Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy

"Without animal rights groups, moreover, it would all go almost completely unremarked... Feared for the truths they might tell, animal rights champions do not deserve our scorn. They deserve our admiration and our gratitude, here above all. Sometimes the most courageous thing is to state the obvious, and that is what they are doing when they tell us that to treat animals in such a way is cruel, abhorrent, and inexcusable. 'We do not need a zoological proletariat,' writes one commentator in dismissing the rights of farm animals, to which the obvious reply is that we do not need zoological gulags, either." (pg. 288).

This book convinced me to never again buy meat from a supermarket.

This is one of the best books I have ever read. I picked it up at the library last week because I recognized the author's name from when he was one of George Bush's speech writers. I didn't really even pay attention to what the book was about because I was in a hurry (although the cover image was captivating). The book explores the idea of man's dominion over animals, and how in modern times that has been turned into a completely unrighteous dominion. The author eloquently argues that every animal should be allowed to fulfill the measure of its creation, and that each animal was made for a divine purpose.

I have always been an animal lover, but I have also kind of thought the "animal rights" people were kind of hippie, liberal weirdos. Scully is not one of those people. He isn't one who would throw paint on a fur coat, or set a bunch of lab animals free. He simply thinks that all animals should be treated with dignity and respect, no matter what their purpose is. I could not agree more.

I learned alot from this book (some things I wish I still did not know!). I had no idea that safari companies in Africa offer "canned" hunts, where captive animals (elephants, lions, etc) are released from a cage directly in front of a waiting hunter. Where is the sport in that? How could anyone possibly think that was ok? Some of the animals used in canned hunts are previously captured wild animals, while some are "retired" zoo or circus animals. So after years of entertaining humans while being mistreated in the name of "training", the final fate of many circus animals is to be shipped to africa and shot. Awful!

I also had no idea that the debate is still going on about whether or not animals are conscious, sentient beings. Really??? How is that even still a question, after all the work done with Alex the parrot, Koko the gorilla, and millions of other animals who have shown the ability to display emotions, thoughts, and suffering?

The chapter on factory farms was just awful. To hear the farmers talking about how the pigs "like" being kept in crates and how they are "happy" with not having enough room to turn around just totally reminded me of the way Satan convinces people that evil isn't really evil. I think Abraham Lincoln's quote about slavery ("If slavery isn't evil, then nothing is evil") could be applied to factory farming. If factory farming isn't an example of unrighteous dominion, then there really must just not be any such thing as unrighteous dominion. I finished reading about the farms thinking, "Dang it! Now I will have to be a vegetarian!" because I really just did not want to contribute in any small way to such a cruel industry. But luckily I was able to find some local sources of 100% pasture raised beef and poultry, so my family can still eat meat, but definitely in smaller amounts than we have in the past. I like the idea of following the word of wisdom's admonition to eat meat "sparingly" anyway.

I HIGHLY recommend this book to anyone. You will learn a lot, and it might change the way you think about certain things.

When I finally cracked it open, it took a long to read as it is just heartbreaking. The author is a Republican and admittedly conservative in most things, but also a vegetarian and fiercly devoted to the welfare of animals. His writing is well researched, well documented, and carefully worded. This has been one of the most difficult books I've ever read: he covers every aspect of animal cruelty: mass farming, whale hunting, animal research, big game hunting, crush videos, etc. He pulls no punches, making for brutal, painful reading. He holds up excuses given by others for their behavior concerning animals and then carefully shoots numerous holes in every single one. This is an important book. He doesn't have all the answers, of course, but he does have a lot of them. He also points out some of the simplest things that we, as humans, as consumers, can do. I can say, without a doubt, that I will live my life differently for having read this.

I liked this book a lot more before I learned the author is the speech writer for Sarah Palin. I have a hard time believing that Scully is not passionate about vegetarianism. The book is incredibly dramatic. You can tell he is a speech writer -- he writes as if he is before 100,000 people trying to enliven them for battle or something. I am a passionate vegetarian, and there were times that even I was like, okay Matthew Scully enough enough enough! So where is his inauthenticity? How can he believe all of this and support a woman who is cool with aerial shooting and hunting and doesn't give a shit about polar bears?

