Eating Animals III: Chooks

Ok, I think we all already know this, deep down. But it's easiest to forget about it!

There are two types of chook (used in factory farming, I mean), broilers and layers.

1. What happens to male layers?
They are killed asap. There are many ways. On Jamie Oliver (I hear) there was a farm visit once. The farmer drafted the males and females, and the males he put in a container and they all dropped dead. Gas. Other ways:

• They are placed in a tube, fall through a series of pipes until they reach an electrified plate. Apparently this is the most common method (in the US at least)
• They are placed in a container without gas, and left to suffocate, those on the bottom first, and slowly, eventually, those further up. 
• They are sent through macerators (great word!) = a mulcher.

So almost half of all layers are killed asap after birth. Without such ridiculous selective breeding, the males could just be broilers right? But who wants to pay for a chook that takes a long time to reach maturity, eats a lot in the meantime, and then doesn't provide big fat thighs and breasts?

Oh, and they're de-beaked. This protects the farmers, and other chooks. With the treatment they get, a lot of chooks go a bit crazy, and even cannibalistic. So better to de-beak them eh?

2. Who raises chicks?

Obviously layers can't raise their own chicks, they must keep laying. And broilers are killed on about day 40 of their life. And anyway, raising one's own chicks is inefficient. 

Chicks are placed in the tens of thousands in big permanently light rooms (light encourages eating) with little warm lights spaced evenly about. They crowd around the heaters, because it's kind of like mum's warmth, and are fed drugs and food through a tube. The drugs I'll get to.

3. Then what?

Once they reach maturity, at about 18 weeks, layers are put in a dark barn (sometimes completely dark 24/7) and a very low protein (almost starvation) diet for 2-3 weeks. Then the lights are cranked up, 20 hours a day, and the diet is turned to high protein. And she'll immediately begin to lay. A layer will lay 300 eggs a year, which is 3X the number she does in nature. This is because of selective breeding and the unnatural manipulation outlined above. 

4. Battery and Free-Range (US - is Australia better? I don't know)

Whether battery or free-range, layers will tend to have about an A4 page of space to themselves. Broilers have more like a square foot. Free-range can mean a vast barren yard with the chooks packed in side-by-side. Literally it requires 'access to the outdoors', which if you use your imagination, and remember they're farmed in lots of several tens of thousands, could mean anything at all. 

Safran says 'I could keep a flock of hens under my sink and call them free-range'. 

5. Grotesque

Broilers are not fit for this world. If they're allowed to live beyond adolescence they lose the ability to walk, and they eventually die from their incredible growth rate. They have been selectively bred not for their own health, but for farming benefits, and this is appalling. 

It's good that they're killed at 40 days then right?

Well, the problem is that life sucks for those 40 days. By the time they reach day 40, they're all having trouble walking (and so presumably are in pain), and apparently a percentage of them can no longer walk or are having so much trouble that it's obvious they're in a significant amount of pain. They're drugged so as to avoid infections, because their living conditions are so cramped and disgusting. In fact, they're given antibiotics, daily.

If you go to the doctor, they will be hesitant to prescribe antibiotics unless you really need them. The reason, of course, is that bugs adapt to the drugs. Farm animals are given drugs when they're ostensibly healthy! This is a significant problem for the control of disease.

6. Death

Layers are killed at one year, because they stop producing eggs at such an alarming rate. There's probably a layer rescue program near you, where you can get your hands on a retired layer. 

Broilers are killed at 40 days for their meat. In the US, poorly paid (think illegal or fresh immigrants) scoop up the chooks 5 at a time by their legs and jam them into transport containers. 30% of these chooks arrive at the slaughterhouse with broken bones. The turnover for these workers is >100% per year, because the job is terrible and plays havoc on your body. If you do it for a lifetime you'll lose the adequate function of your hands, and you may need pain relief to sleep.

What happens at the slaughterhouse is for another day. 

