Heavenly creatures or furry friends?

As we get ready to celebrate the life of St Francis of Assisi on 4 October, Alison Webster asks: what is the point of animal blessings services?

‘Our Master, who art in doggy heaven, bow-wow be thy name.’ So began a predictable journalistic parody of Andrew Linzey’s 1999 book, ‘Animal Rites: Liturgies of Animal Care’. By contrast, an enthusiastic reviewer of this book on Amazon says ‘I’m sure there are some who’ll say that animals don’t have souls…but I for one think that animals do go to heaven. If they don’t, I don’t want to go either.’

The world divides into ‘animal lovers’ and ‘animal indifferents’. In church, this is the time of year when the former group gets to express its gratitude to God for our furry friends. As someone who is allergic to airborne particles of any kind, you can guess which camp I fall into. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that I dislike animals (I was brought up with black Labradors, and to this day some of my best friends have dogs and cats). It’s just that I don’t want to share a home or my bed with one. Antihistamine-induced prejudice aside, though, what on earth are pet services for?

Undeniably, they have mission potential. It may have stretched credibility somewhat that Geraldine Grainger’s animal service in Dibley caused a motorway tailback, but I’m sure these events bring unlikely new people into the orbit of the church. If only for an hour.
But do animal services have any theological bite (sorry)? The problem with a focus on domestic pets, it seems to me, is that it reinforces rather than subverts the central ethical problem. That is, our tendency to create animals in our own image, and to value them simply for what they can do for us. They give us warmth, companionship, and comfort. They don’t protest when we lavish them with love, or when we romanticise and anthropomorphise them. But what about those other creatures out there: the ones that aren’t a product of human scientific ingenuity and design (after all, there’s not much that’s ‘natural’ about virtually leg-free sausage dogs or virtually flesh-free chihuahuas)? These are the creatures that would eat us, given half a chance, or sting us, or suck our blood and give us nasty diseases. But they can also overwhelm us by their beauty, majesty and mystery as we observe them simply ‘being’ in the wild. Being strange and ‘other’. Being animal. If you’ve ever seen a giraffe, an elephant or a lion in the wild, you’ll know what I mean. It’s ironic that whilst we bless our pets, we are wiping out countless species at an alarming rate and damaging, perhaps beyond repair, our planet’s delicate biodiversity.

And I can’t help but set the church’s willingness to bless domestic pets against its refusal to bless loving gay relationships. Does this maks me ‘speciesist’, prioritising human love for human over human love for animal? Perhaps. But aren’t we all? If I had £1 for every animal I see, much to my distress, smeared over the road on my eighty-mile round-trip to work most days, I’d probably earn more than my salary. Foxes, deer, badgers, rabbits, hedgehogs, and other unidentifiable critters litter the various A and B roads I use on my cross-country trek. Yet even animal rights fundamentalists don’t protest against motorised transport (at least not to my knowledge). Not many of us, it seems, have a problem with the assumption that human convenience is worth more than (certain kinds of) animal life.

The ethical issue is not so much whether we should be speciesist at all, but what are the most acceptable ways of being speciesist? Rescuing animals before children in a crisis situation would rightly be considered outrageous, but not to bother rescuing them at all if such were possible would be unworthy of us. Accidentally killing an animal on the road is a distressing and regrettable experience – but deliberately to mow down an animal with one’s vehicle for fun is entirely reprehensible.

Recent debates about Huntingdon Life Sciences and the precarious funding situation of the proposed new laboratory near Oxford remind us that such considerations are far from abstract. Anti-vivisection fundamentalists join other fundamentalists the world over in harassing, abusing and even destroying human beings for ‘a greater cause’. In this case what they consider to be the welfare of animals. Most people find their activities extreme and unreasonable. Yet the debate they promote about the ethical treatment of animals is a legitimate one: what are appropriate boundaries and ethical limits?
Perhaps that, after all, is what pet services are for: to encourage us to take stock of our ethical relationship to animals: domestic, wild, and those in-between, and to assess whether it is all that it might be.

Alison Webster is Social Responsibility Adviser to the Diocese of Oxford