Just Another Animal?
Turning animals into people and people into animals.
In the early 1900s, when Darwin was all the rage, keepers at the Bronx Zoo put Ota Benga, a Pygmy from the Congo, in a cage with an orangutan. “Bushman Shares a Cage With Bronx Park Apes” read the headline in The New York Times. Controversy soon flared: Some Americans saw the exhibit as a statement about a black man being nothing more than an animal that had climbed a little higher on the evolutionary tree. Some people reasoned that Benga must have been one of those progressive-but-not-quite-there-yet subhuman creatures. It wasn’t long before he was jeered at, harangued and treated as a mere subhuman curiosity when he was in the cage or roaming the zoo grounds.
More recently, attempts have been made to link animals and people so closely that the rights and status of other species are elevated to that of humanity.
Last year, Spain’s Balearic Islands legally bestowed bonobos, chimps, orangutans and gorillas with rights similar to children. Peter Singer, who holds the chair of bioethics at Princeton, founded the Great Ape Project with the intent of granting “personhood” to apes. Gary Francione, a leading animal-rights lawyer from Rutgers University, charges that humans arrogantly assume “spiritual superiority,” thinking we’re “special just because we’re human.” Francione believes that position is intolerant and bigoted. Singer labels it “speciesism,” putting it in the category of racism.
Francione wants to bring an end to all animal captivity, including making it illegal to breed animals. Goodbye Labrador retrievers, miniature dachshunds and Old Yeller. In Boulder, Colo., the city has removed any language that implies human beings own their pets. Instead, the humans are now “guardians.” Vancouver public schools are considering adding speciesism to a 12th-grade social justice course, comparing it to human oppression and discrimination.
When our worldview gets disconnected from God and His truth, we turn men into beasts or beasts into men.
The trick of evolution
The theory of evolution declares that we all came out of the same “lucky mud.” If true, then the rights of animals and plants and human beings should be equal — we are all mere leaves on the evolutionary tree. That thinking naturally led a Finnish Green Party activist to declare that he has more sympathy for threatened insect species than for children starving in Africa. Why? Because a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy . . . is an insect. So if there are lots of children but few insects of a particular species, then he would rather save the insect than the child.
Somewhere in this controversy, however, lies the biblical perspective. Man was created by God, in His image as a spiritual being. There is a clear distinction between mankind and the rest of creation. Man was given responsibility for the earth and the creatures that roam it — a responsibility that has not been removed.
Therefore, we should have a concern for how animals are treated. We should be the best environmentalists in the world. But those good concerns go wacky when the difference between a human being and a mouse or a tree gets blurred.
Dangerous ideas
By the early 1900s, many had begun to take Darwin’s theory seriously. Man was merely an advanced form of animal. The subtitle of Darwin’s famous book, The Origin of Species, reads: the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
The evolutionary view was that various races of human beings were at different points along the evolutionary pathway. This idea gave us a scientific reason for viewing other races as inferior or flat-out hating them. Americans are not immune from this worldview, even though it denies our founding statement that all men are created equal. It was the evolutionary notion that led Hitler to believe the Aryan race was the advanced form of mankind, with the responsibility to “naturally select” out inferior humans.
Losing sight
It would be wrong, however, to lay every atrocity of the Holocaust at the feet of Darwin, for man has borne the coals of hatred since Adam’s fall. Cain killed his own brother. Jonah ran from God because he hated the Ninevites. Ethnic cleansing is not a modern or post-Darwin oddity. It is merely a result of denying the truth that man bears the image of his Creator and that God considers life to be precious.
The truth about God’s creation is surrounded by false claims. Those lies can be on opposite sides of the spectrum. On one side, we lose sight of our unique creation by God. Rats become boys, and boys become dogs. We spurn and enslave, kill and cage our fellow man.
On the other side, we lose sight of our role as protector and caretaker of the earth. We become poor stewards of God’s gifts. We pillage, burn and destroy without a caretaker’s perspective.
The answer to the question “Who is man?” is critical. If he is nothing more than an animal, we will increasingly act as beasts.