Dominion over animals?

Question: God gaves us animals to eat. The Bible says we have "dominion" over them.

God gave us animals to eat. The Bible says we have "dominion" over them, so why shouldn't we eat them? This is a very complex question, about which much can be said. Entire books have been written on the subject.

Answer: "Dominion" doesn’t mean "exploitation", "decapitation" and "domination", but rather a responsibility for stewardship. All the world’s prominent religions teach the importance of both compassion and mercy as important values to cultivate. The choice to eat meat, dairy products, and eggs is a violent one—it supports abuse.

Most people would agree that God opposes unnecessary cruelty to animals, and would not condone beating cats and dogs to death. Many Christians and Jews are vegetarians because they're horrified by how God's animals are treated in industrialized farms. From their perspective, God designed chickens to build nests and raise their chicks; God designed pigs to root in the soil; God designed all animals to breathe fresh air, to play with one another, and so on. But today, animals are denied everything that God designed them to be and to do when confined and exploited by the meat production industry.

Even if religious beliefs allow people to eat factory-farmed meat, they certainly don’t require them to do so. Aside from the environmental and human consequences of eating animals, which are reason enough for faith-based people to adopt a vegan diet, God certainly created animals with needs, desires, and species-specific behaviors, and all these things are denied the animals who are turned into food by the modern farmed-animal industries. God also created animals with a well-developed capacity for pain, which causes extreme suffering in a factory-farm setting. Industrialized farms today bear little in common with the family-based agriculture of Biblical, Vedic and Quranic times.

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