children found in, of all places, Cancun, Mexico, two years ago. My oldest daughter heard mewing in the parking lot of our hotel, and she did not stop until she found the sad sac of bones that was trying to pass for a kitten. Clough brings up precisely this example in his book: the paradigmatic emaciated kitty (xx). The children took in Blu, feeding it cream containers from the coffee station, trying to hydrate it, as we searched the internet and consulted with vets in the United States as to what it would take to bring a cat across the border. Well, the experiment was brief, as that very day we were moving to the next location of our vacation to meet other families, and we worried about how we would explain to them that hosting us now also included a cat that might die at any moment, and who would definitely impinge on plans to leave to enjoy the sights for prolonged periods of time. In the end we convinced ourselves that Blu was a kind of Artful Dodger (if you recall from Oliver Twist), who looking famished would swindle unsuspecting and compassionate vacationers out of their cream packets or even more substantial morsels, only to return to its lair at the end of the day. And so we let him go.

The last vignette is really more of a shift that occurred this year in my home. I have been vegetarian for over twenty years now, moderately so I suppose, but have not made the entire household vegetarian. I have been ok with this until last year when it became clear to me that I was using the fact that I was buying “free range” eggs, and organic and other “free range” meats as an excuse to offer nonhuman animal related food at almost every single meal. The shift occurred when the mantra “we do not have to kill an animal every time we eat” took shape in my head whenever I went shopping or when I planned menus for the day or the week. This mantra is now said aloud periodically during the week, and seems to silence my family’s complaints when they see the crockpot and beans come out more periodically than they used to. “We do not have to kill an animal every time we eat.” No discussion, no protesting.

I take the luxury of sharing these vignettes with you because one element that is important throughout Clough’s book in addition to the theological claim of nonhuman animals being co-participants in Christ’s redemptive and reconciling work, is the role of emotions in our relationship with these creatures. All three vignettes play on human emotions (and perhaps nonhuman as well). Our fur-bearing residents become like friends wanting to share in our most intimate moments—even our whispering. An emaciated cat’s meowing tugs at our heartstrings to the point of forgetting all our plans for the day, making us care about this cat, at this time. And a shift in language—from calling a meal “vegetarian” to calling it a “no kill” meal—clarifies the moral import of the decisions we make when we eat.

To entertain Clough’s vivid descriptions of the treatment of nonhuman animals in food and clothing productions, and animal experimentation requires becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable. Indeed, his ethical claims on what is owed to animals heavily relies on the emotive effect of dark and gruesome stories of factory animal farming in order to make their case (for example, in his discussion on the conditions of factory farming for food, 35–48, or farming for clothing, 95–99). There is a manipulation of sorts that takes place in every chapter—completely justified—that primes the reader to be convicted, using the full meaning of the word, with the argument that animals ought to be able to lead lives of flourishing as part of God’s plan. Personal stories that connect people’s emotional core with the moral compass have a distinctively important role to play in our conversations about animal ethics that Clough doesn’t necessarily admit to in the volume, but which is very much already at play in its pages.

What’s ultimately at stake in consuming animals for textiles and clothing?

With respect to consumption of nonhuman animals for food and clothing Clough’s argument involves a two-prong approach. Theologically, he has made the case in volume 1 that we are to see animals as co-sharers in the promises of redemption witnessed to in the Bible. I had initially faulted Clough for flattening whatever creaturely hierarchy was available in the Bible that witnesses to human priority in the order of a redeemed creation (and said as much in a conference panel responding to the book). Upon closer consideration, I realize that Clough is not advocating for the flattening of creaturely hierarchies (as diverse as there are eschatological visions in Christian theology). Clough more specifically wishes to broaden visions of creaturely reconciliation and redemption that more honestly respond to the biblical witness. In turn these demand that we ask ourselves what we might owe other creatures by virtue of being beloved by the creator and made participants of the central promises of the Christian faith. This does not represent a flattening of priorities or hierarchies (if one wishes to sustain an Augustinian or Thomistic understanding of a hierarchy of created beings). It begs the question of whether sattisfying human needs must involve the killing of these co-sharers in the kingdom.

The second prong of Clough’s argument stems from the first, is there currently any real need to kill in order to satisfy our need for food or clothing. Clough’s meticulous descriptive work makes it clear that clothing humans no longer requires the skin of our nonhuman brethren in Christ, and neither is their flesh required to attend to humanity’s nutritional needs. To apply Clough’s ethical principle, there is no intractable or irreconcilable conflict of goals that would have us accept the tragic and massive use of animals for food or clothing. Synthetic and plant alternatives abound, with, according to Clough, quite similar (and in some cases less harmful) environmental impacts on water and ground resources. In this case I ought to expand my mantra “there is no need to kill an animal for this meal” to include “there is no need to kill an animal to clothe this body.”

