Dealing with pests in our homes is an inevitable task that we all must face at some point. Back when I lived in Florida, snakes and mosquitos were the usual culprits. Fire ants were a constant source of concern for children playing in the front yards of our community on the edge of the Everglades. Every so often, a family in the neighborhood would step outside and meet an alligator lounging in their driveway.
Our creaturely companions tend to be less exotic here in Kansas. In my household, nuisances typically concern moths, flies, spiders, and the occasional mouse. Raccoons and opossums are also common, but they typically remain happily outside. Recently, however, my family’s little homestead experienced an invasion of these critters. They had developed a habit of making their way through our cat door to munch on the various types of animal feed in our storage room. Seeing as I couldn’t let these creatures continue making a mess inside our house, the problem had to be addressed in one way or another.
As we all know, pest control comes in different forms. At times, issues might be remedied through relocation. On this score, my kids and I loved streaming the reality show Gator Boys a few years ago. The skill and bravery of guys jumping into pools and canals to wrangle alligators with their bare hands is stunning. In many cases, though, pest control can only be achieved through extermination. After all, when we call a guy and ask him to take care of a termite problem in our basement, we’re not merely requesting relocation assistance.
As I wrote in my last column on the Paschal Mystery embedded in creation, modern science and theological greats like St. Thomas Aquinas agree in their conviction that death has played an integral role in the cycle of life from its very beginning. The Angelic Doctor recognized that death was present among animals before the Fall, even as did not think that these creatures would have posed a threat to humans. In close alignment with what we have since confirmed through science, Aquinas emphasized that lions and falcons were never herbivores. Indeed, he deemed it omnino irrationabile— altogether irrational—to hold otherwise (Aquinas, ST I, q. 96, a. 1 ad 2).
Contending with pests is a challenge that our species has grappled with throughout human history. Predation upon other creatures has likewise been an integral feature of Homo sapiens for as long as he has walked the earth. We’ve been engaging in these practices for at least two hundred thousand years—and that is not counting the presence of these activities among our more ancient relatives, including Homo heidelbergensis (roughly a million years ago) and Homo erectus (as long as two million years ago).
To be human on this side of eternity—indeed to be any embodied creature in this realm—is to live by the death of other creatures. And, yet, some in the contemporary environmental movement are persuaded that ending the life of other living beings is inherently immoral. Indeed, some hold that animals in their innocence are endowed with more rights than humans. Despite our tradition’s adamant focus on protecting all life, the Catholic Church does not share this perspective. I now wish to reflect a little on why that is. In so doing, I will contend that it is linked to a characteristic found in Catholicism but absent in secular environmentalism—a trait that Norman Wirzba aptly refers to as “incarnational nerve.”
The daily sacrifice of creation
Like many of those reading these words in their respective parts of the world, residing in rural Kansas offers me daily opportunities to witness what some have referred to as the ongoing “sacrifice of creation.” Whether it involves cleaning and preparing fish caught from a local pond, slaughtering livestock for sustenance, or feeding pests to our chickens, these small instances reflect mankind’s experience from time immemorial. These days, however, they are now remote from most of our lives for the majority of the time. Most of us purchase our meat pre-packaged in plastic wrap. This makes it easy to develop a vague, de-sensitized picture of nature on the one hand or an overly romanticized one on the other. In reality, it is not pleasant to take the life of a fellow creature, experience the loss of a beloved pet, or witness our crops succumb to pests. Nevertheless, these encounters are often inevitable, and they carry the benefit of attuning our lives to the paschal rhythm of creation—the mystery of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection that is embedded in the very structure of the cosmos.
The Catechism unequivocally affirms of animals that humans “owe them kindness” and that it is “contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly” (CCC §§2416, 2418). At the same time, we also know that our Lord has given man dominion over the earth. In this light, the Catechism indicates, “It is legitimate to use animals for food and clothing” (CCC §2417). As bearers of God’s image, we are authorized to assume responsibility for the life and death of God’s creatures. In some cases, this means ending them in a dignified manner with an awareness that their lives have been entrusted to us for the sake of a more lofty end. This higher purpose typically involves human flourishing, as when we hunt a deer for venison, uproot a beet plant to consume its root and leaves, fell a living tree to build a house, or nourish ourselves on the offspring that a fruit vine has labored diligently to produce.