The life of a chook is crap. We have absolutely no respect for life when it comes to these guys (well, girls mainly). This is all fuelled by our hip-pocket, and that's something I'm pretty ashamed of. Ally and I are not eating chicken at home any more, unless the animal is family-farm, transparently raised. But we can't afford that kind of chook, so I think that's it.

This is torture. I don't see what else it could be called. I'm no animal lover. I just believe we have a basic requirement of respect, and this is lacking... completely lacking.

Eating Animals II: The otherness of fish

When you catch a marlin, or any other heavy game fish, you use a huge metal hook (wolfram alpha disappointingly couldn't tell me the name of it) to lift the fish into the boat. How is it attached? You swing it hard into the fish's head, under their neck, through its eye. This is after reeling it in for a couple of hours till it has nearly died of exhaustion.

I've never caught a big fish, and i now realise I never can.

When you catch a little fish, you do something pretty similar. You stick a sharp metal spike in the fish's mouth, down it's throat, or sometimes on its body somewhere. You then do battle with it for 10s-10min+. It must be terrified. Surely this could be called torture? Once you've brought it in you should kill it straight away. If you put it alive in a net or a cool-box, it will slowly drown.

I've caught many little fish (probably 5-10 for every one I've kept and eaten, by the way, if part of your counter-argument includes 'we've gotta eat'). I'm not sure that I can do this any more either.

Safran emphasises the 'otherness' of fish. We don't care if fish suffer, because they live in a whole different world to us. They're very difficult to relate to. However, fish are intelligent, social animals, who most certainly feel pain.

I'll get to commercial fishing another day, but for now, I need to work out whether I can ever go fishing again. I think probably not.

Church

This is a quote from the book 'Radical' that I posted on about a week ago.  It's about what church is.

“ Children and the elderly, students and workers, men and women all joined together in a body that is united with other followers of Christ around the world in a practical strategy to make disciples and impact nations for the glory of Christ. A community of Christians each multiplying the gospel by going, baptizing, and teaching in the contexts where we live every day. Is anything else, according to the Bible, even considered a church?”

I'm a bit disillusioned with the way we do church at the moment.  It all seems pretty inadequate.  I don't mean that my own church is particularly terrible, I think that most churches aren't getting it right.  It seems to me that church is mostly a case of Christians getting together on a Sunday to meet, read the Bible, pray, hear the Word explained and sing a few songs.  At my church at the moment we have a goal to get all members into a small group where people meet together regularly to pray and wrestle with the Word.  This is all great stuff, but it's only a really small part of what church should be.  What's happened to churches that we have to have as a goal that Christians will meet together to encourage and build one another up?  If we can't find time to meet with our brothers and sisters outside of an hour on Sundays then we're too busy with other things and need to reconsider our priorities in this world.

I think that a local church aiming for these things (attendance at church and attendance at a small group) is aiming low.  Really, really low.   The church is a community.  More than that, the church is a family. We're a family that should be doing everything we can to grow and to bring others from outside, in the cold, inside into the warm.


But that's not how we behave.  We bicker and fight with one another.  We show that we don't want just anyone to join our community, we only want a select few who we deem worthy.  We rarely, if ever, tell people about Jesus.  There are individuals who care for and take part in the community around them, but collectively, as a church, we're devoid of participation in our communities.


I think that our churches should be, as David Platt puts it, 'A community of Christians each multiplying the gospel by going, baptising and teaching, in the contexts where we live every day.'  But they're not.  We're too institution focused.  I hear people asking questions like 'how can you serve your local church?'  This seems like a good question, but it's not.  Much more appropriate questions are 'how can you serve Jesus?' and 'how can you serve your brothers and sisters?' and 'how can you serve the unbelievers in your community?'  The local church is an institution and we don't serve institutions, we serve our God and each other.  If we insist on asking this question we should ask 'how are you serving in your local church?'


So I want to propose some things that I'll expand on in later posts.


