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We eat them, we wear them, we cage them, we hunt them and we experiment on them. We have always used animals to satisfy our needs. Can we really do what we like to the animal kingdom?
Introduction
Factory farming, the fur trade, zoos, blood sports and vivisection are all areas in which animals are used for the benefit of Man. It is a common belief that animals are just there to serve our needs. Judaism though has a completely different attitude to this issue.
In the Beginning...
The first thing God ever said to Adam - the first ever human - concerned animals:
...God said: Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea, and the birds in the air and over every living thing that crawls upon the earth. (Genesis 1:28)
What does "rule over" mean? It clearly implies that we are somehow superior to the animal kingdom, but it also implies that we are responsible for it. In fact, not just animals but all living creatures are in our care. Just as a king must care for his kingdom, so we must care for all life. But our obligations go even further:
...and the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every bird of the air; and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them; and whatever Adam would call each living creature, that became its name. (Genesis 2:19)
So from Genesis we learn that not only did God want us to be responsible for all life, He also wanted us to take an interest in all the many varieties of life and understand their place in Creation.
One of the seven universal laws which have been handed down from the times of Noah is the banning of ripping off a limb from a living animal. We see that even from the earliest times animals used for food had to be killed with minimal pain.
Caring for animals is clearly a difficult task which concerns all people, not just Jews. Unfortunately, Mankind has not been so successful at this. We will use Jewish law as a guide for how to treat animals...
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| The Jampacked Bible © UJIA 1996-2000 | |
Why does God make Adam name the animals? And why do the names stick? The Torah does not mean that Adam made up a word for each creature that God showed him, it is much deeper than that. Naming is an act of defining. God wanted Adam to understand each creature He had created. How and where does it live? What does it eat? How does it reproduce and take care of its young? To name each creature Adam had to find the answers to all these questions. To classify each of them, Adam had to study the biology of all living things. Linnaeus - the father of modern biology - did exactly the same thing. He classified all living creatures by naming them according to various basic characteristics.