"Chickens are Chickens!"

Calvin College has a nice virtual library of Christian Philosophy. In browsing it I came across this article by Richard Mouw, an evangelical philosopher, called “On Letting Chickens Strut Their Stuff.” Mouw rejects the view of the likes of Peter Singer who say that an animal might have greater moral worth than a newborn infant, but he nevertheless thinks that the Bible has important lessons to teach us about how we should treat animals:

I keep remembering a lesson that a devoutly Christian chicken farmer taught me many years ago….



“Colonel Sanders wants us to think of chickens only in terms of dollars and cents,” he announced. “They are nothing but little pieces of meat to be bought and sold for food. And so we’re supposed to crowd them together in small spaces and get them fat enough to be killed.”



And then he moved toward his theological lesson: “But that’s wrong! The Bible says that God created every animal ‘after its own kind.’ Chickens aren’t people, but neither are they nothing but hunks of meat. Chickens are chickens, and they deserve to be treated like chickens! This means that we have to give each chicken the space to strut its stuff in front of other chickens.”

When chickens or pigs – social, sentient animals – are stuffed into factory farms, they’re denied the possibility of living the kinds of lives that they’re suited for. Surely this is a frustration of the creator’s design. Animals have their own kind of dignity, appropriate to their place in creation, and recognizing this doesn’t require putting them on the same moral plane as human beings.