We Must Fight Injustice To Animals

I have spent my life fighting discrimination and injustice, whether the victims are blacks, women, or gays and lesbians. No human being should be the target of prejudice or the object of vilification or be denied his or her basic rights.

But there are other issues of justice--not only for human beings but also for the world’s other sentient creatures. 

The matter of the abuse and cruelty we inflict on other animals has to fight for our attention in what sometimes seems an already overfull moral agenda. It is vital, however, that these instances of injustice not be overlooked.

I have seen firsthand how injustice gets overlooked when the victims are powerless or vulnerable, when they have no one to speak up for them and no means of representing themselves to a higher authority. 

Animals are in precisely that position. 

Unless we are mindful of their interests and speak out loudly on their behalf, abuse and cruelty go unchallenged.

It is a kind of theological folly to suppose that God has made the entire world just for human beings, or to suppose that God is interested in only one of the millions of species that inhabit God’s good earth.

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Desmond Tutu in his foreword to the Global Guide to Animal Protection, edited by Oxford theologian Professor Andrew Linzey, Director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics.

It will be published by the University of Illinois on 30 December.