The Great Chain of Being, requisite study material in my high school history class, was the medieval concept that everything in creation exists in a hierarchy. At the top is God, followed by angels, then the pope and the king, then priests and princes, then the rest of humankind. Below us are the animals, then plant life, then mineral matter. The beings at the top are incorporeal, pure spirit; the rocks at the bottom are pure matter, no spirit. Everything in between — including us — is a mix of spirit and matter. The theologians of the Middle Ages borrowed this concept from Aristotle, who’d ranked the animal kingdom: warm-blooded above cold-blooded; mammals above reptiles.
A thousand years after Aristotle, the church declared that the hierarchy was God-ordained and immutable. The feudal economy of medieval Europe was a reflection of the hierarchy, as was the polity of the Catholic Church. Only with the advent of the Enlightenment did the links in the chain start to weaken and snap, inspiring such phrases as “all men are created equal.” But the Declaration of Independence doesn’t claim that flora and fauna were endowed by their Creator with anything, much less individual rights. In fact, they’re ignored altogether, not even mentioned in that anthropocentric document.
For some Christians, the conversation about our relationship with other animals begins and ends with Genesis 1:28, in which God tells Adam and Eve to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. That’s the entirety of their theological justification for hunting and fishing: God told us to dominate the earth, so we hunt. Next question?
The Bible itself substantiates this view of the created order, even beyond that early verse from Genesis. The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures don’t offer a sophisticated animal ethic. Other religions have a bit more to say, but only a bit.
Hinduism is ambivalent toward animals: on the one hand, Hindus who live less-than-stellar lives might be reincarnated as animals, a karmic punishment; on the other hand, monkeys and cows are venerated — even the milk of the cow is sacred: I once watched a penitent crawl up the 272 steps of the Batu Caves Temple in Malaysia with a brass bowl of cow’s milk, kneeling on each step to pray.
Buddhism teaches that we should strive for the end of all suffering, thus many Buddhists are vegetarians; but in their six realms of existence, the animal realm is evil. Islam joins the chorus: animals are provided by God for our use, “some for riding and some for your food,” but mistreatment of animals is condemned.
In their origins, religions are anthropocentric. No surprise — they were developed to explain and regulate human interactions with God. Animals take a back seat; plants and dirt are an afterthought.
Care for the rest of creation, beyond our own species, is a mark of our cultural evolution.
The intransigence of organized religions on this issue is one reason why they’re struggling, because public sentiment about animals is changing, and quickly. In ancient Rome, staged hunts took place in the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus in which thousands of animals were slaughtered in front of tens of thousands of spectators; today, 70% of Americans are uncomfortable with animals performing in a circus. And while it might not have occurred to Thomas Jefferson, according to the Pew Survey, one-third of modern Americans believe that animals should be afforded the same individual rights as humans. And we’re newly concerned for the bottom rungs on the medieval chain, plants and minerals. In the past, humans despoiled whole swaths of the planet without a second thought; now we’re cleaning up our messes and trying to prevent new ones.
Care for the rest of creation, beyond our own species, is a mark of our cultural evolution. Few of us think of the created order as a hierarchical chain these days. A web is a more apt metaphor. We are woven into a fabric of creation that includes everything from the largest mammal to the smallest cell; everything in the fabric is interconnected to everything else.
I am a hunter, and this is the hunter’s paradox. I sing a paean to one animal, my dog, my companion, while I’m out to kill another, my prey. Why does one sleep in my bed and the other wind up on my grill? And why do I get to decide their respective fates?
Some would say that’s the way God set it up: we’re the masters of creation, and we get to determine which animal is food and which is a house pet. But that answer is shallow and unsatisfactory, a holdover of the old chain.
Admittedly, humans play an outsized role in the web of creation, and we do decide the fates of many species, through conservation, neglect, or extirpation. But if the evolutionary relationship between humans and canines shows us anything, it’s that our survival is mutually beneficial. We’ve grown reliant upon one another. The dogs rely on us for survival, we feed and shelter them. Some species — hogs, camels — have jumped over and back across the half-court line that divides wildness and domesticity, but for dogs, there’s no going back. Without humans, dogs won’t make it — they’ve lost their killer instinct.
I am a hunter, and this is the hunter’s paradox. I sing a paean to one animal, my dog, my companion, while I’m out to kill another, my prey. Why does one sleep in my bed and the other wind up on my grill? And why do I get to decide their respective fates?
The math has recently changed on our side of the ledger, too: we no longer rely on dogs to help us put meat in the larder. The dog has gone from aiding our physical survival as guard and hunter to aiding our emotional and spiritual survival: thus millions of people testify that they couldn’t make it through the day without their dogs. (Maybe Homo sapiens sapiens could exist without Canis lupus familiaris, but would we want to?)
In consideration of this paradox — I feed my dog, but I eat a squirrel — I’m drawn to consider the lesson of this unique interspecies partnership: it’s taught me to lower my eyes.
The earliest images of Christians praying, painted on the walls of the Roman catacombs, show them in the “orant” position — standing, arms raised, palms up, eyes heavenward. God was up there, in the sky, at the top of the chain. To this day, pray-ers in worship settings assume the same posture, even though most of them probably believe in a spherical Earth, meaning that what’s down for us is up for someone on the other side of the planet. There’s really no such thing as “up” and “down,” cosmically speaking. Nevertheless, that mental framework is tough to shake, so we keep looking up when we pray.
Dogs have drawn my gaze downward, away from a vague hope in an immaterial being who lives in the sky to a fellow creature with whom I’m collaborating.
Hunting with dogs has cured me of that ailment. They’ve drawn my gaze downward, away from a vague hope for help from an immaterial being who lives in the sky and instead to a fellow creature with whom I’m collaborating on an activity that means more to each of us than anything else we do. Outside of my spouse and children, I am never more at one with another being than when I’m hunting with my dog. As the poet and outdoorsman Jim Harrison wrote, “Quite literally you belong in the outdoors because your people spent five million years there, only recently emerging into nation- and city-states. The rituals of hunting and fishing, like those of gathering, are archetypally in your blood.” They’re in my dog’s blood, too. We share that in common. And when we’re doing it together, the experience is transcendent, uniting me not just with his species, but with all species.
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