1. Leaders are to blame and they're the ones who have to turn things around.
2. Churches should have less paid staff.
3. Evangelism is everybody's responsibility.
4. Christian involvement in the community is paramount.
5. Evangelism is not more important than active concern for the poor and provision of material and earthly needs.
6. Concern for the poor is not more important than evangelism.
7. Holiness matters.
8. All Christians should administer the sacraments.
9. Christians should work with Christians from other churches.
10. Church leaders should be less afraid of their parishioners working with Christians from outside their church.
11. Churches whose meetings are all about property and money are worldly and not nearly as concerned with the things of the kingdom as they should be.  They will most likely be ministry ineffective.

Eating Animals I: Why not eat dogs

I have started reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer.

My delightful wife got it from the library for me. However I have recently been convinced that I should probably be buying books rather than borrowing them, so perhaps I should buy it.

Anyway, I'm a slow reader, I'm usually reading between five and ten books very very slowly at a time, and so I thought I might blog my way through this one.

Safran (from now on I'll call him this, apologies to the man if he prefers S-F) argues for eating dogs. What's the difference?, he points out. Pigs can show affection, fetch balls, and whatever else dogs can do. In fact, cows and even chooks are apparently just as capable as dogs (intelligent is the word we usually use, I suppose). He points out that many cultures around the world, and throughout history have eaten dogs. From an ecological point of view, hundreds of millions of dogs in the US are 'destroyed' each year, so it's just a waste not eating them. In fact, dealing with all that meat is a significant environmental concern. Much of it is processed and fed to livestock! Cut out that weird, wasteful, middle step, and just eat the dog meat yourself.

Why not?

I must say I was sold. We should be eating dogs, it's an ecological crime not to.

Of course, the dogs will keep coming up. I think it's largely for one reason: it's considered immoral, and in most cases is illegal, to treat dogs the way we treat farm animals. If you torture a dog, you can go to prison. If you permanently lock a dog in a dark room, confined to a cage not bigger than itself, I hope you can go to prison, but if not, I'm certain that nobody will like you. I could go on.

So why the double standard?

Reading this book has coincided with my being quite ill. I can't eat much, and I respond very badly to meat at times. I have been eating almost vegetarian (something we've been planning to do but never actually did for a couple of years now). So this book is particularly interesting at the moment, even though the illness is completely irrelevant. But if I become vegetarian for two simultaneous reasons, then I suppose it's twice as likely to stick?

Incidentally I should mention that I don't want to misrepresent Safran, and I apologise if I do, and at the beginning of the book he says this is not a book advocating vegetarianism...

Radical

At the end of last year I read a book by an American minister called 'Radical: Taking back your faith from the American dream'. 

It's short and easy to read.  It's written in accessible language and is pretty easy for anyone to read.

I was challenged by this book to consider how I'm living for God in this world.  Like 'Generous Justice' by Tim Keller and 'Crazy Love' by Francis Chan, I was challenged to think about whether my life is really just a sell out and whether or not my ideas are being defined by the Bible or my culture.

I think that the way I live my life is too defined by my culture.  My views on money, in particular, are prone to be very heavily influenced by the society in which I live as opposed to the God whom I serve.  I still think of my time, my family and my home as my own.  They're not. 


Too often, I think, we read the Bible as if it doesn't mean what it says.  We read what Jesus has to say and then we tell ourselves that that isn't what it means for us today, it's what it meant for them back then.  Or just one person back then.  But we call ourselves evangelicals, which by definition means that we take the Word seriously as our highest authority.

I'm trying to read the Bible through with fresh eyes and thinking 'What is Jesus says what he means and means what he says?'  It's pretty shocking and confronting.  Christianity isn't meant to be a whole lot of fun, nor is it easy.  But it is worth it.  In every way, a thousand times over.

I strongly encourage you to read 'Radical'.  It's challenging and inspiring and finishes with a challenge that is a good step into taking your faith seriously.

