What Are Animals For?

I'm constantly on the lookout for insights leading to understanding of the purpose of animals in God's design of planet earth—something besides eating them, which is not why they were created (Genesis 1:29-30).

A January 25, 2010, Time magazine article (time.com—don't know if it was in the print version) is helpful in this regard. It profiles the new plans of organic gardening guru Eliot Coleman and his wife, Barbara Damrosch (gardening columnist for the Washington Post), to integrate a small herd of cows and sheep into their Maine organic farmstead. Heretofore, the couple has raised only veggies and written books, sharing their knowledge. But now, for environmental reasons, they are going to incorporate the animals into their plans for sustainability. They are not vegetarians; they are incorporating animals into the life cycles of their growing operations because of what the animals add to the environment (besides eventually ending up on the table).

This is one of those situations where I'm happy to take the good with the bad. I don't support the consumption of the animals for food, but I do support the ideas Coleman will work out for what the animals add to a sustainable lifestyle: specifically, healthy reproduction of grasslands through rotational grazing, the provision of manure for composting to aid in plant production, and the sequestering of carbon in the soil instead of the air. (The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO] issued a report in 2006 saying that factory farming of cattle contributes more greenhouse gas emissions [i.e., methane gas from the cows] to the atmosphere than all the transportation vehicles in the world.)

In other words, these are significant contributions the animals make to a sustainable environment without being eaten. Most people think of this in reverse: We raise the animals for meat and oh, by the way, they have these other benefits. But it's the "other benefits" that are part of the animals' life when they do what they naturally do. They provide these benefits by simply existing, not because they are being raised to be consumed.

It's easy to imagine how, in a perfect world, large and small grazing animals could play a significant role during their lifespan in promoting the ecology and sustainability of the planet—without having to be eaten. This article provides a good overview of those benefits.

[The picture above is used without permission from the time.com article. See link above.]