More than 10 billion intensively-raised land animals will end up on dinner tables this year in America alone.
They’re made of flesh, blood and bone and can feel love, happiness, loneliness and fear just like the dogs and cats we ask our pastors and rectors to bless.Yet because they were born chickens or pigs or cows, these animals are denied everything that is natural to them.
They are never able to feel the earth beneath their feet or the sun on their faces—things that they were designed and created to enjoy by God. Instead, they endure mutilation without painkillers. Chicks have their beaks burned off, cows and pigs are castrated without pain relief, cows are dehorned and branded.
Some, such as veal calves, are kept in lonely isolation, while others, such as chickens, are crowded so closely together that they can barely move. They spend their lives confined to concrete stalls and metal cages, terrified and suffering.
Their fear and pain end only after they have been driven, without food or water and through all weather extremes, to the mechanized massacre of today’s slaughterhouse.
Saint Francis—while neither a vegetarian nor a man facing the systematic abuse and slaughter of animals that we do today—loved all God’s creatures and followed the basic Christian tenet of showing mercy for the downtrodden and those abused and ignored by his society. But there is nothing merciful about today’s factory farms and slaughterhouses, where billions of animals—perhaps the most broken beings in our society—live miserable lives and die violent, bloody deaths. I believe Francis would be appalled by the degree of suffering that we inflict on those of God’s creation we eat.
We have a choice. When we sit down to eat, we can add to the level of violence, misery and death in the world, or we can emulate Francis’s active compassion for all creatures. In honor of this great saint, consider blessing all animals by not eating any of them.
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