Whatever. I liked the book, and I didn't feel overwhelmed by his conservative/religious bias, although I disagreed with him about some moral issues. Like, it was interesting to see where he draws the line on killing animals and then abortion and stem-cell research. Most vegetarians are liberal and are cool with stem-cell research and women's rights. Most. Matthew Scully breaks that mold. So I guess it makes you realize how fuzzy all the lines really are.

Scully makes a lot of valid points and says them better than I ever have. I liked this part:

He was saying people are always like (paraphrasing: "humans have thought and conscience so we obviously are better than animals, we have dominion over them, so we can eat them because they don't and they're stupid and they have no idea what's going on." They are? They don't? Fine, then: (now I'll start quoting Scully...)

"When people say that they like their veal or hot dogs just too much to ever give them up, and yeah it's sad about the farms but that's just the way it is, reason hears in that the voice of gluttony. What makes a human being human is precisely the ability to understand that the suffering of an animal is more important than the taste of a treat." (303)

Also:

"Let's just call things what they are. When a man's love of finery clouds his moral judgment, that is vanity. When he lets a demanding palate make his moral choices, that is gluttony. When he ascribes the divine will to his own whims, that is pride. And when he gets angry at being reminded of animal suffering that his own daily choices might help avoid, that is moral cowardice." (121)

See what I mean about the dramatic stuff?

Anyway, read this book, if only to be confused about how someone could do such a brilliant job encapsulating such a complicated issue so beautifully and simply, and yet churn out the words for a woman who says things like "Talibani" and "Gee Willikers*".

*I have never heard her say "Gee Willikers, but I bet she does."

This is a book I didn't expect to change my life. The tagline is, “The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy.” I picked it up because of the rave reviews of people I trust and because of my amateur interest in bioethics, which this relates to, if only tangentially. How should humans relate to the world around them? How should Christians think about our relationship to the rest of creation? I've typically been more interested in this topic in connection with the environment but of course you can't totally separate separate flora and fauna. I figured it was time to turn my questions to the animal kingdom.

The thing is, I don't really like animals. They can be cute, and majestic, but they never inspired in me the same passion that I’ve seen in other people. Most pets annoy me and don't seem worth the time, money, and contact with bodily fluids, strange smells, and cleaning supplies. And I have always laughed at vegetarians (I’m sorry). Didn't God give us animals to eat? (Well, sort of, as a concession after the Fall.) Aren’t animal products the best way for us to get protein, containing all the amino acids we need in one package, unlike plants? (Well, yes, but of course there are other animal products besides meat and if you're careful about it, you can get everything you need from plants.) Like many conservative-leaning folk, I saw animal rights activists as sentimental, inconsistent, and even anti-human, crusading for the whales while ignoring assaults on human life.

Then I read this book, which is written by a speechwriter for George W. Bush. Scully has conservative street cred. You can't accuse him of pandering to his liberal base. That immediately made me more open to what he has to say, not just because I'm more aligned with him on several fundamental ideas but because I knew he couldn't rest on appealing to people who already agreed with him. He would have to rigorously defend his arguments to a skeptical audience. There could be no cheap ideological rhetoric here, not if he really wants to make his point.

Scully does all of that, and more. I was stunned by the quality of his writing and his thinking. His sentences—oh, his sentences! He mixes lucid philosophy with sharp-eyed reporting, wrapped up in humor, ruthless logic, and warm personal reflections to create an account that is unapologetic but movingly gracious. He bares before you the gruesome details of porcine slaughterhouses, recounts conversations with international whaling lobbyists in between reflections on the ethics of utilitarianism, and surveys theological interpretations of the Judeo-Christian creation story before taking us with him to Safari Club International, a multi-day big game hunting convention. He spends pages carefully deconstructing arguments from both conservative Roger Scurton, who revels in the glory of fox hunts, and the liberal Peter Singer, who argues that infanticide is less bad than murder of an adult (and therefore the killing of animals is even less problematic). He quotes Saint Bonaventure and Pope John Paul II as well as David Hume and Sigmund Freud.

If this book were merely a survey of current attitudes toward the issue of animal welfare or an in-depth journalistic expose of the state of industrial farms, it would be a significant and eye-opening contribution to this discussion. But Scully goes far beyond reporting or criticism, instead laying out a compelling argument for why and how all people but especially Christians, of whom he is one, should treat animals. My favorite summary of this thesis is from one of the reviews in the front pages: “Scully’s argument for the protection of animals is not based on rights, liberation, or legal sophistry, but on the old—someone would say old-fashioned—idea of mercy.”

