Today's opening words are taken from the recent report published by the UUA Commission on Appraisal, which summarizes current trends in Unitarian Universalism. The following was included under "Conclusions and Recommendations", which provided suggested statements that are central and uniting to our members:
We affirm the vision of the natural world as an interdependent web, of which we are inextricably a part - not as dominators but as companions and at times protectors. Our cosmology draws heavily from the teachings of science. We acknowledge an ethical responsibility to foster sustainable use of the world's resources and to live in harmony with all beings.

I see us grateful for these extraordinary companions.

I see our lives rich with animals. I see us with many animal friends. I see our cities sprinkled with wild places, shorelines, parks, ravines and creek-canyons, where wild creatures can live. I see all life forms working together in harmony, cultivating the full potential of the planet.

I see us appreciating the different needs, different kinds of intelligence, and different responsibilities of the various animals. I see us sensing the unique ways in which they feel, they think, they suffer, and they love.

I see us learning to treat with respect those who are, in the greater scheme of things, but our younger brothers and sisters. I see us realizing they, too, are expressions, in their individual ways, of the universal life-force. I see us acting from the knowledge that it is the same God-Force that gives us all breath.

I see us realizing that all God's critters have a place in the choir.

Whether I like it or not, I've unknowingly been a player in the animal ethics issue all of my life, probably every day of my life. I have grown up in a society that is quite dependent on other animals, based on a combination of desires and to a lesser extent, needs. As I grew up, I was taught that animals were there for our taking, we could do with them as we pleased. We could hunt them, eat them, use them for our clothes, keep them as our pets, and even care for and love them. And I'm fairly sure that I must have given some thought to the inconsistencies of how we as humans seem to ration out our mercy and compassion for animals. At one minute, I would be nurturing my pets with full awareness of their ability to feel joy, pain, sadness, and fear. Then in the same day, I would feed or clothe myself with little regard for the violence that was perpetrated on innocent animals in order to make that food or clothing possible. But as too often happens when moral or ethical debates threaten our way of life, I would tell myself........"It's always been that way".

But where did this notion come from, that we as humans are somehow blessed with authority over other animals, with authority for deciding what rights they have? In 1917, Sigmund Freud summarized it this way:

"In the course of his development towards culture, man acquired a dominating position over his fellow-creatures in the animal kingdom. Not content with this supremacy, however, he began to place a gulf between his nature and theirs. He denied the possession of reason to them, and to himself he attributed an immortal soul, and made claims to a divine descent which permitted him to annihilate the bond of community between him and the animal kingdom."

The "domestication" of animals - the exploitation of goats, sheep, cattle, and other animals for their meat, milk, hides, and labor that began in the Near East about 11,000 years ago - changed human history. In earlier hunter-gatherer societies there had been some sense of kinship between humans and animals, reflected in totemism and myths which portrayed animals, or part-animal part-human creatures, as creators and progenitors of the human race. However, mankind crossed the Rubicon when Near Eastern herdsmen and farmers started castrating, hobbling, and branding captive animals to control their mobility, diet, growth, and reproductive lives. To distance themselves emotionally from the cruelty they inflicted, they adopted mechanisms of detachment, rationalization, denial, and euphemism, and in the process became a harder, more ruthless lot.

When I was 9 or 10 and living in the Virginia suburbs of Washington DC, I saved up my money and purchased a long desired slingshot. Now this was no normal slingshot, it was actually a "wrist rocket" which is elaborately designed to wrap around your wrist and can propel a projectile with significant force. I decided it was my duty to scare off the large number of cats that had begun surrounding our house (we had an un-neutered female cat), so I began patrolling the yard. Using wadded up foil balls so I wouldn't actually hurt the cats, I quickly found out that accuracy with a slingshot obviously required a lot of practice. Try as I might, I never even came close to hitting a single one of those cats.

But one day I was patrolling the back yard and looked up into a tree to see a rather hapless squirrel sitting on a branch quite oblivious to my current state of mind. This was my big chance. Just like Daniel Boone or Davey Crockett. So I reached down and picked up a sizeable stone, pulled back the sling, aimed, and let the stone fly.

Now I have to confess, that I really didn't think I had a chance of hitting that squirrel. But to my amazement, the stone cork screwed through the air and hit the squirrel dead center. You would think that my direct hit would have been reason for great celebration. But instead, the sight of the squirrel falling from the branch filled me with immediate shock and shame. I would have given anything to have that rock back. The sudden feeling of empathy for the squirrel was overwhelming. But luckily for the squirrel (and to a lesser extent for me)... I wasn't very strong at that age and when the squirrel hit the ground, it immediately got up, ran back up the tree (to a much higher branch, I might add) and began to give me a severe scolding.