But on both food and clothing fronts Clough only briefly addresses the market-driven dynamics of higher production with the highest profit. For all the detailed analysis of industrial farming for food and clothing, Clough doesn’t attend to analysis of why market forces and the shaping of desire (and even awareness) of capitalism push human beings to tolerate ever-increasing levels of cruelty to both human and nonhuman animals alike.2 I would push Clough to consider beyond market dynamics to truly analyze consumption as a social and moral phenomenon of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Consumption is a theological problem, one that shapes desire toward inordinate acquisition of goods. This includes clothing and food, among other consumer goods. And the shaping of desire, the multi-billion-dollar industry of advertising and marketing, benefits particular elements of our society. It purposely establishes barriers between the production of goods (workers, how raw materials are sourced, transportation of goods) and the consumer making it nearly impossible for consumers to easily access this information in order to apply their ethical values to their consumer choices. Production of goods and the market forces that shape entire industries and consumption patterns are not morally neutral, and have deep impacts for human well-being, and, add Clough’s argument, for all creatures. Just imagine that in the United States one out of every six advertising dollars in the restaurant industry is spent by McDonald’s.3 A sixth of all restaurant advertising. To be honest I thought this figure would be more. In the UK McDonald’s spends eighty-six million pounds in advertising.4 Animal and worker welfare and environmental concerns are not considerations in these companies’ bottom lines, let alone whether we might owe nonhuman animals some measure of protection for their flourishing (to use Clough’s language) due to their identity before a redeeming and reconciling God.

Deeper systems theory analysis of consumption would, I think, supplement Clough’s arguments, but also provide more balance as to how to make the fullest theological argument possible about not just the identity of all creatures before a reconciling and redeeming God who shares a plan of salvation for all creation, but of how profoundly sin impacts our ability to live into this eschatological vision, often in ways unbeknownst to us. Considerations of animals as “the poor” in the preferential option for the poor, for example, require that we understand the systemic forces that impact people’s lives, particularly consumption, who historically have benefited from these dynamics and systems, and who systemically get consumed.

Things we tolerate

We have come to tolerate a great many things as a society: child labor, abortion on demand, resource extraction at massive and irreplaceable scale, the gassing of humans at the border (between the United States and Mexico, but also along other contentious borders, such as Hungary’s). Any situation that threatens the systems set up by global capitalism (such as during the Occupy Wall Street and #BlackLivesMatter movements) is met with deep resistance by the powers that benefit from these systems, often employing legal and political avenues to block access to knowledge about their industry (such as gag laws protecting industrial farming) and the arm of the law to interrupt the momentum of these movements critical of networks of global capitalism.

The moral toleration of the cruelty and killing we enact on our brethren creatures, participants in the covenant of salvation according to Clough, is in part manufactured. And yet, it is one of the most powerful forces dominating the morality of consumption. It is not only that we ought to stop consuming animals for clothing and food, but that we ought to consider why we are consuming so much to begin with. Here is where a focus on the subject of consumption seems to me to be a first step, prior to theological reflection on the ontological nature of animals. Focus on a human subject ethics of animal care—about who we become as humans who consume—more readily asks the question of inordinate consumption than an animal ethic based on the identity of animals before God. The latter does not force us to question the role and hold consumption has in defining who we are.

But Clough is talking first and foremost to Christians. That conversation must admit that “the flourishing of animals matters to God, and Christians are called to conform their love to God’s love, and to care for those God cares for” (2). I especially appreciate the language Clough provides for negotiating seemingly irreconcilable conflicts among God’s beloved creatures, a key question in discussions on end of life ethics. Specifically, Clough proposes that “the place of animal creatures on God’s gracious acts of creation, reconciliation, and redemption, and the vocation of Christians to live lives that respond to this divine initiative, provide prima facie reasons to avoid causing harm to fellow animal creatures and to promote their flourishing” (9). “To avoid causing harm” to God’s beloved creatures reminds Christians that all are in a complex web of life—and, yes, death—intimitaly bonded to divine life. I am hopeful and excited about the possibilities that this conversation focusing on animal rights and flourishing can bring to the conversation on the flourishing of the life of unborn humans, as well as that of women in crisis pregnancies, people in various stages of terminal and challenging illnesses, and physical and mental impairments. These are conversations that in Christian circles have been stagnant for some time, made intractable by their political weight, that could greatly benefit from an infusion of new theological and ethical language that promotes the flourishing of all. Clough places the moral question of the consumption of animals beyond the irreconcilable conflict of requiring animals for clothing or food. Modern technology and agriculture allow this level of reflection. Conversely, his reflection could promote conversations on contentious end of (human) life ethics that had previously not been possible, and that consider what is owed to all life worthy of God’s creative, reconciling, and redemptive action. In my estimation this conversation becomes most fruitful when we begin and end with a discussion of the types of creatures we want to become, and the level of true harm and suffering we are willing to cause to other creatures beloved by God.

Human existence is deadly for our fellow animals, and needlessly so. The litany of our offenses, so patiently detailed by David Clough in chapter after chapter of this book, makes one redden with shame at our collective way of life, and the many ways in which it is predicated on killing and cruelty. It comes almost at a shock, arriving at chapter 7, to be reminded that alongside eating animals, dressing ourselves in their skins, and using them in many other ways as mere instruments for our own flourishing and amusement, we also live in intimate communion with them. We bring them into our homes and into our hearts, lavish care and attention on them, rearrange our lives around their needs, and grieve them when they are gone.

