A Theology of Tending Animals

On the spiritual discipline of managing livestock.

Cover image by Karla Miller

There was a dinner with some city friends when I was seven or eight. The adults were eating steak and drinking wine. Our bummer calf came up.

“The kids bottlefeed it?” someone said.

To this day the sick-sweet smell of formula brings back cold mornings feeding calves. Some like to toss their heads to encourage the milk, which they do to their mothers, but when there is no mother, just a half-asleep child holding a bottle close for warmth, this innocent behavior arrives as a solid punch in the gut.

“You’re raising a calf to eat it?”

The look of disgust on her face is why I remember the conversation. I felt very embarrassed and ashamed. As she grimaced, she cut a piece of bleeding steak.

There is a fantasy of a light footprint, and most can indulge. The stark reality of life is faced by a diminishing few. Less than 2% of Americans work in production agriculture. The rest outsource their dirty work.

Christianity teaches that humans are made in God’s image and owe animals care, because animals are innocent creatures. The prophet Jonah sulked on a hillside when Nineveh was spared from burning, and God scolded him: “Should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?” If Jonah—man of God—could not find compassion in his heart for adults spared from judgement, surely, said God, he could find it for animals, who didn’t deserve judgement.

Animals are collateral damage of their caretakers’ rebellion. In the beginning it was very good. Now it is fallen. Our bodies are born perishing. Every human life is expensive. Things die for us to live. There are no exceptions.

A vegan influencer eats bananas and spinach and calls it clean. Not healthy eating. Not nutritious eating. Clean eating.

She senses that the business of life is dirty. Killing an animal to nourish an aging, imperfect human body is a dark, humiliating admission. She wants to feel clean. She wants to eat plants and drink coconut water and wash her sins away.

Except: 7.3 billion animals are killed every year for vegan diets. Open rangeland where meat animals graze is far more hospitable to wildlife than a field of row crops. Produce doesn’t co-exist with insects, snails, rabbits, gophers, squirrels, foxes, deer.

The first human death was a product of this conflict; clean and dirty, what is acceptable to God, meat and vegetables.

Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a worker of the ground. In the course of time Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions. And the LORD had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard.

Pride, humility, religious performance, amazing grace. In Abel’s offering there was confession. He saw the cost of his sin, his need for God. In Cain’s, he held his head up. He could earn his way back to the Garden. Instead: following Cain’s self-righteous act of sparing an animal, he killed his brother. Refusing to acknowledge sin, sin consumed him.

Nature groans. Creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.

In their complex system of animal sacrifice, the Israelites foreshadowed the Messiah, the Lamb of God, who wore the sin of the world. What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood.

History is a long struggle to prove otherwise. After he sinned, Adam did not run to God. He ran away. He saw he was naked and made clothes from leaves. This was as insufficient as Cain’s offering. The first animal death:

And the LORD God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.

Adam’s efforts to cover himself was the original act of civilization, and since then, civilization has been the progressive march to show God we are above nature—and by extension, Him.

Think how complex and sophisticated a system is required to support this fantasy. It’s a feat, the exquisite construct of an advanced civilization. From birth to death, a modern Western person can live in the delusion of clean hands and a light footprint. This is the marvel of modernity, end product of thousands of years of dedicated human effort. Clothing, once shaped from animal skins and sharp cotton fibers, now bright polyester in a mall. Meat, not cut from a bleeding carcass and cooked over an open flame, but mashed and mixed and breaded or cut and wrapped, laid in a freezer or squeezed into meatballs or ground or dinosaur nuggets. Lettuce, not grown in manure and bone and cleansed of worms and insects and guarded by traps and fencing and poisons, just served sterile in a tidy plastic bag. Everything divorced from its origin. Milk, cheese, mixing bowls, wooden desks, boots, glue, candy, car tires, marshmallows, chewing gum, biofuel, beer, soap. Clean.

Last year the city of Denver tried to ban slaughterhouses within city limits. Not the process of slaughtering animals. Not the consumption of meat. Just the proximity. They wanted to push this dirty thing we all depend on, this barbarism we consume, farther from society.

In ancient Israel the scapegoat was loaded with the sins of the community and sent into the desert to die. Today the farmer and rancher and trucker and butcher and factory worker live far from the centers of society, and send in the things we need to live, and we never have to look them in the eye.

Every so often someone makes a documentary about some brutal trade or other and society is horrified at this medieval, mysterious behavior. We consume this content, which we call “educating ourselves,” while sipping a latte or eating sausage pizza at a table made from wood on a screen powered by rare earth minerals. We consider this ritual a good deed.

The woman across from me at dinner when I was eight years old doesn’t know what calf formula smells like. She has never named a baby meat animal. She doesn’t know how calves toss their heads when they feed. She only knows how steak tastes.

I loved those baby calves. I petted them and played with them. My father, a veterinarian, is also a hunter. He got a deer tag every fall. But when someone found an animal that needed help, they called him—and my mother, also a veterinarian. Many times I watched them perform free surgeries on injured wildlife. Tranquilize a bull elk and spend hours disentangling his antlers from someone’s barb wire fence. Set a baby fawn’s broken leg after she was hit by a car. Adopt a dog when his owners didn’t care enough to pay for surgery.

Christianity teaches that it is a person’s duty to look life in the eye, to see what sin has done, and to care for earth and its innocent creatures as gifts from God, hurt by our rebellion, until some future day when He makes all things new, brings us back to the Garden where the wolf sleeps next to the lamb, and the little child leads the lion, and there is no suffering anymore, because He never made us for this.

David was a shepherd. Paul was a tentmaker. Peter was a fisherman. Jesus was a carpenter. The shepherds saw the angels because they were outside. There is honesty in living with nature. There is something sacred I cannot quantify that you get from standing witness to the cycle of life. This is the spiritual discipline of tending things that sustain human life, the wisdom of years close to nature, the humility in agriculture, the godliness of taking care of animals, the holiness in dirty hands.