I don't know that this was an immediate life changing event for me, but it is something that has stuck with me through the years. And in retrospect, it provided me with a good lesson in the power of seeing first hand the results of ones actions. When I had previously been patrolling the yard thinking about my prey, I simply saw these animals as targets…. trophies for the taking. But as that squirrel was falling through the air, and to some extent when it was back in the tree chattering away, I saw it in a completely different light. It now appeared vulnerable, and I saw that it could suffer and feel pain. I had never needed this lesson when it came to my pets; I knew them well. I fully understood their purring, their whimpers, their wagging tails. Through this senseless act of violence, the squirrel had changed right before my eyes.

In her book The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings captures the essence of this awareness as she describes a young boy gazing upon the deer that was recently slain by his father:

As a result, one of the terms that is too often brandished in the animal ethics debate is anthropomorphism, which is defined as the inappropriate ascribing of human characteristics to non-human creatures or objects. There are many who take exception to any assertion that animals share any of the human traits that make us so apparently special. But there is growing evidence that other animals are much more like us than we think.

There is no doubt that a pig is different from a human being. But it is also different from a cow. We are all animals in our own right, each with our own characteristics, and what some refer to as our own "nature". But what do we truly know about the nature of other animals. Our ability to communicate with them is virtually non-existent. We find it hard enough to truly understand other human beings, even when we speak the same language. But regardless of what we know or don't know about other animals nature, about what they think, what they feel, about how they may contemplate their own lives, we do know that at a biological level, we are incredibly similar and products of a very common evolutionary process.

Steven Siviy, a behavioral scientist at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, stated it this way:
"If you believe in evolution by natural selection, how can you believe that feelings suddenly appeared, out of the blue, with human beings?"

As I was growing up, my family always had dogs. My parents had a dog when I was born, and when I moved away after college, I left behind 3 that I had become quite close to. When you spend a lot of time with an animal, you get to know it pretty well. Each of these dogs had a definite personality all their own. There were good traits, there were bad traits. There were countless instances when these dogs displayed behaviors that made it obvious they had a lot going on inside. They displayed fear, anxiety, happiness, guilt, and even treachery. Did this make them human? No. Did it make them equal to humans? No, but it didn't make them equal to birds or fish either. It simply made them who they were.

Rev. Gary Kowalski , President of Unitarians For the Ethical Treatment of Animal's Executive Committee, is also the author of a book titled "The Souls of Animals". In the introduction, he writes: "No one can prove that animals have souls. But if we open our hearts to other creatures and allow ourselves to sympathize with their joys and struggles, we find they have the power to touch and transform us."

As I think about it, the most vivid of my feelings towards my dogs fell into 2 important categories; I felt joy when I watched them doing those things that they obviously thought were fun, and I felt compassion when I saw them suffer in any way. And it was these 2 feelings that I see as central to what Albert Schweitzer referred to as a "reverence for life"; cherishing the joys of life, whether my own or another creatures, and feelings of compassion when another beings life didn't seem to be going as planned. And why should this reverence for life be limited to just my own well being, that of my fellow humans, and a few select pets?

In 1915 he coined the term, "Reverence for Life," which he saw as the elementary and universal principle of ethics. It was based on what he referred to as the "will to live", which he saw in all living beings. In 1935, he wrote the following:
I am life which wills to live, in the midst of life which wills to live. As in my own will-to-live there is a longing for wider life and pleasure, with dread of annihilation and pain; so is it also in the will-to-live all around me, whether it can express itself before me or remains dumb. The will-to-live is everywhere present, even as in me. If I am a thinking being, I must regard life other than my own with equal reverence, for I shall know that it longs for fullness and development as deeply as I do myself.

As the summers went by, I also remember seeing what could be best described as atrocities, some of which were a normal part of what was deemed necessary to maximize the value of the hogs, but some of which was the result of nothing more than human cruelty. I don't intend to go into the details of either. However, one of the so called "improvements" that appeared on my uncle's farm was what was affectionately referred to as the "hog house".

As you will see, this was like no house that I had ever known and I doubt very much that the pigs considered it much of a home either. This new building was a large structure of concrete and steel that was used to hold the mother pigs and their piglets. Inside was an elaborate network of metal stalls which were only a few inches longer and wider than the mother hog herself. On the side of the stall, was an equally small area where the baby pigs could escape when the mother pig would finally decide to lay down. The floor was made up of steel slats that allowed for the easy elimination of the animals waste.