Reflecting on fellow animals as companions and pets offers a context in which the strengths of Clough’s approach are fully on display. Clough understands all creatures to have been created good in their own right, gifted with being through which they may glorify God in participating in God’s triune life. This theology of creation yields two core questions that must be brought to bear on our practices. The first, broadly Aristotelian question, asks about how various human practices support, or fail to support, the flourishing of our fellow animals. This requires attending to what it means to flourish as a member of a particular life form, with its characteristic capacities and vulnerabilities. The second question, yielded by a Christian understanding of animal life within the arc of creation, fall, redemption, and eschatological consummation, understands communion as creation’s eschatological destination. It holds current human practices up against fellowship with God and one another as the end for which we were created. For much of the book, this eschatological destiny is rather remote. When we attend to our forms of shared life with companion animals, however, it draws near. We have here, albeit in broken, slanted ways, to do not just with fostering the flourishing of our fellows, but with anticipating the shalom to which we are called.

This yields a robust yet flexible structure for thinking about human practices with regard to companion animals. Most fundamentally, it offers a reason to affirm in general the impulse to share our lives with fellow nonhuman animals, against those who insist that such relations are always forms of domination, with nonhuman animals made wholly dependent on human beings and subject to human whims. Clough rightly holds that any proper response to such concerns must begin by considering what it is to flourish as a particular life form. It is not sufficient to point to human affection for pets; affection can nonetheless be exploitative. More significantly, domesticated animals, most evidently dogs, can flourish in properly ordered communities of human and nonhuman members. Not only do dogs amply return the affection lavished on them, they enjoy mutual play as a form of rule-based encounter, and enjoy, too, working together toward with human partners toward shared forms of excellence, as in agility training. Wild animals typically cannot flourish in community with human beings, since their way of life is so other than human modes of existence that these cannot be brought together harmoniously: some creatures are naturally solitary, or require vast areas in which to roam. Yet against those who see in the practice of keeping companion animals of any kind, under any conditions, an impermissible exercise of power, Clough argues that these relationships provide a context for forms of mutuality and shared excellence that are genuinely good and that anticipate eschatological communion.

How, then, are we to differentiate between foretastes of the Peaceable Kingdom and vicious forms of overrealized eschatology? First and foremost, by attending to conditions for the possibility of flourishing as a member of a particular form of life. Forms of shared life that violate those conditions are to be rejected; it is not for us to transform carnivorous hunters into herbivores, or force companionship on the solitary. But let us linger a bit longer over one particular aspect of human relationships with companion animals that might seem to rule them out altogether: the fact that they are property relationships.

Clough argues against breeding practices that are harmful to animals, either because of the characteristics that are selected or because of the effects of inbreeding. He also notes that commercial facilities that supply pet shops rarely allow for creaturely flourishing, and condemns the capture of wild animals on the basis of the suffering and deprivations involved. He does not, though, himself examine the question of the ethical status of human ownership of companion animals as such, even though he mentions the fact that some do object to this relationship.

Is it permissible for human beings to own, and to be able to buy and sell, nonhuman animals as companions? Property rights have often been understood as absolute, that is, as granting permission to the owner to dispose of—to use, even to destroy—the property at whim. There are competing notions of property. Catholic social teaching, for instance, insists on the universal destination of goods; property rights are not absolute but are justified because property is an institution that better serves the common good.1 Property owners thus have a responsibility to keep the common good, the conditions for the flourishing of each member of society, in view. On this view, property ownership comes along with a special burden of responsibility. Yet the responsibility here is construed as responsibility to the common good. If the universal destination of goods is construed as a destination to the good of humankind alone, as it often is, then the responsibilities of animal owners are not to their animals but to their fellow humans. The ownership of some human beings by others was finally rejected as incompatible with the dignity of human nature, however mild and beneficent the form of ownership.

One might of course insist that property relationships give us ways of holding owners responsible for those creatures in their care. If I discover a house full of neglected and half-starved cats, I need to know who is to be charged with neglect. It is their owner who is responsible for their treatment. Yet much the same is true in the case of neglected or abused children. We do not, though, say that they are owned by their parents. We have other ways of tracking human responsibility relationships legally and socially, through the role of “guardian.” Seen through this lens, the language of “adopting” companion animals from shelters gains new resonance. To be sure, our legal system does not differentiate between companion animals who have been adopted and those who have been purchased; both are treated as property. Yet the language of “adoption” substantially reframes the relationship. One is not purchasing an item that might fail to live up to expectations and thus be returned for a refund; one is inviting an individual into one’s family. The role is that of guardian, not that of owner. An individual one adopts is a member of the community whose individual and communal flourishing is to be tended, not something to be merely used well in the pursuit of that end.

Clough argues, in this respect making common cause with animal rights approaches, that “something is due, morally, to non-human animals that have a sense of themselves as subjects of their own life” (11). Such creatures can be treated unjustly, not simply unkindly; they ought never merely be treated as means to the ends of others. These are not the only creatures that matter, morally, since “the source of the ethical demand is the status of animal creatures in God’s creative, reconciling, and redeeming purposes” (15), but he seems to concede that these sorts of animals lay us under a particular set of requirements of justice.

Of course, to insist that we stand in relations of justice with these creatures does not mean that they are bearers of the same set of rights as human beings. A right to vote makes no sense for a cat. A right to an adequately stimulating environment does. The development of a sound account of the rights of animals must attend to the particular capacities and vulnerabilities characteristic of their life form. We are thus returned to the question of what it means to flourish as an instance of this particular sort of creature. Children provide an illuminating basis of comparison, given that like companion animals, they cannot choose to live in human families, nor do they choose the particular families they have. While children are generally regarded, as affirmed by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990), as having the same fundamental human rights as adults, some of these, such as the right to marry or vote, are dormant, and children have special rights that articulate what is owed to them as vulnerable and immature human beings, such as the right to be raised by parents in a family or cultural setting, insofar as this is compatible with the best interests of the child.2 Children are treated unjustly when they are treated as adults. They are also treated unjustly when they are not treated as on the way to adulthood. Defining the specific rights that they possess allows us collectively to articulate what is owed to them in support of their flourishing now and their path to flourishing in maturity. While children have a right to be cared for and a right to have their preferences taken into account, they do not have a right to personal liberty, a right to run away from home.