Scully does not, as I expected, frame this issue in terms of animal rights. He does argue for reducing animal product consumption, ending big game hunting, radically re-hauling the way we treat livestock, and various other related protections of animals. And although he dives into the persuasive evidence that animals are conscious and can suffer pain (and since this was written twenty years ago, I'm sure there is much more data now to defend this claim), he ultimately does not rest his case for protecting animals on qualities they possess. Nor does he only point to some classical idea of humanity—we lessen ourselves when we mistreat animals. While he acknowledges these as good points, the linchpin of his argument is the uniquely Christian concept of mercy.

Animals are, on the whole, weaker than us. They do not have the moral capacities we do. That is precisely why we must use our greater rational and moral capabilities to look out for their good—as one spider-bitten human learned, with great power comes great responsibility. Or as Scully says:

“The whole logic of Christianity is one of condescension, of the higher serving the lower, the strong protecting the weak, the last being first, and all out of boundless love and generosity, ‘rights’ having nothing to do with it.”

“Whenever human beings with our loftier gifts and grander callings in the world can stop to think on [animals’] well-being, if only by withdrawing to let them be, it need not be a recognition of ‘rights.’ It is just a gracious thing, an act of clemency only more to our credit because the animals themselves cannot ask for it, or rebuke us when we transgress against them, or even repay our kindness. We are going to need a little mercy ourselves one day. The way I figure it, I cannot expect mercy if I am unwilling to give it.”

“One may regard animal welfare as an entirely secondary matter. One may view the creatures as morally incidental, as soulless beings for whom no bell ever tolled and to whom no one has direct moral duties. What one may not do under the guise of religious principle is deny that we have at least certain basic obligations of kindness, and that these obligations impose limits on our own conduct that today are simply not being observed.”

Animals need not have moral capacities to necessitate that we use ours. It was convicting to realize how many of my arguments, once I was informed about what's actually going on in our slaughterhouses, rest solely upon my pleasure and convenience. Isn’t it my right to eat meat? Or is it my responsibility to offer mercy to creatures that I have been given, well, dominion over? Which of these motivations will I follow?

A large part of Scully’s argument is that eating animal products, especially meat, is no longer a necessity. I expected him to make a strong, explicit case for going vegetarian or vegan, but he does not. Instead, he lays out the facts of how animals are treated and the argument for acting with mercy. He then leaves the specific choices that will follow from those things up to the individual. Depending on where you live and your income, for example, you may be able to buy locally, humanely sourced meat and dairy products—or you may not. There are different ways that the conviction to treat animals with mercy can be lived out, and I appreciate that he leaves room for that. He was clear, however, that some trends, both personal choices and national systems, will need to change and that it will require sacrifice.

“We have no valid claims of need anymore, only our claim to the material good of fare to which we are accustomed. Meanwhile, in a global, high tech economy of six billion consumers— perhaps nine or ten billion by the year 2100—livestock animals simply cannot be raised under humane conditions. We are left, then, with exactly one material good and one moral good, our pleasure weighed against our duty of compassion. And these can no longer coexist. One or the other must be abandoned.”

I am not sure I would have been willing to hear this argument a couple years ago, or even last year. It would have seemed hyperbolic and virtue-signaling to me. I'm not sure what changed in me, and I'm not sure what needs to change in people to be able to hear it. But I pray that we are able to.

Perhaps the most compelling part of Scully’s argument to me was how the current discussion around animal rights and treatment of animals seems to take for granted that they must be of use to us to matter. He quotes the president of the International Wildlife Management Consortium—World Conservation Trust (what a mouthful) talking about whales: “Our main purpose is sustainable use…For us, the principle of sustainable use will suffer no exceptions, except for science. The worst crime against nature is waste, not to use resources.”

So animals are just resources and simply to exist as a waste.

