I have a friend who breeds Labradors. She’s a real dog lover, and she especially likes the slightly smaller Labradors – those nice slender ones with the petite paws. So whenever she gets a new litter of puppies, she selects one or two with the smallest paws, then takes the rest of the puppies down to the shed and slaughters them. The ones she keeps are sleek and slender, very beautiful: just the right size, not too big and clumsy.

We bought our own pet Labrador from her, and it has made a wonderful pet. It’s just the right size for a good family dog.

I can already hear the cries of moral outrage – so I’ll admit it, that wasn’t a true story. We’d all be scandalised if we heard of a dog breeder who treated puppies that way, and we’d be scandalised if we knew someone who had supported such a breeder by buying one of their dogs.

Yet most Australians don’t feel scandalised by the Melbourne Cup, even though the race that stops a nation is founded on a huge system of routine cruelty and brutality.

Tens of thousands of thoroughbreds are bred for racing, and only a small portion of these ever make it on to the track. Those that are too slow or too sensitive or too easily injured are promptly dispatched to the abattoir.

In Australia, between 30,000 and 40,000 horses are slaughtered each year. The biggest proportion of those horses – up to 60% according to one RSPCA report – is from the racing industry. In the industry, these animals are described as “wastage.”

For Christians, the treatment of animals is directly tied to belief that our world is created by God. If the world is God’s world, then we are responsible to God for the way we treat other creatures.

In one of the most important works on Christian ethics of the past century, the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth wrote that the Genesis creation stories provide a model for the relation between humans and the animal world.

In the creation story, animals are created on the sixth day as humanity’s fellow-creatures. They exist in a mysterious proximity to human beings.

When Genesis speaks of human “dominion” over the created world, it implies a vocation and a responsibility.

On the one hand, human beings have a unique calling to tame, harness and domesticate animals. But on the other hand, as Barth argues, such “dominion” must always take the form of a “careful, considerate, friendly and understanding treatment.”

Alone among all creatures, it is human beings who have the capacity – and the obligation – to befriend the world.

And Barth sees this human responsibility most perfectly embodied in the relation between human beings and horses. “A really good horseman,” he insists, “cannot possibly be an ungodly person!”

In the relation between horse and rider, there is real dominion, but it is realised in the form of a deep, sympathetic understanding. The horseman “is so completely at one with his horse” that he takes from it only exactly what it is willing and glad to give.

The rider harnesses the horse’s own inner potential, and the horse responds with gladness. This human action is not an alien imposition, but a gift in which the horse is permitted to flourish and to find its place within the order of creation.

In contrast, Barth argues that the killing of a sentient animal is always a mark that something in creation has gone amiss. To kill an animal is essentially different from uprooting a plant or felling a tree. It is much closer to the act of killing another human, since it means the “annihilation” of a unique being:

“The nearness of the animal to the human irrevocably means that when we kill a beast we do something which is at least very similar to homicide.”

Barth nevertheless argues that the killing of animals is possible under circumstances of necessity. It is a moral exception rather than the norm. It is a “defensive” action, an emergency, but never a “natural” or “normal” part of our relation to animals.

If we are permitted to “kill” an animal under certain circumstances, we are never permitted to “murder” it.

Barth’s view is perhaps closest to the Native American custom in which the hunter gives thanks to the animal for allowing its life to be taken. Here there is no indiscriminate slaughter, no killing for the sake of mere human convenience. Rather a particular creature is killed under conditions of necessity, and the killing itself reflects a profound attentiveness, respect, and concern for the animal. When the knife goes in, it is with gratitude and regret. In Barth’s words:

“Respect for the fellow-creature of man, created with him on the sixth day and so closely related to him, means gratitude to God for the gift of so useful and devoted a comrade.”

Or, in the words of the Hebrew proverb: “A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast” (Proverbs 12:10).

If we take the life of an animal, then, it is an act of reverence and penitence, and it contains an implicit appeal to divine redemption. Indeed, Barth argues that the killing of an animal is always a religious act, an “offering” in which we sadly and reluctantly take another life in exchange for our own. It is a priestly act: “A meal which includes meat is a sacrificial meal.”

Barth thus implores Christians to stand against the “thoughtlessness and hardness of heart” which so often characterise our relation to the animal world. He writes:

“Across every hunting lodge, abattoir and vivisection chamber, there should be written in letters of fire the words of St Paul in Romans 8:18-19, concerning the ‘earnest expectation’ of the creature – for what? – for the ‘manifestation of the children of God’, and therefore for the liberation of those who now keep them imprisoned and even dispatch them from life to death.”

The same words might have been written about Australia’s horse racing industry, with its vast institutionalisation of a brutal and callous disregard of animal life.

The Melbourne Cup is the climax of this bloody industry, and of what Barth called our “astonishing indifference and thoughtlessness” regarding animals.

It might be good fun to watch horses running around a track, especially when it involves a bit of a punt.

But if our fundamental calling as human beings is to befriend God’s creation, then God’s own image in humanity is defaced when we participate in these bloody rites, this mad race that thunders above the fresh soil of ten thousand graves.

Benjamin Myers Lecturer in systematic theology at Charles Sturt University’s School of Theology in Sydney. He is author of many essays on theology and literature, and writes at the popular blog, Faith and Theology. 

Image source: Flickr/ Chris Phutully used under a CC License.