BBC Radio 4 20170810

It came as a surprise to me to read in a report published yesterday by the Centre for Crime Prevention, that England and Wales currently set the lowest maximum sentence within Europe for cruelty to animals – that sentence being six-months imprisonment. We have traditionally rather prided ourselves on being the world’s greatest animal lovers. And yet relative to the rest of Europe, and to the US and Australia, by the way, England and Wales are, it seems, the most lenient towards animal cruelty.

There is a little bit of conceit in the notion that when it comes to kindness to animals we on this side of the channel are so much better than those on the other – and the irony is, of course, that a similar conceit has very often governed human relationships with animals. Animals have been useful to us in many ways, and not just as food, but in the case of horses and dogs, as our obliging partners in various endeavours; but even as we have formed profound bonds with animals, we have found ways of looking down on them. We know that animals are just like us in many respects - they are born, breathe, eat, sleep, form sexual and social bonds, care for their young, suffer and die. But whilst knowing all this, humans have also invested a good deal of energy in identifying and stressing alleged differences between them and us. Humans have been said to be rational, self-conscious, speakers of language, manufacturers and users of tools, whereas animals, by contrast, have been said to be non-rational, unself-conscious, unspeaking, and not much good at technology.

You don’t need to have viewed the complete works of David Attenborough to pick holes in any such categorical ‘us and them’ account of the differences between humans and animals – just to take a single example, chimpanzees are apparently rather adept at fashioning twigs or grass to remove termites from their tunnels. But I can’t help thinking that picking away at the supposed differences, however far you may confidently expect to get given the astonishing capacities of certain species, rather misses the point, morally speaking – as if animals would only deserve compassionate treatment insofar as we can persuade ourselves that they are the same as us.

Christians especially should recognise the fact that love can and should reach beyond kinship and sameness, to those who are genuinely different or other. When the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth insisted that you can’t talk about God by talking about man in a loud voice, he was making the point that between God and humanity there is a profound and unbridgeable distance. The basis of God’s love for humankind is not, then, that we are, so to speak, demi-gods – indeed the gap between us and God is more profound than any distance we posit, whether rightly or wrongly, between us and others of God’s creatures. It is always a good idea I think, to be suspicious of any purported account of the differences between any ‘us’ and any ‘them’ – but just as well, it is worth remembering that the love we call divine reaches over distinctions, disparities and difference.