While these actions appear to some as unduly anthropocentric (particularly when it comes to consuming animals), it is crucial to bear in mind what might appear as cruelty is quite often the precise opposite. Indeed, human practices like hunting often contribute to the well-being of the ecosystem in question and even benefit the very species to which the creature whose life has been taken belongs. Those involved in conservation and agriculture can attest that refusing to intervene in creation by harvesting, hunting, fishing, trapping, and the like is often the opposite of mercy. An overcrowded population is healthy neither for mammals, fish, nor trees. And so it is that both humans and these creatures benefit when we play our part in creation’s paschal drama by taking their lives into our hands.
The fruit of such efforts can be seen by examining concrete illustrations, like the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s. Quite understandably, initiatives like this are at times met with resistance by the humans who live nearby. How and where to carry out endeavors like this is a question that requires great prudence, and it is not a subject we can tackle here. Having said that, the positive outcomes of restoring native species to their ecosystems are clear. In Yellowstone, the renewed presence of wolves has helped reduce the elk population, which has meant more food sources for bison and more trees for beavers, which in turn has led to more salmon in local bodies of water and thereby more food supply for otters.
Yet, in order for this all to work, the Yellowstone wolves must play their part in creation’s paschal drama by hunting and killing. As this case serves to illustrate, the inevitability of creatures causing the deaths of other creatures is a fact that cannot be ignored. Indeed, deeper consideration reveals that conservation, agriculture, and indeed basic human subsistence positively demand it.
Our participation in the altar of the world through eating
We’ve just examined the structure of creation through the perspective of nature and her rhythms, but a further layer of insight into this reality can be achieved if we view it through a sacramental lens. On this score, noted Christian environmentalist Wendell Berry evocatively writes, “To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation.”1 Expanding upon Berry’s evocative observation, Norman Wirzba describes creation with its Trinitarian grounding as “the physical manifestation of God’s self-giving love” and “an immense altar upon which the incomprehensible, self-offering love of God is daily made manifest.”2
These authors have placed themselves in good company, for no less a figure than St. John Paul II wrote that the Eucharistic sacrifice has a “cosmic character”:
Yes, cosmic! Because even when it is celebrated on the humble altar of a country church, the Eucharist is always in some way celebrated on the altar of the world. It unites heaven and earth. It embraces and permeates all creation. The Son of God became man in order to restore all creation, in one supreme act of praise, to the One who made it from nothing.3
Now if the world is a cosmic altar, then the death of living beings that makes the lives of others possible should bear not only physical but also spiritual significance. One of the great benefits I have derived from reading Norman Wirzba’s work involves his careful attention to this meaning in one of the most mundane practices that we all partake in every day: eating.
As Wirzba sees it, eating is a spiritual exercise that facilitates our alignment with the fundamental truth of the world. For the Christian with the eyes to see, it is an opportunity for finite created beings to glimpse a reality that Hans Urs von Balthasar saw as existing analogously at an even more fundamental level in the life of the Trinity. This centers on the fact that eating ineluctably makes us full participants in the daily drama in which life is given up in order for other lives to thrive. Contemplating this, we are presented with an occasion for awe and holy pause, for eating means accepting the reality of another being into ourselves. In the words of Wirzba, “We are called to recognize the profound mystery that God created a world that, from the beginning (even in something like a pre-fallen state), lives through the eating of its members.”4
Meat: to eat, or not to eat?
Much as one may applaud the efforts of vegetarians expressing respect for all God’s creatures by electing not to partake in their flesh, Catholicism does not count itself among the world’s religious traditions for whom complete abstinence from meat is a moral imperative. Indeed, Catholics may identify a problem for this philosophy, religious or secular, that often goes unaddressed. For, although animals are often regarded as having an ontologically higher status than plants, the fact is that consuming any organism whatsoever—even fruits, vegetables, and seeds—requires taking a life. Regardless of how lowly these living things may seem, a lifestyle dependent exclusively on them still does not exempt one from participation in the cruciform rhythm of creation.
