Moral Status of Animals in The Ancient World - Bible

Bible

The first chapter of Book of Genesis describes how God gave human beings dominion over animals, tempered throughout the Torah, or Old Testament, by injunctions to be kind. Severing a limb from a live animal and eating it was forbidden (Genesis 9:4), cattle were to be rested on Biblical Sabbath (Exodus 20:10; 23:12), a cow and her calf were not to be killed on the same day (Leviticus 22:28), a person had to feed his animals before himself (Deuteronomy 11:15), animal suffering had to be relieved (Deuteronomy 22:4), oxen treading the corn were not to be muzzled (Deuteronomy 25:4), kids were not to be cooked in their mother's milk (Deuteronomy 14:21), mother birds not to be disturbed while sitting on eggs (Deuteronomy 22:6-7), and oxen and asses not to be yoked together (Deuteronomy 22:10).

It was only after the Flood that meat-eating was permitted either for humans or for animals, God telling Noah and his sons: "nd let the awe and dread of you be upon all the land animals, and all the birds of the sky, and all that creep on the ground, and all the fish of the sea: they are given into your hands. Any small animal that is alive shall be food for you, like green grasses — I give you all." (Genesis 9: 1-3).

Peter Singer argues that the Christian New Testament is devoid of injunctions to be kind, with Paul of Tarsus interpreting the Sabbath requirement, "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox as he treadeth the corn" as intended to benefit human beings. "Doth God take care for oxen? Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope." (1 Corinthians 9:9-10).

Saint Augustine (354–430) argued that Jesus allowed the 2,000 Gadarene swine to drown to demonstrate that man has no duty of care toward animals: "Christ himself shows that to refrain from the killing of animals and the destroying of plants is the height of superstition ..." Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) took up Augustine's position, arguing that human beings should be charitable to animals only to make sure that cruel habits do not carry over into our treatment of other humans, or cause a financial loss to the animal's owner. "If in Holy Scripture there are found some injunctions forbidding the infliction of some cruelty toward brute animals ... this is either for removing a man's mind from exercising cruelty towards other men ... or because the injury inflicted on animals turns to a temporal loss for some man ..."

The Augustine/Aquinas argument was later supported by a number of philosophers, including John Locke (1632–1704) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), and it underpinned much of the 19th and 20th centuries' animal protection legislation. It is an early example of what law professor Gary Francione calls "legal welfarism," namely that the welfare of animals is viewed as important only insofar as it benefits human beings.