I have done a lot of thinking recently about where our worth as humans comes from, our value as beings and not producers. Perhaps that is what cleared the way for me to be sympathetic to Scully's arguments because I recognized in them a similar push against utilitarianism, a resistance to the idea that any being matters because of its output or usefulness to others. As he says when describing how groundbreaking the Genesis depiction of animals was: “For the first time animals are not only significant in themselves, belonging to Him and not to us; they are players, however lowly, in the story of our own moral development. The God of Israel delights in all that He has made. All creatures sing their Creator’s praises, and are dear to him for their own sakes.”

It is not that we may never use animals for anything. The problem arises when we make their utility our only calculation in how we treat them. It becomes perverted when we cannot imagine whales simply swimming in the ocean as being a good thing but rather a waste of resources.

Scully does not only critique others, however. He provides a detailed list of policies that we should bring before Congress right now to address the exploitation of animals in America. It's one thing to condemn the current laws, and it's another to paint a compelling vision of a more just world, but it's still yet better to be able to enshrine these ideas in practical next steps. I don't know much about our current policies, how feasible his suggestions are, the fallout in other industries or negative externalities they might cause. But at least he has positive, practical solutions for both the individual and the country.

As I kept reading, I grew increasingly uncomfortable with my superficial, indifferent criticism of those who have sounded the alarm bells about the way animals are treated. I am ashamed to admit it but before I truly didn't care. Scully has convinced me that nothing could be further from how a Christian should behave.

I am still pondering what this looks like for me practically. Right now, I'm trying to only eat meat at restaurants and at the very least stop eating meat every day, resisting this expectation that I can't have a good meal unless there's meat in it. When I do buy meat, I try only to buy it from my local farmers market. Yes, it's more expensive, but if you buy less of it in general, it balances out. And surely it is a small price to pay for the chance to be more like God, our kind and generous creator, author of all mercies, delighted inventor of the manifold creatures that fill his earth who in their beauty, diversity, and vulnerability point us to him.

As Scully concludes,

“[A]nimal welfare is not just a moral problem to be solved in statutes, but a moral opportunity to fill our own lives with acts of compassion. Kindness to animals is not our most important duty as human beings, nor is it our least important. How we treat our fellow creatures is only one more way in which each one of us, every day, writes our own epitaph—bearing into the world a message of light and life or just more darkness and death, adding to the world's joy or to its despair.

‘In a drop of rain can be seen the colors of the sun,’ observed the historian Lewis Namier. So in every act of kindness we hold in our own hands the mercy of our maker, whose purposes are in life and not death, whose love does not stop at us but surrounds us, bestowing dignity and beauty and hope on every creature that lives and suffers and perishes. Perhaps that is part of the animals’ role among us, to awaken humility, to turn our minds back to the mystery of things, and open our hearts to that most impractical of hopes in which all creation speaks as one. For them as for us, if there is any hope at all then it is the same hope, and the same love, and the same God who ‘shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain for the former things are passed away.’”

Absolutely brilliant book.

We’ve all seen the crammed chicken coops, the overfed, hormone-injected cow, or the shot deer hanging off the back of a hunter’s pickup. We’ve all felt something, if not a little sadness, for these defenseless animals. Then we go home and we pet our dogs and think nothing of it. So what then? In his treatise DOMINION, renowned journalist Matthew Scully explores the argument for animal rights in the modern world, and the various inconsistencies found within these debates. As the title lets on, Scully’s perspective is that humans misinterpret the Bible’s meaning of “dominion,” twisting the concept to mean that our superiority trumps all. We forget the precious idea that along with this privilege comes responsibility and the expectation that all life will be treated with dignity at our hands.

Scully explores several main animal industries, including factory farms and hunting, bringing to light the political and philosophical contradictions found around the world when justifying the cruel treatment of animals. Scully never makes the naive assumption that all animals should be treated equal, as that is just simply not the case in biology—there will always be a food chain. Rather, he makes an argument for the humane treatment of all animals, even if you eventually plan on slaughtering them and having a fantastic pig roast. Scully has been a vegetarian for many, many years, but DOMINION is in no way a call for veggies to unite and spread the good word. It’s a book about grace, understanding, and respect for your fellow creatures, as well as a call to view the laws of nature through a new set of eyes not tarnished by the industrial food system or a false reading of some holy scripture.

While there are some (at times heavy) Christian overtones, he successfully presents his argument in a way that spans all cultures and religions, compelling me to examine my behavior within my own structure of ideology and belief.