Education - Public vs Private

I am a teacher at Nowra Christian school.  It's a real life Christian school.  Last year our HSC results were the best in the Shoalhaven.  In publicising this fact our principal is being very careful to make sure that everyone knows that we aim for high results but that our priority is raising kids to love and serve Jesus.  From a marketing point of view this attitude is a disaster and it's largely why an Anglican College close by has so many more kids than us (they shamelessly flaunt results and minimise their Christianity).

Since my first daughter was born I've been thinking about what I want for her in a school.  I do want her to go to school.  I think that if all you want for your child is great results then home schooling is the way to go, but I want more than that for my daughters.  But what is that?

I often hear from Christians what a shame it is that Christian schools exist.  Some Christians I know are militantly against any independent school and some others think that they are just unnecessary.  Over this summer I met a Christian guy at the beach and when I told him where I worked, his immediate response was 'Oh, I don't agree with Christian schools.' He then went on to say that a public school was fine for him and that his kids all went to public schools and they're fine, so all kids should go to public schools.  This argument is ridiculous.  I hope that he actually had other reasons that he didn't share.

Often a big reason I hear against Christian schools is that by taking Christian kids out of public schools you take away the opportunity for them to evangelise to their non-Christian friends.  This argument has some validity.  The problem with it, though, is that we're imposing on our kids an expectation that they will do something that we don't do ourselves.  My experience of most Christian adults (myself included, I'm ashamed to say) is that really talking about Jesus to their friends is pretty rare.  So our kids have no model.  Although that's not exactly true.  They do have a model, it's one of being ashamed, apprehensive and quiet when it comes to proclaiming Jesus as Lord and calling others to repentance.  So one of my problems with this argument is that we are asking our kids to do something that we ourselves aren't willing to do.

My next problem with this argument is that we're feeding lambs to wolves.  If we are to say that we want our kids in public schools so that they can tell their friends about Jesus, how many of us are going into the school with them to help.  How many of us are in the classroom helping out with reading groups, helping on excursions, teaching scripture ourselves.  The answer is not very many.  Instead what tends to happen, I think, is that we send the kids to school and have very little idea of what's going on in the classroom.  This is ill advised in any school, but when your kids are under the direct instruction and influence of non Christians for the greatest part of their day, surely we want to be as involved as we can.  So if you argue that you want your kids to evangelise to others then what are you doing to help them, at home in your teaching of them, in the community in your modelling how to speak to peers about Jesus and in the school, helping them to tell their friends about Jesus?  I know that there are a few parents who do this, but they seem so few and far between as to make them almost invisible.

I know that if I send my daughters to the local public school that they will be well supported in that school community by my wife.  She models telling kids about Jesus to our daughters, she is already actively involved in the school telling kids about Jesus both in and out of school hours and she fosters relationships with peers so that they might consider how to know Jesus.  My eldest daughter sees all of this and is involved in it too. (My wife isn't perfect, she'd be the first to admit that, but it's undeniable that she works hard for Jesus)  Having said that, though, I also know that if I send my daughters to a public school that most of their friends will be non Christians, they will have mostly, if not all, non Christian teachers propagating morals, ethics and a world view which is totally opposed to our own.  Those teachers are a danger to my children as they want them to be more like them and I want them to be more like Jesus. They will hear only the most basic gospel presentations for 1 hour a week (if that).  They will be actively encouraged to consider all religions or no religion as possible truths.

If I send my daughters to my school then they will be able to pray in class and with their teachers.  They will hear from the Bible every day.  They will be encouraged to follow Jesus.  They will have some non Christian friends and mostly Christian friends.  Every one of their teachers will love and serve Jesus and will actively discourage them from seeking out other religions as possible truths.  On the down side, they may find it hard to make other meaningful friendships with kids in the community and might not have as many opportunities to present Jesus as saviour to people who don't trust him in their schooling years.  But they will be being prepared for ministry in school, being trained up to go out and serve.