Companion animals, like human children, are vulnerable and dependent on our care. Unless they are capable of making a knowing, informed choice of life in the wild over life in human care, it does not make sense to regard them as having such a right of choice. When we go out in search of runaway companion animals, we are not violating their right to liberty but are recognizing our responsibility to care for those in our charge, ill-equipped to fend for themselves in an environment that most often is far from “wild,” and incapable of informed consent or dissent. It is we who have the responsibility to determine whether a life in companionship with human beings can be a genuinely flourishing one for these creatures, or whether they can flourish only when able to direct their own lives more fully.

I see three possible routes here for Clough when it comes to animals as property. The first would maintain the permissibility of property relationships while insisting on the responsibilities that attend ownership; property ownership is finally a form of stewardship; all that we own we hold in trust, to serve God’s purposes. The second would go farther, insisting that the property relation is impermissible when it comes to members of certain animal kinds, those who are characterized by having a sense of themselves as subjects of their own lives. The third option would go farther yet, insisting that no animals may rightly be reduced to property, since the source of the ethical demand lies not in animals’ own subjectivity but in God’s purposes. Since Clough does not articulate a stance against ownership, I assume that he comes down closest to the first option. We might defend it by arguing that the distinction between a responsible property relationship and a responsible guardianship is abstract; since nonhuman animals are not able to differentiate between the two, there are not (unlike human beings) harmed or violated merely by being owned. What matters is how they are treated. The right not to be owned is, on this view, a bit like the right to vote; granting it to nonhuman animals makes little sense. Yet the ownership relationship sits uneasily with the notion that anything is owed to that which is one’s property. Affirming that members of animal kinds that have a sense of themselves as subjects of their own lives may not be owned may be the only way to treat these creatures justly. Given a legal system that treats all domesticated animals as property, one is complicit in an unjust set of social practices. One may refuse complicity with this injustice by refusing to have companion animals, or one might choose to inhabit these practices in a transformative way. Arguably, the employment of the language of “adoption” by animal shelters is engaging in a small way in this sort of transformation of our collective imaginations and consciences.

Clough’s project is aimed at moving human practices in relation to our fellow animals in a positive direction, one in greater harmony with God’s purposes for creation. It is not aimed at resolving every refined and rarified question. Insofar as naming the fact that our moral concepts are ill equipped to work across the species divide can easily result in paralysis that effectively perpetuates the status quo, his approach is obviously the right one. I am hopeful that it will have a significant impact. Yet there is also a place for puzzling through the remaining theoretical difficulties, particularly since they bear on important practical questions—questions such as the legitimacy of owning animals, which I have taken up here, but also practices of euthanizing animals, of breeding animals who are members of threatened and endangered species, and more. We have our work cut out for us. Thanks to Clough’s On Animals, which so winningly invites us to find our proper place in the glorious creaturely chorus, we are well on our way.

 This reflection centers on chapters 2, 6, and 8 of the text. The areas for my discussion are on the killing of animals for food and sport. My reflection with some exceptions affirms most of the moral criticisms of this learned text. I wonder if my colleagues who gave me this assignment had seen on my web page a few of my pictures of a wonderful fishing trip I took with my son in which we went trophy bass fishing in Orlando, Florida—strictly catch and release. This trip was a traditional activity and pastime that I was passing on to my son as I received it from my father. My father loved to fish but only had the time to do so after church on Sunday. He was not much of a churchman but felt that his family should go to church and to fish. He got two clergy persons and lifelong fishing out of his efforts. He would not take us fishing unless we first attended church.

So, it is not surprising that after reading my assigned texts, I, a lifelong fisherman, with jaundiced eye, read my chapter on animal sporting in a begrudging fashion. Still even with a biased point of view I do not have a formal argument that adequately refutes Clough’s basic contention that fish and all animals are my co-creations all made by the loving hand of God. I share his theology that all creatures are made by God for his pleasure and under his will and protection. As such, fish and others cannot rightly be deemed to be my property or charge or even wards to be dealt with howsoever I choose. From a fish’s point of view, a fisherman must be considered to be like Satan in the first chapter of Job—one who has come into the presence of God and sought to test one of his creations. At best, unlike Job, God permits me to attempt to catch a fish, then to kill and eat him. This freedom is far more license given to me vis-à-vis the fish than God gave to Satan to plague Job. Job at least was guaranteed, from the beginning of the consultation to emerge at least with his life. For Christians, the book of Job poses a theodicy problem: How can this all-powerful, all-good, and loving God allow bad things to happen to ostensibly good people through no fault of their own? Job did not deserve what Satan did and the fish seems to also to suffer unfairly at my hands. Here I am not even a stand-in for God, but for Satan. Such a reflection gives me, a Christian, great pause.

