Abstract
Lisa Kemmerer,
Animals and World Religions
, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2012; 368 pp.: 9780199790685, £60.00 (pbk)
Animals and World Religions is an ambitious undertaking, in which Lisa Kemmerer looks at seven major religious traditions (indigenous, Hindu, Buddhist, Chinese, Jewish, Christian, Muslim) with the aim of drawing out and examining the resources they contain for thinking about humanity’s ethical obligations in relation to nonhuman animals (or ‘anymals’ – pp. 17–18). In each of the seven chapters, the Scripture, myths, history and theology of a religious tradition is examined, along with lived examples of animal liberationists whose actions are their religious witness.
The monograph is not intended to be either critical or holistic but descriptive and exhortative. Kemmerer’s aim is to demonstrate that all major religions contain significant resources indicating that our current treatment of animals – particularly in factory farming – falls far short of the standard to which humans are called. For this reason, she is concerned with religious ideals rather than the actions of religious people (pp. 8–10): the reality that relatively few believers live up to these ideals is no more an argument against her central thesis than the historical reality of the Crusades is an argument against Christians striving to live non-violently today.
Thoroughly sourced and well explained, Animals and World Religions is a valuable text for anyone interested in how faith impacts on human relations with the other-than-human. It is only in the concluding chapter that questions are raised about how far Kemmerer can go with her descriptive approach. Although the case for focusing on the positive and the ideal is well made, when such a self-confessedly biased methodology is used to reach conclusions at the macro level – such as the argument that ‘Not one of the world’s largest religious traditions teaches that anymals are of lesser importance’ (p. 285) – credibility is stretched. To take the example of the Christian tradition, Kemmerer is surely right to highlight the powerful theological resources for attending to nonhuman animals, including recognition of God as creator of (and covenanter with) all animals and Jesus’ lived example of love for the marginal and dispossessed; but to move from this to the claim that the Christian traditions do not teach that humans are more important than other animals is to reach an unhelpfully limited conclusion.
Other arguments made are easier to accept. ‘Of what moral relevance are contemporary religious organizations if they have nothing to say about the most egregious sufferings ever – both in quality and quantity?’ (p. 287). Kemmerer asks, answering herself on the next page. ‘If you stand within one of the world’s [major religious traditions] … then what you eat and what you wear – whether or not you support anymal exploitation – is critically religiously important’ (p. 288). This statement does not depend on the claim that humans are no more important than any other animals; and in the light of the copious resources on display, and the brutally honest appendix detailing the realities of factory farming, it is a statement which Kemmerer makes hard to deny.