I think that arguments for and against public and private education are often simplistic and unhelpful.  I would like to see Christians who are against Christian schooling really consider whether or not they are being fair and the same for Christians who are against public schooling (although I don't see that many of them, even working in a private school).

I'm interested to know other people's thoughts.

How western culture has defined Christian love; or How we're greedy, selfish and loveless

This post is a confession.  It's also a challenge; to myself and to others.  If you're a Christian and you read this and you disagree with it then please tell me.

I have a bent toward social justice.  It started a few years ago and has been increasing as I've considered whether or not Jesus could possibly be pleased with the way I live in and view the world.  I've also become increasingly frustrated with churches I attend as they seem to operate blind to the needs of the poor in this world. 

A few weeks ago I spoke to the congregations of my church about purchasing Fair Trade chocolate easter eggs.  The idea was that my wife would order eggs for people to use as their easter eggs and we would have them delivered to is and pass them on to those who ordered. 
To say that the congregation's response to the offer was disappointing would be an understatement.  2 people took up the offer without me badgering them later.

The reason I care about the response to the easter eggs has nothing to do with the fact that people didn't buy easter eggs from me.  Some people just don't buy easter eggs and that's fine.  It's the people who do buy them and will just go to the shops at easter time and get whatever they want who bother me.  Their choice shows no discernment or forethought.
The fact of the matter is that much of the chocolate available today is farmed by boys who have been either kidnapped or sold into slavery to work in another country.  The are treated poorly, they are not paid a wage and they are denied access to their families, to education, to health care and the things that we would call basic human rights. It's impossible to know what chocolate is made from slave farmed cocoa, but we know that most companies deliberately know nothing about where their beans come from so that they can maintain plausible deniability.  Since the market price of cocoa is so low, the only farmers who survive to make a iving are those who are willing to use slave labour and pay very low wages to their other workers.  This means, then, that most chocolate farmed is farmed by means which, if we saw them happening in Australia, we would stop them.  Fair Trade is not a perfect system, but it seeks to apply measures of accountability to the farmers they buy from whilst paying them a price for the beans that means they can reasonably meet the expectations (no slave labour, reasonable wages, no forced overtime, regular days off of work, etc.)
That workers are being treated poorly in this industry isn't something that has just come to light; we've known about it for a long time.  The question is, then, should Christians care?  And if they do, does buying chocolate that we can reasonably assume is the product of slave labour make us culpable?  Obviously my opinion is yes, we should care, and yes, participation comes with culpability.

James 5:1-5 seems pertinent here:
Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you.

This passage should be written on the walls of every Australian Christian's house.  We are rich.  When we participate in a system that we know oppresses others, we become oppressors ourselves.  To say this displeases Jesus is putting it too weakly.  When James says woe to these rich oppressors, it's not a slap on the wrist, he's calling God's full wrath down on them.  When we participate in the purchase of chocolate, coffee, clothing, rugs, cotton, and whatever else comes at the cost of slaves and fair treatment of workers, and we have even the slightest inkling that the people who produced it may be being treated so, we ourselves become complicit in the act and we displease our God whose children are suffering for the sake of our wallets.


Another situation in my church recently also bothers me.  We have come into some money in our church and the Parish Council decided to put the money aside for a children's worker and a youth worker.  Some of it has also been given away to ministry to Aboriginal people in the Shoalhaven, which the Sydney diocese has seen fit not to fund any more.  Due to recent circumstances God has been gracious enough to provide us with people willing to oversee the children's ministry without being paid to do so.  We also already have faithful people working in these ministries to make sure that the kids in our community hear about and are invited to trust in Jesus.  So we don't need to continue looking for a children's worker.  So then, what do we do with the money that we had set aside for a worker?  We could use it for another worker to do something else, we could use it for building maintenance, we could save it, we could give it away, we could do any number of things with it.  Let's say, though, that the congregation decides to give it away (as unlikely as that is).  What should it go to?  What's best?  Here, in the culture of the Sydney Anglican Church, the answer seems obvious.  If you choose to give money away, you give it to the preaching of the gospel.  Any person's greatest need is to know Jesus, so until that need is met, all other needs are secondary.  This sounds good, and it's usually the option we go with.  It seems biblical to put eternal salvation ahead of worldly comfort, even if it means that some die sooner of preventable diseases.  And to an extent I agree.  Only I don't actually live like that.  No one does.  And it's not biblical.  So we have to stop reasoning like that.

