An Emergent Animal Ministry

A few years ago I edited a collection of poetry and prose, In Praise of Animals under the Skinner House imprint.    While the collection was proposed by my editor at SH, I'd long been interested in Animal Rights.  For a couple of decades I'd been calling Animal Rights "an ethical frontier," the next step in a progressing ethic of respect and reverence.

Within Unitarian Universalism Animal Rights has become a more sophisticated movement as ethical treatment thinking has transformed to an animal ministry perspective.  I think this represents, in part, a distancing from a secular animal rights activism.  The emergent Animal Ministry movement looks more to moral suasion  than to confrontational coercion.

I've prepared a Reader's Guide to my In Praise of Animals collection.  I think it is an apt means for the uninitiated to begin to explore what is now being called "multi-species" relationships--our appropriate relationship with our animal kindred as well as the web of life that embraces us all.  My guide is a resource for individual reflection.  But it would also work well in a readers or book discussion group.

Animal Rights is no longer a frontier.  It is a realm of ethical being that is rich and fulfilling.  It is, in my estimation, a coming home for the human species.

An Innate Sense of Life: Moral Grounding

In late September UCH will host a first ever Multi-Species Workshop, sponsored by our Animal Ministry group, in conjunction with an animal blessing Sunday Service.  


I’m awfully proud of our progressive religious ways.  Our relationship to animals  has a deep vein of identity and compassion that's now a burgeoning movement within our ranks.  

The three towering figures of early American Unitarianism are Channing, Emerson, and Parker.

In particular, Channing and Parker are known for their highly developed consciences.  They embody the Unitarian core notion of CHARACTER. 

From the current perspective of animal rights/liberation joined to the emerging  (scientific) understanding of an innate moral sense—particularly “do no harm,” the following two anecdotes are a propos.  In addition, these anecdotes beg the value of moral development and age-appropriate religious/moral education that we UUs have long promoted.

First, William Ellery Channning from a letter:

I can remember an incident in my childhood, which has given a turn to my whole life and character. I found a nest of birds in my father's field, which held for young ones. They had no down when I first discovered them. They opened their little mouths as if they were hungry, and I gave them some crumbs which were in my pocket. Every day I returned to feed them. As soon as school was not, I would run home for some bread, and sit by the nest to see them eat, for an hour at a time. They were now feathered, and almost ready to fly. When I came one morning, I found them all cut up into quarters. The grass around the nest was red with blood. Their little limbs were raw and bloody. The mother was on a tree, and the father on the wall, mourning for their young. I cried, myself, for I was a child. I thought, too, that the parents looked on me as the author of their miseries, and this made me still more unhappy. I wanted to undeceive them. I wanted to sympathize with and comfort them. When I left the field, they followed me with their eyes and with mournful reproaches. I was too young and too sincere in my grief to make any apostrophes. But I can never forget my feelings. The impression will never be worn away, nor can I ever cease to abhor every species of inhumanity towards inferior animals.

Second, Theodore Parker from an “Autobiographical Fragment:”

When a little boy in petticoats in my fourth year, one fine day in spring, my father led me by the hand to a distant part of the farm, but soon sent me home alone. On the way I had to pass a little " pond-hole " then spreading its waters wide; a rhodora in full bloom — a rare flower in my neighborhood, and which grew only in that locality — attracted my at­tention and drew me to the spot. I saw a little spotted tortoise sunning himself in the shallow water at the root of the flaming shrub.    I lifted the stick I had in my hand to strike the harmless reptile; for, though I had never killed any creature, yet I had seen other boys out of sport destroy birds, squirrels, and the like, and I felt a disposition to follow their wicked exam­ple. But all at once something checked my little arm, and a voice within me said, clear and loud, "It is wrong!" I held my uplifted stick in wonder at the new emotion — the consciousness of an involuntary but inward check upon my actions, till the tortoise and the rhodora both vanished from my sight. I hastened home and told the tale to my mother, and asked what was it that told me it was wrong? She wiped a tear from her eye with her apron, and taking me in her arms, said, “Some men call it conscience, but I pre­fer to call it the voice of God in the soul of man. If you listen and obey it, then it will speak clearer and clearer, and always guide you right; but if you turn a deaf ear or disobey, then it will fade out little by little, and leave you all in the dark and without a guide. Your life depends on heeding this little' voice." She went her way, careful and troubled about many things, but doubtless pondered them in her motherly heart; while I went off to wonder and think it over in my poor, childish way. But I am sure no event in my life has made so deep and lasting an impression on me.

In my estimation an innate awareness of the value of life—one’s own and then in compassion with fellow creatures—is both traditional Unitarian and cutting edge, 21^st century progressive UU religion.  I’ll be searching Emerson to determine whether he had a similar childhood experience.

Animal Rights Gains Support

On June 25 the Spanish Parliament took a giant step toward granting the so-called great apes certain rights (life and freedom) heretofore exclusively human. The environmental committee passed resolutions that echoed scientists and philosophers of the Great Ape Project, who advocate for humane treatment of our species closest animal kin.

The Great Ape Project's website declares: "The idea is founded upon undeniable scientific proof that non-human great apes share more than genetically similar DNA with their human counterparts. They enjoy a rich emotional and cultural existence in which they experience emotions such as fear, anxiety and happiness. They share the intellectual capacity to create and use tools, learn and teach other languages. They remember their past and plan for their future. It is in recognition of these and other morally significant qualities that the Great Ape Project was founded. The Great Ape Project seeks to end the unconscionable treatment of our nearest living relatives by obtaining for non-human great apes the fundamental moral and legal protections of the right to life, the freedom from arbitrary deprivation of liberty, and protection from torture."

In my estimation animal rights is an ethical frontier that illuminates our human relationship with Nature--the great web of life. Compiling my quote collection In Praise of Animals (Skinner House, 2007), convinced me that we are just beginning to appreciate animals as kindred and that a once assumed dominion over animals is a fallacy.

Bravo to Spain for taking this first legal leap granting animals their intrinsic rights.