In turning to Scripture for guidance I find the Gospel of John, chapter 21, verses 1–21. There I read about the disciples who, after Jesus’ crucifixion, turn back to commercial fishing on the Sea of Galilee. They fish all night to no avail. At dawn a stranger hails them from the shore. Jesus tells them to cast their nets to the right side of the boat—there they catch a huge load of fish. Recognizing this miracle, they realize that their fishing guide is Jesus, who tells them to come ashore. They join him ashore to a breakfast of grilled fish and warm bread. Whatever they discussed over breakfast I am fairly sure did not focus on fishing for food or sport, the welfare of the fish or any other animals. Jesus is there with them with his resurrected body a portent of the new heaven and earth that is to come. Yet even resurrected, Jesus eats as they do. The new heaven and earth are still to come at a later time. I take this passage to be a retelling of an actual meal with our resurrected Lord. Christianity is built on the historicity of the resurrection of Christ.

Accordingly, God watches them eat and fellowship. God watches as the load of fish die, God watches as others gut them and sell them at market: waste not want not. God does not intervene on behalf of the fish—they are God’s fish, precious to him, but they are not spared. His eye has also been on the sparrow. Jesus assures us of this care in Matthew 10:29, saying, Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them falls to the ground outside the Father’s care. . . . And you are worth more than many sparrows. So, God cares for sparrows and fish and disciples. And God also cares for Job and subsequently me and you. God is no respecter of persons but does seem to care more for people than other creatures. Animals may be as precious to God as people, but it is not clear to me that we should esteem them as highly and relate to them as we do to each other. I confess therefore to being a species bigot.

Now getting back to theodicy problems, I am not following Job and posing challenging questions to God as to theodicy issues, nor am I trying to utilize a “What would Jesus do?” argument to justify my “mistreatment” of fish. Bad things happened to them then and now, but our discussion cannot simply end with a lament for the fish. Though the fish die, they have glorified God in simply being themselves, in being fish. Clough maintains that animals do not have duties by which they obtain sacred value—they do not need to make claims, to be rational, to even be sentient, in order to be sacred. They merely need to be—their being glorifies God. What I would like to also suggest is that their lives glorify God—all of it, even including their deaths. In dying they glorify God and they feed me. Still, I could probably be as well fed eating a bowl of lentils.

Rather than be seen as Satan, however, I would prefer to be compared to a grizzly bear, patiently waiting by a river during a salmon run. Grizzlies also glorify God in their fishing and eating and they honor the fish in eating all of it and in killing it quickly so that it does not suffer. This fishing is very different than modern commercial fishing or fish farming. Clough makes irrefutable points in detailing the gruesome process by which we humans turn our fellow creatures into neat packages of flesh ready to be cooked and devoured. His detailing of the enormous misuse of water, land, energy, resources, as well as animals is telling and compelling. Clearly, we cannot rightly continue modern animal food production as we are doing now. The abuses to animals and the land, the thermal warming associated with the practice, the vicious castrations and slaughter of animals are repulsive and cannot be compared to even the industrial harvesting of plants that can also damage psychologically all in the chain of production.

For Clough, vegetarianism is a morally compelling response—along with massive changes in our food production processes. This he justifies well as a moral choice available to all. Yet to demonstrate that vegetarianism might be morally superior for some is not the same as saying it is morally compelling for all. Again, what Clough objects to is the fact that the killing of the animal causes it to suffer and cuts its life short. The actions of the food production, even before the slaughter, also interfere in the “flourishing” of the animal. These observations appear to be self-evident. However, if the trout do not bite my fly, they do go on to flourish another day. If the individual salmon who swims too close to the shore escapes the grizzly’s swipe it too flourishes. Still the salmon who swim upstream to spawn fulfill their destiny. Those who die after spawning fulfill their destiny do so as well as the ones who get taken by the bear. My question is how am I different from the bear? Of course, as Clough points out repeatedly, I have the choice of lentils or other nutritious foods. I would submit however that my killing of the individual salmon though hurting it as an individual animal does not necessarily harm its species as a species. Smarter salmon or trout pass on my fly, their lazy or less careful brothers do not. If fished properly I cull the herd, or I guess I should say school. Wildebeest cross rivers at certain migratory times each year. They do so knowing that there are hungry crocodiles in the water as well as waiting lions on shore. A certain percentage always make it through, and a certain percentage do not. Salmon have to swim, grizzlies have to eat. Gazelles have to cross the river, predators need gazelles. As the gazelle, in its last moment of life, feels the lion’s jaws on its neck I am sure that the last emotion/thought felt/expressed by the gazelle is not hallelujah, but, “Damn, why God? Why me?” Even so it glorifies God in its death. In particular, when the lion kills and eats the gazelle, it is merely also fulfilling its destiny and cannot be characterized as a sinner, since sin comes into the world by means of only one animal species—Homo sapiens.

In contrast to the lion, Clough details the martyrdom of Christians in the Roman gladiatorial contest, killed for the lustful pleasure of its jaded citizens.

What is odd about Clough’s text is the relatively little discussion of the nature and place of death as part of life. We all die, but it is a well-known fact that fisherman and hunters pay for licenses that are used to maintain wildlife and their habitat. True conservationists like birders do also and do so while not killing a bird. Thus, recreational animal killers, also known as hunters and fishermen kill some animals but also work and pay for their betterment in terms of habitat preservation. These efforts for a species serve to benefit the “sporting” animal directly and most other animals indirectly in that natural habitat and stocks are preserved. Consider, the wildlife officer that kills an urban coyote who has been snacking on pets. He has hurt coyotes as a species much less that the land developer who puts a new subdivision in a California canyon that is not fit for such use and which is on the coyote’s rightful territory.

