It really wasn’t until this year that I started realizing the how universally important it is for all of us —especially Christians — to care about animals.

The only pets I had growing up were fish.  These gave me the idea that animals were just things you fed and whose tank your Dad cleaned and who you flushed down the toilet when they were done being your pet.  Some fish were the kind that people watched for a while and then sent to fishy heaven, and others just came dead in the form of dinosaur nuggets.

As I grew up, I started encountering people who actually liked animals.  A lot.  There was something about animals, to them, that somehow made it worth it to give up their money on pet food, their time on cleaning, and their appetite on picking up poop and barf.  …And then after a while the pet just croaks, and everyone’s all sad about it — which wouldn’t have happened if they’d never got a pet in the first place!  I didn’t understand it.

[warning: graphic image of a cow]

And then I found out about the real animal fanatics who even cared about cows and pigs and stuff.  Now this was all just way too sensitive and touchy for me.

Earlier this week, I was staring at my shoes as I walked across the main stretch of campus.  I looked up to find a man giving out these booklets.  I struggled to decide spontaneously whether I wanted to pay him any mind, and I ended up reluctantly taking his pamphlet.  I had seen this information before — a group of vegans on campus passes them out every year.

But this year I ended up actually flipping through the booklet.  It talked about how the food industry pretty much treats animals like a part of the machine.  Chickens end up getting body parts sliced off while they’re still alive.  Little chicks’ beaks are whittled down until they can’t eat and they starve.  Pigs tails are painfully chopped off, and then the sensitive nub that’s left gets chewed on by the pig behind him.

And I am perpetuating this in some way by eating these animals.  I am accepting this practice by paying certain companies money to continue it.

Instead of asking, “Why do people actually care about this?” my question has changed to, “Why have I never actually cared about this?”  If other people are raising such a ruckus about it, and changing their lives about it, it must be pretty important to people.  Paraphrasing C.S. Lewis, either it’s really important, or not important at all.  There is no middle ground.  Where do I stand, based on the reality of this phenomenon?  Whether I think it’s stupid or annoying or good or bad, it’s happening.  It’s happening in my world, the world I live in, and therefore anything I do from this point on will be a choice, and a reaction to what I now know.

You know, there are a lot of topics like this that we encounter and we never really make a decision about.  It’s easy to avoid a subject simply because you think it’s stupid or annoying, or even hurts your feelings. But “It’s stupid” or “It’s annoying” or “It has hurt my feelings” are not really answers.  Animal cruelty hurts a lot of people’s feelings.  Maybe people are even offended by the vegans who try to speak up for animal injustice.  But that doesn’t relieve us of the responsibility to react.  If you’re going to do something about it, have a good reason.  And if you’re going to do nothing about it, fine, but have a good reason.  Otherwise you will be doing nothing less than rejecting reality.  (So why are you still here?)

I lived over a decade of my life without really resolving the question in my head of, “What am I going to do (or not do) about animal cruelty?”  I’ve concluded that I don’t think it’s ethical, and I really think that, regardless of the fact that I’m a poor college student who loves meat, we can do better than this as the human species.  I don’t know exactly how yet, but I want to start investigating the way my food arrives at my grocery store.  I don’t want to be mindless or ignorant or a hypocrite.  If I say to myself in my mind that animals are valuable and worth treating ethically, and then I do nothing in the face of an industry that says the opposite, then I’m lying about what I really believe.  Either I have to change my actions somehow, or else convince myself somehow that animals really aren’t worth treating ethically — either by me or by anybody else.

It’s easy to walk away from something and, before we’ve even decided how it fits into our values, decide that it doesn’t fit into our reality at all.  What is one topic you’ve kind of avoided thinking about?

Think about it.

…Seriously.  Make my blog post useful and let it change you.

Whatever it is, I encourage you to get off the fence about it, starting now.  Don’t be afraid to examine your life and your world.  I guarantee you’ll be better for gaining an understanding and acting on that understanding with wisdom.

(For further reading on Christianity and the food industry, check out this article.)