Decades ago, before he was a nationally recognized face, Stephen Colbert featured a “Better Know a District” segment on his show The Colbert Report wherein he would parody a far-right cable news host as he interviewed members of Congress, attempting to get them in awkward situations for comedic effect.
In his interview with John Yarmuth, then a congressman from Louisville, Kentucky, Colbert referenced Yarmuth’s past life as a debater on local television. He challenged Yarmuth to point out his debating chops by immediately debating the alternative side of an issue of Colbert’s selecting. The stance Colbert selected to take was that throwing kittens right into a wood chipper was a nasty thing to do—and he then pointed to Yarmuth to argue the opposite side—that sometimes, throwing kittens in a wood chipper is the proper thing to do.
The joke, after all, was that no decent human being, much less a politician searching for votes from a majority of the population, would ever wish to be seen making the case for throwing kittens in a wood chipper. This past week, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem proved that, as much because the American public has shifted on all types of issues, there still isn’t much of a constituency on this country for “Throw Kittens within the Wood Chipper”—or, more accurately on this case, “Shoot Puppies within the Head.”
In fact, many individuals have noted that this could be essentially the most united that Americans of each parties and all tribes have been of late—all in expressing revulsion at Noem’s self-disclosure in her memoir that she “hated” her 14-month-old dog Cricket. When Cricket wasn’t trained enough to hunt pheasants as a substitute of chickens, then bit the governor, Noem shot the dog and buried her in a gravel pit.
There’s little query that Noem won’t be gunning down her next pet from the vice-presidential residence on the Naval Observatory. That’s obvious. What’s less obvious is why, even with all of our moral divisions, this type of story can still call forth such strong emotions in most individuals.
Michael Knowles, a commentator at The Daily Wire, argued that the outrage over Noem’s boast of her dog-killing skills is just another example of liberal elitism. Urban progressives are those who treat pets like children, he said, sometimes pushing their dogs or cats down city streets in baby strollers.
To a point, he’s right. I can’t imagine a soul where I grew up, within the little Woolmarket community of Biloxi, Mississippi, ever putting a dog in a baby carriage. That said, Knowles’s argument could only come from an urban dweller who knows no more about rural America than the people he lampoons. It had the texture of The Office’s Michael Scott—after getting caught undressing in his office—telling receptionist Pam that “European offices are naked on a regular basis.” Pam replies, “They’re so not.”
Yes, rural Americans often don’t depend on veterinarians to euthanize their sick pets. Sometimes, a fast, merciful shooting—somewhat than an injection—is, in truth, how someone will “put down” a dog suffering with distemper or rabies or cancer. It doesn’t follow, though, that almost all people—rural, urban, or suburban—would kill a pet for not being trained properly (or a cow for not producing enough milk, etc.).
So why does this story evoke such strong emotion—enough to shoot a politician’s political profession within the face in front of the entire world?
A friend texted me that query on day three of the news story. He wasn’t for gunning down puppies, but how, he wondered, with all that’s happening—including the potential for World War III erupting from Gaza or Ukraine or Iran or Taiwan—would this be such a giant story?
Other people would indicate that there’s a lot human suffering that we put out of our mind. Those who consider (as do I) that abortion is a violent act, or those that consider (as do I) that some capital punishment techniques are inhumane, might wonder why a puppy can unite us in recognizing cruelty when these other things don’t.
That’s a very good query. It could be that recognizing animal cruelty will not be necessarily a substitute for a priority for (vastly more necessary) human dignity, however it could be a start line for recognizing a greater truth.
As much as some caricature the Bible’s picture of humanity because the crowning point of creation as being the origin of a rapacious mistreatment of the earth—including animals—almost nobody really believes that animal life and human life are equal in moral value or moral accountability.
When the ethics entity I led got here out for laws banning animal fighting (corresponding to when one gambles on which pit bull or which rooster will kill the opposite), a really concerned church lady tell us that she thought it was a waste of time. “Animals don’t know what the law is,” she said. “If they wish to fight, they simply fight.”
We had to elucidate that the bill was to not penalize animals within the wild from fighting one another. She misunderstood the bill, but her intuitions were in the proper place. We find Kristi Noem shooting Cricket to be morally weighty in a way we don’t find Cricket killing chickens. Human beings are morally responsible creatures in a novel way—including in the best way we treat our fellow creatures.
The Bible tells us so. When Jesus said that a human life is price “greater than many sparrows” (Luke 12:7), he did so within the context of claiming that not considered one of those sparrows is forgotten or unnoticed by God (v. 6). In fact, the Bible itself shows us that we’re designed to see a parallel between animal creatures and ourselves in some key respects.
The apostle Paul references the command “Do not muzzle an ox while it’s treading out the grain” as an analogy for paying those that labor inside the church their just wages (1 Tim. 5:18). The entire Old Testament sacrificial system is about seeing something morally significant, though not ultimate, within the shed blood of bulls and lambs in a way that may not be the identical with, say, an offering of wheat or of bread.
God commanded the people of Israel under Moses—just as he would before in the times of Noah and afterward with the early Christian church—to not eat the blood of an animal: “For the lifetime of a creature is within the blood, and I actually have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it’s the blood that makes atonement for one’s life” (Lev. 17:11).
We learn to acknowledge the Lamb of God through hundreds of years of God’s people seeing, well, actual lambs.
We recognize this created analogy when things go horribly mistaken with the best way people treat animals. Almost every story a couple of serial killer’s childhood includes the torture of animals. Consciences which are seared in some things often move to greater and greater things. The lack of the power to wince on the sight of a suffering animal is usually an early sign of an identical lack of conscience on the pain of other human beings.
By contrast, how a lot of us grew up higher in a position to take care of and love other human beings because we loved and took care of a Labrador retriever or some guinea pigs?
Children ravenous in Gaza are more necessary than dogs and cats. Vulnerable unborn human life is of more significance than that of pets. The poor should compel us to compassion more so than cruelty to animals. That human beings are more necessary doesn’t mean, though, that the lives of animals are not necessary.
Part of the fallenness of this world is that, as sinners, we seek to make invisible whatever we as human beings don’t wish to see. When we don’t wish to see the suffering of a poor Lazarus under the table or a beaten man off the road to Jericho, we turn away.
Often, our proximity to the pets we love implies that we don’t sinfully protect ourselves from seeing them. We wince once we hear of cruelty to them because we aren’t expecting it, and we will imagine it.
Rather than denouncing the inconsistency here—of loving sparrows greater than people—perhaps we should always do it the opposite way around. Maybe we should always note that all of us appear to rightly recognize that we should always treat our pets without cruelty—after which we would ask ourselves why we don’t extend an excellent more emphatic moral responsibility for each other.
We live in a world of ethical numbness, of human cruelty. We disagree on matters that must be obvious to any functioning conscience. When we see an exception to that, we should always note it and be glad.
We appear to still know that shooting a puppy and throwing kittens right into a wood chipper is a nasty thing to do. We should attempt to ask why we notice it and seek to construct on that.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