Clough also oddly characterizes animals in essentialist terms and does not address the process of natural selection—evolutions seems to be a nonfactor. Nevertheless, the competition between animals can be of hoof and claw and usually we humans do not pick sides, though when we do, it is usually on behalf of the animal that is most useful to us or looks or acts the most like us. But Clough’s theology plays no favorites. Lion and gazelle both honor God. But is God disrespected if a species becomes extinct? Perhaps, but not necessarily so. The insanity of the mass killing of the passenger pigeons is indeed a human disgrace. But the disappearance of the saber tooth tiger or the mastodon has to be chalked up to the competition of other animals. Is it always God’s will when one victor emerges? And given the nature of natural selection, can any victory be considered permanent? Turning back to the production of food from animals the most disturbing facts must be faced. It is the massive and brutal unnatural selection that we human beings have accomplished over making wild animals into domestic ones and devouring them wholesale that constitutes Clough’s most persuasive proscriptions. Yet what most needs to be addressed is the reality that our abuse of animals is not generated by bloodlust, or cruelty, or callousness but is generated by our refusal to self-limit our populations. We refuse to limit our numbers. If we all evolved into adopting some form of plant-based diets, we still will have to check ourselves at some point: we would still be utilizing more than our share of the earth’s resources. Clough does not seem to address this issue well.

Still when Jesus grills, serves, and eats the fish—and miraculously directs more fish to the disciples’ nets—he participates in the already but not yet world that we all live in, a world which is fallen. Perhaps it is not a sin for Jesus to do so since he had paid for that sin already on the cross before that celebrated breakfast. We fisherman cannot make such claims, we have not paid for any of our sins—we are reliant upon Jesus to do so. And if we do take the life of a fish quickly and consume it gratefully, or release it carefully unharmed, cannot the blood of Christ pay for those sins? And also, for the sins of those who spay cats, and those who kill insects to protect their vegetables and also for those who convert meadows into gardens and keep rodents out? Clough is not hypocritical in absolving himself from participation in this fallen world. The world is quite difficult even in a non-industrialized system. But death comes to us all and if we are buried naturally, we too enter into the circle of life on behalf of the worms. This is not a pleasant thought, but the word humility comes from humus—the earth. From ashes to ashes and dust to dust we are all under the will of God. But Job got no reasonable and easy reply from Yahweh and if tragedy befalls one of our loved ones neither will we. Like the gazelle we may ask, “Why God, why me?” and, “Why now?” If God deigns to respond his answer might well be, “Why not you? And why not now?”

I close my reflection not in triumph but in humility and in a little shame. I could take up bowling and l Like to hike for recreation especially if it is to some new and fertile fishing hole—but seriously, I am probably not going to give up fishing. I will have to live with the guilt—but I have always respected the fish. Still I am reminded of the sinful haute cuisine of the French in dining on ortolan.

The customary way of eating ortolan, a delicate songbird, involves the diner covering his or her head with a large napkin. Tradition dictates that this is to shield—from God’s eyes—the shame of such a decadent and disgraceful act. (Henry Wallop, “Why French Chefs Want Us to Eat This Bird—Head, Bones, Beak, and All,” Telegraph, September 18, 2014.)

As we laugh at the French, foolish to think that God does not see them, eating the tiny bird, we laugh uneasily for we know that God’s eye is on the sparrow and we know he watches us as well.

David Clough’s On Animals: Theological Ethics is a fitting companion to the impressive doctrinal framework developed in On Animals: Systematic Theology. Taken together, it is a major intervention that deserves a wide audience. Each volume has its appropriate focus, roughly theoretical and practical in nature. But it would be a mistake to push this distinction too far given a tendency to caricature those tasks. Volume 1 locates nonhuman animals within God’s gracious work of creation, reconciliation, and redemption. Informed by this theological vision, volume 2 examines human use of other animals in a wide range of practices. It also places theological ethics in constructive dialogue with philosophical ethics without getting lost in abstract thought experiments. Happily, appropriate to his broadly Barthian sensibility, theology responsive to its canonical texts is not left behind in practical pursuit of ethical analysis. Indeed, the relation between the two volumes might itself be a topic of some interest given ongoing disputes about ethics conceived as a branch of theology. A virtue of Clough’s work is the way he shows rather than theorizes what ethics might look like when it takes theology seriously and what theology might look like when it takes ethics seriously. Or better put, without conflating them, he does theology in the doing of ethics.

Apart from the urgency of its concerns, however, Clough’s project is too important to leave to questions of method or disciplinary boundaries. By my lights, like issues of race, class, and gender, it is also too important to consign to a particular specialty within an academic guild. It challenges all of us to confront questions we might not otherwise be compelled to address, both intellectually and politically. It does so by laying out a series of concrete issues. My focus will be the opening two chapters, and chapter 4, “Using Other Animals for Labour.”

