Westminster Abbey, Gucci, & Exotic Animal Skins

Gucci-Fashion-Show-at-Westminster-AbbeyDavid Clough, Professor of Theological Ethics, University of Chester, writes:

Last week, Westminster Abbey found itself in the midst of an unusual controversy. Controversial enough for the Abbey to be hosting a high fashion show, but then People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury pointing out that Gucci, one of the exhibitors, were likely to be exhibiting fashion products made from the skins of exotic animals. Who’d be an Abbey or Cathedral Dean?

The Abbey tells me that they didn’t give any consideration to the ethics of displaying products made from exotic animal skins in advance of the show. Perhaps they were too busy responding to other ethical questions concerning whether a place of worship should derive income from the marketing of luxury goods to the hyper-rich. The Abbey tells me they have no plans to stage similar events in the future, so perhaps they’re hoping not to be confronted with the issue again. But how should Christians respond to a challenge such as that from PETA? Should Christians avoid products derived from exotic animal skins, and fur?


One immediate response might be that Christians have more important things to think about, such as sharing the good news of Jesus Christ, or responding to situations where humans are in dire need. So it’s interesting to note that evangelical Christians in the eighteenth and nineteenth century didn’t see things that way. John Wesley preached against cruelty towards animals in his famous sermon on Romans 8, ‘The General Deliverance’. In a video on Evangelicals and Animals for St John’s School of Mission, Philip Sampson shows that Calvin, Baxter, Spurgeon, and many other evangelicals had similar concerns.

In the early nineteenth century, William Wilberforce joined with other Christians and a prominent Jew to campaign for the first laws against cruelty to animals and to set up the Society for the Protection of Animals, later the RSPCA. And Christians were the most prominent opponents of the cruelties of vivisection in the late nineteenth century, against Darwin, Huxley, and their followers, who wanted scientists to be able to vivisect animals without restriction.

So what inspired our Christian forebears to make the connection between their faith and concern for animals? The settled Christian view from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries is represented in an early fifteenth-century commentary on the Ten Commandments I recently came across, ‘Dives and Pauper’, which discusses whether animals are included under the prohibition ‘Thou shalt not kill’. It concludes that Genesis 9 gives humans permission to kill animals where necessary, but that they should not be treated cruelly, ‘For God that made all has care of all, and he shall take vengeance on all that misuse his creatures’. It concludes that

therefore men should have compassion on beast and bird and not harm them without cause and have regard for the fact that they are God’s creatures…

and that those who torment animals or birds for cruelty or vanity ‘sin most grievously’.

It is not a big step from this fifteenth century perspective to a Christian evaluation of what Gucci is doing in using exotic animals for its luxury fashion items. It turns out that snakes, alligators, and crocodiles often have their skins removed while they are still alive. Animals raised for fur are often left mutilated to suffer in traps, or farmed in barren cages in poor welfare conditions that led to the banning of fur farming in the UK. The cruelty inflicted on animals to produce fashionable accessories is the clearest possible example of tormenting animals for human vanity. Christians should have no part of this, as the church knew at least 600 years ago. Abbeys and other churches should not promote these products, and Christians should not purchase them.


So far, so uncontroversial, perhaps, but those of us who don’t buy crocodile handbags or mink coats should consider what is a daily practice for most of us that inflicts wholly unnecessary cruelties on vastly more of God’s animal creatures. Could it be that Christians need to think more widely about the implications of their faith for the intensive farming of animals? Here male day-old chicks are dropped into a mincer because they are no use to the egg industry. Here chickens raised for meat have been re-engineered to reach slaughter weight in 35 days, spent in huge windowless sheds, with their immature legs painfully struggling to support their outsize bodies. Here pigs have their tails cut off because they would otherwise torment each other by biting in the bare sheds in which they are raised before being transported for slaughter. I am convinced our predecessors in faith would be shocked at this vast range of unnecessary cruelty in which we are complicit through the food we choose to eat.

Perhaps it’s time for the church to think again about its attitudes to God’s animal creatures. There are signs that it’s happening already. Last year, Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si called Christians to recognize the value of each of God’s creatures, and major US evangelical denominations, including the Southern Baptists, signed up to the Evangelical Statement on Responsible Care for Animals that commits Christians to ‘treat all animals as living valued creatures, deserving of compassion, because they ultimately belong to God’.

CK-logo-254x95It seems to me that we’re at a tipping point, in which twenty-first century Christians could rediscover a care for God’s animal creatures that the church once knew was part of its mission. If you’d like to find out more and find resources for reflecting further on the issue follow our CreatureKind project.


61K9z2mZK7L._UX250_David Clough is Professor of Theological Ethics at the University of Chester. His first book, Ethics in Crisis: Interpreting Barth’s Ethics (Ashgate, 2005) was based on his Yale PhD. He then co-wrote Faith and Force: A Christian Debate about War (Georgetown University Press, 2007) with Brian Stiltner, arguing the pacifist side of the debate throughout. He co-edited the collection Creaturely Theology: On God, Humans and Animals (SCM, 2009) with Celia Deane-Drummond, a colleague at Chester. His latest book is On Animals I: Systematic Theology (T&T Clark, 2012), the first book to attempt a systematic theology of animals. It is the first volume of a two-volume work; the second volume will be entitled Theological Ethics.


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4 thoughts on “Westminster Abbey, Gucci, & Exotic Animal Skins”

  1. “His latest book is On Animals I: Systematic Theology (T&T Clark, 2012), the first book to attempt a systematic theology of animals.”

    Do you have this, is it good? It sounds fascinating, and covers an area I’ve never even considered looking at in that level of depth.

    Reply
  2. I’m all for animal welfare, but not PETA and their antics (see the “PETA” ep of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! for a raucous, but enlightening, breakdown).

    Reply
  3. I fully agree with you Ian. I am appalled that so many Christians I know are so complacent about the suffering of the animals they routinely caused by intensive farming methods. For decades I have been a virtual vegetarian because I can’t afford to eat free range meat regularly. I also boycott many types of chocolate bars and most factory-made cakes because they use eggs derived from hens kept in cramped cages. (Thankfully the battery cage has been stamped out of the UK but some alternatives are not much kinder.)
    I wonder if the reluctance of many Christians to follow their conscience on this matter is due to not being prepared to repent and reform their lives when it touches something as close to their heart as pleasure from food, and their minds insidiously and unconsciously find a way to blunt their conscience on this matter and to fabricate spurious justifications. We all have the ability to bury our heads in the sand when it suits us. Someone once said, “Believe what you will – you will anyway.”

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    • Surely friend that should be ‘follow your conscience’? Is it not more likely that most are restrained by budget, and deceived by the hygienic nature of meat purchasing – you really can’t tell the difference between the happy smiling cow at point of death and the miserable life so happy to die one, when you purchase that gleaming fresh looking cut and ready to stew beef. Now while the middle classes are happy to have others tell them right from wrong for those on less of a budget or at least less access to the overdraft and deferred payment being made miserable about the food you buy and told by the Prof what you should be eating, and wheat gluten isn’t like meat nor does soy milk make the tea you drink enjoyable, is just to have someone piss on your back and tell you it’s raining.
      These things belong to the nature of economics and perhaps a read of Goodchild’s Capitalism the price of piety would be of far more value than getting lost in nonsense that deflects away from the battle for the soul that is Capitalism. Do you think the poor sod working nightshift at MacDonald’s is any less ‘processed’.
      In short the Man is right but he’s so wrong like Christians’ rowing over ancient theories instead or rediscovering that it was Good News being proclaimed because I’ve never met a miserable person who could really give a shit for anyone or anything else.

      Reply

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