New Hope,
I am following your fair and melancholy (does that meet with your euphoria?) reflections on the life, suffering and death of all creatures.It is a pertinent branch of this conversation that would be a shame to lose it in a separate thread.
It is my own observation of the animal world in my own life that there is one thing and only one thing to distinguish me as I kill a chicken to eat it and a dog who savages it and perhaps will eat it. It is this: I care how the chicken feels.
Yes, every moment of its life I have been happy for the chicken that it enjoys its life.
From your posts I trust you will not find me disgusting for regarding myself and the dog as different cases.
(And, frankly, I wish that there were a god that were more distinct from the dog than he has shown himself to be. Which perhaps is a thought I need to examine a little more...)
But here is the case for me:
I have seen so much the suffering of animals. When I first came to live with my husband on his farm in the Ozark mountains I could not bear the ways that pain and death overtook creatures in the barnyard and woodland. A stray dog tore through a nest of kittens, a hog waiting for his feed reached sideways to a rooster and munched off shoulder and breast of the bird whose grieving cries were hushed when the hog swallowed his first bite and then ate the rooster's head off. I heard the strange cries a frog makes as it commences its one-way trip into a blacksnake's belly. The plaintive shriek of a young rabbit when the farm dog lays tender flesh bare with a flick of her teeth. Not to mention the torments of innumerable mice and baby birds for the amusement of generations of barn cats. and horrors more than these....
Jesus quoted "Ye are gods..." and yes, there I am. I rule the world of animals around me if, in a haphazard way, with something like consistency. Yes, I kill some.Yet I do care how they feel. I have killed to end pain. And all thee while, within the limits available to me, I try for them to have a good life. And for those destined to feed the family, I go to lengths to provide a sense of security for them. They trust me to look after them--truly. And as the moment arrives for my killing them, for them I take care that they not feel the horror of betrayal, if it is betrayal to be locked in this cycle of life and death with them. Because finally, I will supply their end that will certainly come one way or another--as Heaven above said-- does inevidibly come to every life. But I, I make that end swift and painless.
So that is my case--The dog does not do the same for a chicken. And sadly, he cannot gainsay me.
Obviously it is only fair to say on the dog's behalf that he doesn't have the same resources as I do-- even if he had a disposition toward the chicken as kindly as my own.
But God doesn't have the dog's excuse, does He?
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I eat very little meat as the years have gone on. I cannot eat commercial pork because hogs in this country are now raised in such mental suffering that I cannot enjoy their delicious meat as I did formerly.
And I am far from a saint. My failures depress me--but it has served this: to make me all the more suspicious of claims that an all-powerfull all-loving God who supplies no evidence of a concern equal to my own.
Take care, and I am certain that there are many others who appreciate your thoughts in this thread. No wories abot yur spellig--
maeve