The reason I say that none of us live like that is that in our own homes we don't give up the basic necessities of life for the sake of the gospel being preached.  Nor do we ask the rest of our families to, be they the family that lives in our house, or our extended family.  No, we provide for their needs first, and then far beyond their needs.  Then, usually, we take stock of what we have left and, maybe, give a little away.  But we have high expectations of that little we give away and don't want to see it wasted.  After all, it doesn't go that far.

Then, on a Sunday, we have the gall to call each other brothers and sisters in Christ.  We say that our Christan family is our most real family and the bond that binds us is stronger even than blood.   This is true, but we live as if it isn't.  We justify watching our brothers and sisters perish due to starvation by saying that the most important ministries are Word ministries and that the preaching of the gospel is paramount.  But this isn't how the early church operated.  They were so generous with each other that no one was in need.  Indeed, in the whole Roman empire the emperor Julian, wanting to eradicate Christianity spoke of the difficulty of doing so when Christians put everyone else to shame with their generosity by looking after their own poor and the Empire's poor.  When plagues ripped through Europe, it was regularly Christians who would say and care for the sick at great persona risk.  Sometimes bishops commanded their parishes to do so, and under strong, compassionate leadership they reduced the death toll considerably in some areas.  They didn't abandon the area so that more Christians could live to preach the gospel, they gave material aid at the cost of their lives and no one would dare say they did wrong.

Today about 30,000 people will die of starvation related illnesses.  None of them are in our blood families, and we are busy in church building new buildings, employing more people, sponsoring Christians to give up their jobs and go to preach in already Christian countries.  And yet lots of those suffering are in our family.  Our real, eternal family.  They share with us the same brother who gave up his life so that we might know him.  I know that I am part of the problem.  I'm greedy and selfish.  I give too little and keep too much.  I readily show that I love my wife and daughters and then I show that I am complacent toward my brothers and sisters in other countries who really need my help.

We need to understand that one day we have to meet Jesus face to face.  In Matthew 25 Jesus talks about the sorting of the sheep and the goats.  Those who lived compassionate lives are sheep and enter heaven.  Those who don't are goats and go to hell.  Either we believe Jesus that the mark of a true Christian is love, mercy and compassion, or we dismiss his words and call him a liar because we are saved by grace and we can do nothing to lose our assured position.

Then, after we've met Jesus we have to meet our brothers and sisters.  Our true brothers and sisters.  And I'd hate to think that I should have to embrace men and women as brothers and sisters who had suffered and died needlessly in this world and I had done nothing to help them.  We are the rich man in Lazarus and the rich man.  We have the word and we ignore it while Lazarus dies at our gate while we debate how to build better buildings, employ more people and facilitate more people giving up their jobs to go overseas and preach to the converted.

We can afford to give more.  Our churches can afford to give more.  I am extremely confident that of the money I put in the plate at church, not one cent of it goes to feeding the poor.  This is a travesty and it goes against everything that is suggested in the model of the early church.  This is a call, to myself above all, for communal generosity.  Our lord gave us everything he had.  He praised the woman who gave everything she had and saved nothing for herself.  We don't even get close to that, but want to be considered faithful.  We talk about God wanting us to enjoy good things as though the good things God's given us are money and stuff and not relationships and creation.  And when we say that we say that God doesn't want our poor brothers and sisters to enjoy good things, only us because we don't share what we get, we are too busy enjoying it.  We, as collective churches in Australia are greedy, selfish, loveless and faithless.

So what are we going to do about it?