In this connection, Wirzba has touched on something profound when he suggests that a vegetarian diet may at times “reflect a refusal to come to terms with the life and death that characterize creation.” He even describes this as a desire to take flight from reality which is “akin to the Gnostic tendency to deny the incarnation, in all its embodied and fleshly character, and the cross of Jesus Christ.”5 Personally, my favorite way of articulating this point is captured in Wirzba’s statement that hesitance to consume the flesh of other creatures stems from a “failure of incarnational nerve.”6
Wirzba’s theology of eating carries a pivotal implication that has a deep affinity with the insights of other ecologically sensitive Christian minds. Approaching creation through a Trinitarian and Eucharistic lens, these authors see it as a mistake to view death as an evil to be avoided at all costs. Instead, they accentuate the good news that death is the kenotic passage through which life must pass in order to be transformed. On this point, Wirzba echoes the wisdom of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Benedict XVI that I referenced in my previous column: For these theological giants, the sacrificial logic of self-offering that we witness on the Cross is grounded in the inner life of the Triune God and embedded in the very foundation of the created world. Here’s how Wirzba puts it:
If God’s creation of the world is understood as the expression and concrete manifestation of divine intra-Trinitarian love, and love entails a willingness to give oneself wholeheartedly to another even to the extent of laying down one’s life for another (1 John 3:14–16) or “emptying oneself “ in service to another (Phil 2:6 –8), then it is appropriate to see in the work of creation God’s willingness to pour himself out so that creaturely life can exist. Divine death, understood as the self-offering that reaches a climax in the cross, is the origin and the condition for the possibility of true, resurrection life.7
Christ teaches us this lesson with his analogy of the seed that must fall to the ground and die in order to rise again (John 12:24). From the perspective of the New Testament, human beings are called to be transfigured by making our lives an acceptable offering to God. And, whether we like it or not, membership in the communion of life that we call creation necessarily also entails taking the lives of other creatures. To underscore its vital importance, our Lord has helpfully attached great pleasure to the activity of munching on chicken wings, sinking our teeth into baby back ribs, and savoring a seared steak.
Admittedly, it is easy for me to say this. I am one of those featherless bipedal omnivores who instinctually incline toward the carnivorous side of the culinary spectrum. I must therefore acknowledge that this all may simply be an exercise in rationalizing an inordinate fondness for sacrificing animals on my backyard barbecue. All the same, it highlights a fundamental area where the Christian approach to stewardship of creation contrasts with prevailing trends in mainstream secular environmentalism.
To eat or not to eat is not even a question for a creature. Within the sacramental worldview of Catholicism, it is even an imperative. The real question is how to carry out this responsibility in a manner consistent with God’s law and with due respect for the creatures the Lord has entrusted to our care.
Endnotes:
1 Wendell Berry, “The Gift of Good Land,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2002), 383.
2 Norman Wirzba, Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), 181, 174.
3 John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, §8.
4 Wirzba, Food and Faith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 183.
5 Wirzba, Food and Faith, 183.
6 Wirzba, Food and Faith, 302.
7 Wirzba, Food and Faith, 173.
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Just my 2 cents but getting rid of the doggy door would be an easy fix to prevent varmint entry.
Wendell Berry lost me on same sex “marriage “. How does that work in embracing Creation and all things natural? We can grow organic gardens all day long but but our first instructions were to go forth and multiply. I think that’s a much more critical thing and if marriage crumbles, so does everything else.
As you alluded to, plants do not want to die, otherwise why would they have protections like barbs and poisons? During droughts, you’ll often notice trees putting out high levels of seeds to save the species.
A kernel of grain is alive with the germ, I believe, as well as an apple with the seed.
To every environmentalist I meet i say that there is no ecological environment that under as great a threat as that of a woman’s womb. When that threat is eliminated from our modus operandi, then and only then, will I discuss issues related to trees, animals, the earth, etc. After all, it is only man who is created in God’s image and has an immortal soul; not cats and dogs.
Ramage essay is an excellent summary explaining and justifying the course of nature that for sacrifice, for some things to live others must die and be eaten. As with most such defenses of omnivore cultures, Ramage’s defense of the inevitable use of animals for food and clothing bypasses the issues of the horrible abuse of animals in the industrial production of chicken, pork and beef meat. Even if billions daily are humanely slaughtered, it comes after a shortened life under unnatural and tortured confinement.