I don't recall the details of how the hogs were put into this building, how long they stayed, or under what circumstances they finally came out, but I remember that I was horrified by this place. Any time that our chores involved venturing into this building, I was filled with total dread. It was a place I did not want to be; I doubt that the hogs thought much of it either.

What I didn't realize at the time is that this building represented the future in hog farming. The pressures of the marketplace had made it necessary for farmers to develop more efficient and cost effective ways of producing pork, and needless to say, compassion was the first thing to go. Over the years, this method of pork production became the norm, and "industrial farming", which is nothing more than enormous versions of my uncles "hog house", would eventually displace the small farmers like my uncle.

The story is the same for virtually every animal based food product we buy today. Factory farming has taken over the production of milk, beef, pork, eggs, turkey, to name just a few. And in all cases, the implications for the animals are the same; they are seen as nothing more than machines, and their well being is based solely on the bottom line.

Noted theologian Thomas Berry notes that "We've come to see the non-human world only as a collection of objects to be exploited solely for our purposes. We place value on non-human life forms only if they are useful to us; an arrogance that sets us above and apart from all other life forms of the planet."

In his book, Dominion, Matthew Scully talks at length about the atrocities and violence that are inflicted on animals in the latest, state of the art factory farms. I'm going to spare you the details again. It is something that I believe all of us should be aware of, but everything has its time and place and this is not it. So we will share with you instead a small but insightful summary:

At the end of the study, the scientist reported this startling conclusion:
Generally the behaviour of … the pigs born an reard in an intesnsive system, once they had appropriate environment, resembled that of the European wild boar.

I must say that my journey towards vegetarianism has been a relatively recent one, made with the help of this church, some of my friends, and most significantly my wife, Sylvia. I was raised as a meat eater and had always viewed vegetarians and vegans as misguided at best. Growing up, there was scarcely a meal that did not include meat. And my family traditions, like many of yours, were filled with hams, turkeys, and back yard barbecues.

Many years ago, Sylvia had taken a keen interest in the growing environmental concerns posed by the recent developments in the farming industry, not the least of which was pesticide use. When our first child came on the scene, these concerns took on a new meaning. We began purchasing an ever growing amount of organic foods, a movement that has obviously become widespread in recent years, based on the number of organic products now offered at most stores. And the more we educated ourselves, the more we found to be concerned about.

Sylvia soon learned about the health and environmental concerns surrounding meat production, whether it was growth hormones in farm animals, or mercury in fish, or the inordinate toll that meat production takes on our already battered planet. Soon, we were down to just one meal of meat a week, and before I knew it, Sylvia had declared herself a vegetarian. The kids and I still enjoyed our cheeseburgers, our sausage, our ham sandwiches. But for Sylvia, it was tofu, Boca Burgers, and lots of vegetables.

Now needless to say, we had lots of kitchen table conversations on this issue, and I found it hard to disagree with most of what she had to say. Granted, her concerns leaned more heavily to the side of health and environmentalism, but there was a very strong case for her decision to kick the habit. And after awhile, after sitting through many a meal where a very reasonable vegetarian alternative was available, I came to a significant conclusion. I was continuing to choose to eat meat simply because I liked the taste. I didn't need the meat. And for me, this represented an even more fundamental dilemma: Was my desire for the taste of the meat worth the suffering and violence that it inflicted on the animals that made it possible? How did this fit with my reverence for life? How did this fit with my concept of compassion for those worthy of it?

I have been a vegetarian for about 2 or 3 years now, and during that time, I have learned that it truly is a journey. You start at a place of comfort, you move in a direction that at times may seem strange, but you eventually come to accept your new surroundings. And it has not always been easy; there are times when social, family, and business situations make vegetarianism difficult, and sometimes awkward. But I continue to gain more awareness and learn new things. And in doing so, it has become apparent that there are many roads from which to choose, and not all lead to vegetarianism. Some choose to become vegans, who contend that any imposition on animals is inherently unethical. For others, it may be a reliance on more friendly forms of farming, like organic or free range foods, or involvement in one of the many organizations working to stem the tide of animal abuse in our society. For some, it may be no change at all. But no path can skirt this issue; we are all involved. The well being of our fellow animals is in our hands, and how we choose to care for them is up to each and every one of us.