Doing justice to animals?

David L. Clough is Professor of Theological Ethics at the University of Chester. His current research is on the place of animals in Christian theology and ethics. In 2015 he founded CreatureKind (http://becreaturekind.org), a project aiming to engage Christians with farmed animal welfare.

Human impacts on fellow animal creatures are extraordinary in scale with multiple linkages to climate change. According to estimates by Vaclav Smil by the year 1900, the combined biomass of domesticated animals had grown to exceed the biomass of all wild land mammals by three and a half times. That resulted from a combination of big increases in livestock numbers, and big decreases in wild land animals, significantly driven by the need to make space for all the livestock. Humans displaced wild animals in order to make space for raising domesticated animals for food. During the twentieth century humans quadrupled the biomass of domesticated animals, which was a major factor in the halving of wild land mammal biomass, so that by 2000 the biomass of domesticated animals was twenty-four times greater than that of all wild land mammals. Domesticated chickens alone are three times the biomass of all wild birds. And in the same one hundred years we reduced numbers of fish in the oceans by 89 per cent. Raising livestock in these numbers is a major contributor to an anthropogenic mass extinction of animals comparable with those found in the geological record. If we continue on this trajectory there will be virtually no wild animals to be concerned about. If we combine this with the realization of the cruelly impoverished lives we inflict on farmed animals, the vast majority of which are raised in novel industrial environments, it is clear that attending to the impact of human activity on other animals is an urgent demand....