Feeding the populace of the world likely results in a shorter life for both plants and animals, plus livestock and poultry kept confined. Would we opt for more hungry people at the expense of saving animals so they may live to a natural end/death? Also, how would we practically protect animals (and plants too) from natural predators except by confinement in artificially non-natural environments (pesticides and herbicides for plants and confinement in ‘sterile’ nurseries)? Extending the ‘natural’ livespan of animals would require that people protect them against their natural predators; and this would result in scarcity of food supplies and over-population. It seems the arguments of Ramage adequately address your concerns.
This being Lent, can we cease from thinking of Christ’s blood shed for us? How do we incorporate this gift into our God-given lives?
St. Francis de Sales’ idea:
“…[M]editations as these…will help you, and having made them, go on bravely in the
spirit of humility to make your general confession;—but I entreat you, be not troubled by any sort of fearfulness. The scorpion who stings us is venomous, but when his oil has been distilled, it is the best remedy for his bite;—even so sin is shameful when we commit it, but when reduced to repentance and confession, it becomes salutary
and honourable. Contrition and confession are in themselves so lovely and sweet-savoured, that they efface the ugliness and disperse the ill savour of sin. Simon the leper called Magdalene a sinner, but our Lord turned the discourse to the perfume of her ointment and the greatness of her love. If we are really humble…our
sins will be infinitely displeasing to us, because they offend God;—but it will be welcome and sweet to accuse ourselves thereof because in so doing we honour God; and there is always somewhat soothing in fully telling the physician all details of our pain.
When you come to your spiritual father, imagine yourself to be on Mount Calvary, at the Feet of the Crucified Saviour, Whose Precious Blood is dropping freely to cleanse you from all your sin. Though it is not his actual Blood, yet it is the merit of that outpoured Blood which is sprinkled over His penitents as they kneel in Confession. Be sure then that you open your heart fully, and put away your sins by confessing them, for in proportion as they are put out, so will the Precious Merits of the Passion of Christ come in and fill you with blessings.”
Chap. 19, Introduction to the Devout Life.
Enjoy the feast, Friends Of and In Christ.
I tried to make a comment yesterday Jim, but it may have evaporated into cyberspace.
Sorry about that.
Every varmint in creation seems to enjoy a chicken dinner-even occasionally chickens themselves. Farmers used to have less trouble from hawks & owls that prey on poultry because they’d simply shoot them. Of course you’d get into big trouble with that today. Ditto for taking out your neighbor’s dog.
When you attempt to raise chickens outdoors you discover they’re pretty defenseless & everything wants to eat them. So the problem is solved on a commercial scale by large, varmint-proof poultry houses. They also protect chickens against disease, insects, & parasites.
I raise a few beef cattle & used to raise sheep before the coyotes got out of hand. Those are animals that are raised on pasture. Some beef cattle do spend time in feedlots but not all (“grass fed/ finished” cattle don’t) & the greater part of their lives are still spent grazing on forage.
Farming doesn’t reap a great deal of profit & farmers have no incentive to mistreat their livestock, especially since stressed, abused animals don’t grow or reproduce well. And since growth, putting on weight, & reproduction are the goals for livestock producers, why would farmers work against that?
Some of the worst offenders of “chicken welfare” I’ve seen were backyard hobbyists. I visited one gentleman’s operation that was truly gross. But that doesn’t translate to all small producers & hobbyists being careless. Most people who raise animals care about their outcome or they wouldn’t be doing that. There are a whole lot easier ways to earn a living.
While Ramage’s exposition of predatory creation and the spirituality of eating may be brilliant, I’m not convinced. Not yet. Perhaps prejudice against what needs to be further processed. Although after watching an inlaw eat himself to death I suppose there can be a religiosity attached.
Then Christ feeds us with his own flesh and blood. Norman Wirzba does make a valid point regarding the insanity of those who religiously believe killing chickens is murder. We feed on eachother. I love woods, trees, and meat. Trout fishing with a flyrod a favorite. Hunting with guns not. A true story. My last attempt was when a flock of wild turkeys crossed my path and took a shot at the lead turkey’s head with my Winchester. He didn’t fly off or drop or run wounded. He turned and ran at me. Then stopped and stared as if in admonishment. I haven’t hunted since and likely never will. But if invited by a neighbor for a wild turkey feast I’m all in.
Thank you for sharing that wild turkey encounter. I’ve shot plenty of varmints but never had the time to go hunting. We benefitted from hunters sharing with us, though.
Turkeys, especially the wild variety, are much smarter than we give them credit for.