I read Clough’s charitable effort to advance an undeveloped aspect of modern theology as invitation more than polemic. I take comfort in this style, as I am no authority on “animal ethics” or “animal theology.” Clough shows how thinking about the fate of animals, and the very notion of animality, solicits questions that extend well beyond debates about vegetarianism or education in moral sentiment. The casuistry of the chapters is not put forth as a series of resolved puzzles. So I welcome this opportunity for mutual inquiry about topics that he rightly argues have been neglected and understudied. Moreover, I read the book not only as a helpful primer in animal ethics and its future, but a way of doing theological ethics which admits complexity within the “tension between creation as we know it and the new creation that God will bring” (80). I will return to the notion of complexity, but first a word about the theology.

I find the theology challenging yet inspiring. Clough emphasizes the creator-creature distinction in ways any Augustinian would appreciate. God, not humans, is at the center of a cosmic drama that draws all creatures into the praise of the Triune life. Many of our practices in relation to other animals fail to embody witness to this drama. In fact, our domination and oppression of other animals positively defy it. For Clough, all animals (including humans) are put on a somewhat even plane relative to God and the purposes of the Holy One of Israel. I see no issue with that fundamental move, though I am still not sure what it means for nonhuman animals to repent in their own way and participate in the work of redemption by transforming their predatory nature. That may reflect a limit to my theological imagination. My own view still wants to maintain all animals are not on an even plane relative to each other. I suspect this permits more of a creaturely hierarchy than Clough allows, though I am uncertain what criteria Clough might adopt to judge better and worse hierarchies (let alone good or bad ones).

Clough also tries hard to find common ground across religious and ethical traditions, embracing a methodological pluralism that is quite different than mixed proposals like “utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people” (to borrow a phrase from Robert Nozick).1 I confess, however, the ethics volume was more bracing existentially than the theology volume. It was a harder read, not because of the writing, but because of the horrific nature of its subject matter that raise familiar questions about the ethics of representing the suffering of others. Perhaps unjustified, the theology provoked intellectual wonder. The ethics, given Clough’s exquisite sense of the pain of fellow creatures, challenged the idolatry of my practical atheism in the way I live. It exposed my complicit ignorance and weakness of will in light of empirical realities such as the rapid industrialization of meat production and major shifts in intensive farming over the past half century. My own views, and practices, as President Barack Obama once put it about another issue, are “evolving.” In part, this is a result of trying to learn from someone I deeply admire, and also as parent of young children which has reawakened me to the lives of nonhuman animals.

Perhaps like a good preacher, or community organizer, Clough is gentle on those of us still on the way. His style is prophetic, but not in a way that positions a righteous purity against those of us enmeshed in cultures that make his veganism odd. Despite indicting moral laziness, he has what our teacher Margaret Farley would call “the grace of self-doubt.” He also admits the extent to which we are all complicit in wrongdoing, though in ways that try hard not to write tragedy into creation or endorse moral mediocrity in the face of sin. No one is exempt from the consequences of the fall in our treatment of animals as fellow creatures of God. Any mode of living responsive to God’s redeeming of the world can only be “provisional and partial” and “far from what we believe to be ideal” (22). That judgment reflects an overarching eschatological dimension in his approach to ethics. While clarity is a virtue of the work, including self-denying appeals to analogies with just war reasoning or concessions to certain regrettable features of mortal life under the banner of lament, it is still unclear at times where Clough stands on familiar questions about realized eschatology, interim ethics, and even the vexed question of supererogation (a concept strangely missing in this volume). How should we think about what might be good to do, what is permitted to do, and what is required to do, morally and strategically? Given the abuse of notions like prudence, necessity, and relative justice, it would be clarifying if Clough would more explicitly distinguish his realism from other strands in theological ethics. Complexity is a frequent term in the book, and he is sensitive to charges of making the perfect the enemy of the good (89). But it was hard to resist the feeling that its invocation for Clough was a sad prelude to the dangers of moral compromise under conditions of sin and finitude.

There is a history to morality in the book that calls for fresh thinking in light of new realities. Perhaps the most striking statistic is found at the very beginning of the book: domesticated animal biomass now exceeds wild terrestrial mammals by twenty-four times (1). Clough calls this reality a matter of exploitation. The spirit of the book is to identify ways to make our treatment of animals less “morally problematic” (124) and “more respectful” (67). On the whole, I find that strategy compelling: prioritizing the most unjust practices, and making relevant distinctions between forms of use (say, raising animals for luxury fur or amusement rather than companionship or cooperative forms of labor).

Clough never explicitly offers a theology of domestication, though he consistently argues that to resist domestication perpetuates its own kind of human-exceptionalism (126). By my lights, there will be no wild animals in heaven. This follows not only a vision of the Peaceable Kingdom, but because all animals (including humans) will be domesticated into the household of God (Eph 2:19). I am not sure if this requires a rejection of eating those animals that give themselves up as food. We will be eating one animal, an incarnate savior, it seems, depending on one’s view of the Eucharistic banquet in the messianic era. It also implicates a view of creation: whether, before the fall, all animals were domestic, named by Adam and responsive to one another in a garden not a wilderness.

In his opening discussion of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, Clough finds that care for the wounded animal is not justified by an equal demand on our care. It is because “this creature in need” confronts the soldier (xv). But is God species neutral? Clough denies, at least according to the sayings of Jesus, “a flat moral equivalence between humans and other animals” (xvii). He suggests a tension is only acute in situations of “irreconcilable conflict between human and non-human interests” (xvii). Clough consistently tries to push such conflicts, like feeding humans before livestock in cases of famine, to the margins, and calls for a moral imagination wherein compassion for nonhuman animals benefits all creatures. But he does seem open to cases of “regrettable necessity,” as in certain human communities where there is no alternative to subsistence hunting (72).

