By Sheldon Greaves

This past week has seen yet more brutality as the nation watches the shocking events unfold in the wake of the Samuel DuBose shooting. Meanwhile, America and the rest of the world has exploded in grief and outrage at the murder–I choose that word deliberately–of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe. I was amused, sort of, to see an opinion piece recently that chided the blogosphere for showing more outrage over Cecil than for Sandra Bland. First, I question the premise of the article; it isn’t clear to me that most major US political figures have found it politically necessary to make a statement on Cecil the way they have on Sandra Bland, for example. The article doesn’t really deliver any data to make that point.

I had personally concluded that my own anger at Cecil’s demise was that it so perfectly encapsulates the attitudes of the 1% towards the world and everything in it; take what you want, kill what you want, your money will smooth over any problems along the way. Responsibility is for poor people.

But then I saw this item on AlJazeera America, “Samuel DuBose, Cecil the lion, and the ethics of avowal” by Lori Gruen. She first demolishes one premise of the above-mentioned opinion piece that it is impossible to be outraged at more than one thing at a time. But then she makes a very strong argument that the two tragedies are connected in a very basic way:

Historically, disregard for the lives and bodies of black people has been justified through a process of dehumanization that specifically compares them to animals. (Protesters of the Michael Brown killing in Ferguson, Missouri, and the Freddie Grey killing in Baltimore, Maryland, were directly referred to as animals.) In the current taxonomy of power, white and black women are also often animalized, for example, when exploited as pieces of meat. If it were no longer acceptable to treat animals as animals and violate and kill them, the animalization process that serves to justify structures of white male power would be weakened. Weakening that structure is one way to avow the lives of those who were wantonly killed and perhaps allow more just social relations to develop from our grief and anger. (Links in original)

 This struck me for a number of reasons, both because it makes excellent sense of the larger situation, and because of a major theme in the Hebrew Scriptures regarding the value of life, both human and animal. To recap, in the Garden of Eden, humans are given dominion over the animals, but they are not allowed to kill them or use them in any way for food. Then, after the Flood, God makes a concession that human life is still inviolate, but animals may only be eaten if the blood is returned to God. In other words, the key to a viable society is that human blood may not be taken, and animal life may not be ingested. The penalty for violating this blood prohibition is the same as if the offender had committed murder, so the blood prohibition in Jewish law was taken very, very seriously.

Later, the fear of violating this prohibition is what gives rise to the Jewish dietary laws. They were an arbitrary set of rules to restrict the taking of animal life to an acceptable minimum. The Biblical legalists understood very well that how humans treat our animal friends has a clear influence on how we treat each other. I know may people who, upon visiting a person at home for the first time, pay attention to the way their pets behave as a metric of the character of their host.

A better world begins with a respect for life, both animal and human. This is a vital component even though, as the Hebrew Scriptures acknowledge, humans tend to be  carnivorous and homicidal. But our very survival as a civilization and perhaps even as a species may depend on whether we can rein in our collective dark side and understand that we are all–humans and animals alike–in this together.