I appreciate Ramage’s article, as I have other pieces of his, but as Jim points out, he ignores the reality of how most meat for human consumption is produced in our modern world, from the immense beef yards he certainly knows lie near him in Kansas and Nebraska to the similar pork facilities in Iowa and on to the soul numbing (and recently body endangering) meat markets of Wuhan, China and many other places in the far east. What 99% of humans consume is not raised on Catholic family farms, but on an industrial scale that desecrates what God has created for our legitimate use. Much of turkey production, for instance, is from birds bred so intensely to produce “white” meat that many of the creatures cannot properly stand up given how “front-loaded” their breasts are. There is a spiritual connection I suspect between the way God’s creatures are handled by Big Ag and the inhumane plight of the poor who must work in the industrial butchering facilities, again, many of them near to Mr. Ramage in Kansas, Nebraska, and for chickens, in Arkansas.
Ramage also fails to acknowledge that flesh consumption was granted to man by God after the flood, a concession not part of the original creation. When we fast from meat we not only make a sacrifice challenging our modern habits, but we restore briefly the diet of Eden.
But I don’t want to end without complimenting other aspects of the article, including his defense of created nature itself, with its balances and regenerations. And I for one applaud the re-introduction of wolves to Yellowstone and more recently to Colorado. The cattlemen who are so bitterly complaining have for too long gotten to run their herds often on federal land paying only a pittance for the leases. The cheap use of land owned by us all by a relative few is a subject for another discussion but a true Christian approach to nature and the American west would involve not only standing up to the environmental left but to the far-from-conservative secular right.
Robert Isenberg, at Goodreads, reviews Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”:
“Naturally, my high school English teacher felt it necessary to assign “The Jungle” to read over Thanksgiving break. As my Dad carved the turkey, the conversation went something like this:
MOM: Could you pass the turkey?
ME: Oh, yeah, great, why don’t we pass the meat that untold numbers of Slavik immigrants had to die to process? Why don’t we just spit in the face of the proleteriat and laugh, knowing that he’s too malnourished to fight back.
DAD: Are you okay?
ME: Oh, sure, I’m great. And you know why? Because my comfort is based on an oligarchic pyramid, where we feast while others starve. Thanks-Giving? Who are we thanking? The Taiwanese sweatshop worker who wove the plastic netting that enwrapped our raw turkey? I’ll be we’re not. I’ll be we haven’t given HIM a second thought.
MOM: So, no turkey, then?
I’m not sure which was worse: My Socialist diatribes or bookending the most succulent turkey of my life with readings about men kicking rats off their bleeding feet and falling into vats of grease. Thanks, Ms. Doe.”
When projecting this economy of life to its logical end, one would perhaps have to conclude that it would include humans. Wouldn’t everyone be better off if we were not encumbered by the expense of the unproductive elderly, the infirm incompetent etc.. Does logic support the idea of “the human exception “? How do we as Catholic Christians defend the sacredness of human life from natural conception to natural death. How does the Church present and defend an alternate morality which is cross grain from that of the secularized society it finds itself in? And even at odds with many who call themselves Christians? Are we prepared? Will any argument we make even be listened to? Are we ready for the inevitable mockery, scorn, marginalization and eventual exclusion and finally persecution? My friends, it’s time to begin preparations now. We must educate and prepare our children while we still have freedom to do so. Change on every front is advancing at such a rapid pace that it will be very difficult to catch up.
Many long years ago, a deacon assigned to my parish for practical experience before his ordination preached one of the most bizarre sermons I’ve ever heard. “Life agonizes for us in the vegetable world,” said he, invoking the silent screams of wheat stalks brutally cut down or carrots pulled from the earth. We were commanded to feel guilty about eating vegetables much less meat. (I don’t know his position on protein from single-celled organisms.) So I complained to our conservative Old School Pastor. The young man was never ordained. I iz quietly proud.
For God, everything brought forth into existence from nothing and reverting them into nothing doesnot constitute a cruel annihilation, nor dead, be it plants or animals or human or even stars doesnot have any existance except for the living and such deaths are something worth pondering and to seek if there is any way to keep living. This search was fruitful for many, Jesus included, so let the dead bury dead, those who live and love life strive not to die.
You city slickers and supermarket foragers who applaud the reintroduction of wolves in the unfenced zoo we call Yellowstone are all delusional.