As Christians discuss the morality of their food choices, one of the most compelling arguments for opting out of the chicken-sandwich-at-Arbys lifestyle is that brought by those who maintain that large-scale factory farming is necessarily abusive to the animals involved. I want to write more about this later on, but wanted to state two guiding principles now, and return to develop them later.
The first is that, if we grant the abuse, the objective is more than sound — it is compelling. “A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel” (Prov. 12:10). It is false to say that men do not owe anything to their animals. We clearly do not owe the same thing to animals that we owe to one another, because a Christian man can treat an animal decently that he winds up having for dinner. But nevertheless, mutatis mutandis, we clearly owe our animals respect, and this applies both to the twenty chickens in the barnyard, and to the twenty thousand chickens in that large building on the horizon over there. That is the first principle.
But the second principle has to be remembered as well. Animals are not the same as humans, for we bear the image of God and they do not. But animals are similar to humans; we can empathize with them to varying degrees, and, depending on the circumstances, we should. But this similarity leads to the second point. Just as we all should know intuitively that abuse is wrong, so we should also all know intuitively that abuse is counterproductive. At some point pretty soon in the process, a significantly abusive chicken rancher would run into the law of diminishing returns, and the results would spell disaster for him.
If a dairyman hired small boys with sticks to torment his cows all day long at close intervals, would his milk production go up or down? This is not a trick question. Animals do not perform well under abusive pressure, any more than humans do. We are similar that way. But in 1935, it took 16 weeks to get chickens up to a scrawny 2.8 pounds. In 2006, it took 7 weeks to get them up to 6 pounds. To argue that these results were achieved by making their chicken lives hellish is, at some significant level, counterintuitive.
But if the argument then shifts, and it is maintained that this is all done with hormones and mirrors, and that the chickens are living the luxurious life of the doomed, and that the hormones are bad for you and your sandwich, then we should at least notice that the abuse argument has been dropped. We are no longer talking about chickens in torment, and are now talking about how the splendid condition of the chickens was achieved by cheating. There are reasonable questions to raise there, I am sure, but they are not the same questions that Proverbs 12:10 creates.