Jewish and Christian traditions have long distinguished what is owed near and distant strangers, without rendering the latter beyond moral concern. The same holds, as Clough notes, for the variegated taxonomy of biblical injunctions that map and construct relations of various kinds (29). Much of contemporary theological ethics is wrestling with how best to engage this legacy given extensive demands to expand the circle of moral concern (say, in debates about “global justice”) and tend to those historically misrepresented by Christian tradition. Care for nonhuman animals is part of this story. I occasionally wondered if Clough views moral demands in relation to nonhuman animals primarily in terms of claims of justice or compassion. Again, he might wisely resist a stark contrast here as well. But it would be interesting if animal ethics might be a way to trouble that familiar contrast, especially given the strong emphasis on duties of justice in contemporary ethics and political theory that might explain the relative neglect of nonhuman animals.

Trading on the parable of the Good Samaritan, and against trends in philosophical ethics, Clough holds to the moral significance of proximity. He also resists efforts to categorize who might be worthy of relationships of mutual recognition based on certain characteristics or capacities (such as rationality or capacity for a sense of justice). At the same time, however, much of the book relies upon descriptions of nonhuman animals that solicit recognition of them as worthy of a non-substitutable moral status. Passages on the cognitive capacities of fish (38) or the peaceful sociability of pigs (48) seem aimed (at least rhetorically) at situating nonhuman animals on a spectrum with human animals in thinking about our actions towards them. Nevertheless, that status is run through their relation to God rather than for their own sake. So I was a bit unsure how this squares with his claim that a theological view must be a “direct duty” view. Clearly, the ethical status of nonhuman animals is not derived from their relation to humans. But obligations seem always already mediated at least in relation to God “because the source of the ethical demand is the status of animal creature in God’s creative, reconciling, and redeeming purposes” (15). This position is not an indirect view that considers duties to nonhuman animals only in relation to humans. But it is not a direct moral duty in any straightforward sense. How might animal ethics help us think about the very notion of “intrinsic value” and God-relatedness?

Clough reserves for a lone footnote the question of our causal efficacy given contested claims about the sensitivity of the opaque supply chain within the industrial food system to individual consumer choices (67n158). He is not an act consequentialist, so it is not a pressing challenge to his theory. He seems agnostic on the question of whether or not participation in this system constitutes a formal or material cooperation with evil. But I think the question of market sensitivity does warrant more consideration given how demoralizing those claims can be, not to mention difficult questions about collective responsibility, moral agency, and individual obligations.2 Again, animal ethics here might offer insights into broader questions of the moral life.

Let me turn to chapter 4, which focuses on the labor of animals beyond their reproductive labor to the use of their distinctive skills and strengths. Clough begins by highlighting the use of animals that meet human needs, especially domesticated dogs (i.e., hearing dogs, search and rescue dogs, and police dogs) as well as those animals that provide other forms of assistance in therapeutic contexts.

Despite relationships of mutuality and care that often develop in these cases, he still finds them morally complex. He does not seem to endorse these relations as positive goods. He puts them on the spectrum of “less problematic” (130). The moral concerns are primarily about their sourcing, training, and treatment. The problem is the abuse of these animals, not their use even in dangerous work.

By contrast, he narrates the shameful history of draught labor, especially the use of horses and mules for agricultural machinery and transportation. It is a long history that still includes over three hundred million animals “over worked and poorly cared for” (120). Here, Clough notes studies that detail the overlapping strategies of treatment of human slaves and nonhuman animals (125). Again, however, he admits that “animal welfare is understandably a lower priority than human welfare” (120) at the subsistence level in which many animals are used, save exceptional cases like the miserable treatment of Asian elephants.

I take it that he does not oppose in principle the use of animal labor, even the use of wild animals. Clough notes examples of cooperative labor like gathering honey with African honeyguide birds or fishing with bottlenose dolphins. He also provides a telling example of a seven-year-old Belgian Malinois called Diesel that died raiding a home of suspected ISIS terrorists after the Paris attacks. Clough rejects the use of dogs in suicide missions, but he leaves open the possibility of exposing them to risks that human members of a team also undertake (128). I am not sure if the use of wild animals like dolphins for military purposes should be distinguished from domesticated animals like dogs. Interestingly, Clough (invoking Marx) denies a determinate role for appeals to freedom of choice in assessing the difference between human soldiers and nonhuman animals. But he calls for greater awareness of power asymmetries and the ways our use threatens the harmony of God’s creatures within a multi-species community.

Might Clough prefer the use of artificial intelligence to the use of animals as our co-laborers? That would be a revealing position. I take it some who train animals for labor view it as a case of “enoblement, in the development of the animal’s character and in the development of both the animal’s and the handler’s sense of responsibility.”3 Giving commands to labor together, like teaching my child to play piano or building a home with others, is here a sign of reverence rather than exploitation. It is not clear to me which side of sentimentality lies, or the gap between sin and authority, but with Clough I think we do well to place them within a Christocentric gaze. Difficult choices will need to be made as we face the challenges outlined in this book. Readers should be grateful that Clough does not make a choice between theology and ethics one of them.