In this thought-provoking piece, the Revd Dr Jan Goodair challenges us to rethink the language we use to describe our relationship with animals. Moving beyond the limitations of ‘dominion’ and ‘stewardship,’ she invites us to embrace new models rooted in fellowship, companionship, and hospitality. With theological insight and practical vision, Jan explores how these concepts can transform the way we value and care for the other-than-human members of God’s creation.
I imagine that most of us who have made our way to the Sarx website have long ago ditched the language of ‘dominion’ when it comes to talking about our relationship with animals. Yet I wonder if we have too easily exchanged ‘dominion’ for ‘stewardship’. I want to explain why I find both of these terms problematic, and share with you some of the alternatives that I have been exploring: fellowship, companionship and hospitality.
Dominion (a term presented in Genesis 1:26) has, at its worst, been interpreted as ‘power over’, as a license to treat and exploit animals in any way that brings us pleasure or benefit, however much that might be to their suffering and detriment. Using ‘dominion’ as the framework for our relationship with animals would mean that we could conveniently avoid any moral questions about our interactions with them: anything can be justified. Some thinkers have tried to rehabilitate the term by speaking of dominion as limited, illustrated, for example, in the Genesis 1 prohibition against eating animals and the restriction in Genesis 2:17 against eating from one particular tree in the garden. Others have tried to temper the term by relating it to the way in Hebrew kings exercised dominion. There was a tradition of seeing the kings as servants of both God and the people: they did not exercise dominion for their own benefit but were charged with the task of keeping God’s order and passing on God’s blessings. Passing on God’s blessings to animals sounds quite encouraging. Sadly, however, I don’t think we will ever communicate that idea if we continue to use the word ‘dominion’. During his childhood, my now very adult son, connected that word with the cartoon series ‘He-man and the Masters of the Universe’. It’s difficult to rehabilitate a word with that sort of association.
What then of stewardship? It’s not a term that the Bible itself uses in the context of our relationship with animals or to creation as a whole. Yet we have come to use it in these contexts, and many seem to feel quite comfortable with it, the use of a different term seemingly signifying a different hinterland of underlying attitudes. To a certain extent, there is a degree of truth in this. Biblically, stewards are depicted as people responsible for the financial management of households and estates on behalf of owners. Both Old and New Testament references to stewards contain clear notions of accountability: a steward can’t manage affairs for their own benefit but must do what the owner wishes and will be held responsible for mismanagement. There are some encouraging signs as we apply this understanding to our relationship to animals: there is no despotism here, and since God is the owner who has declared all creation to be very good, we can be sure that God intends us (the stewards) to take care of the animals whom God values. And yet …
Photo credit: Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Media
Stewardship does not solve the problem of our need to reconceptualise our relationship with animals. This is partly because we changed the word without changing our behaviours, continuing to destroy natural habitats, to imprison, torture and kill animals with only our own needs in mind. However, there are also aspects of the stewardship model itself that means it can never really serve a deep change in human-animal relationships: hierarchy and dualism are problematic features of this model. Hierarchy is built into the model. As Karen Armstrong observed, God is securely located at the “apex of the pyramid and human beings as his [sic] deputies on earth”.[1] The hierarchy continues downwards, with all the ‘things’ human stewards are charged with managing existing beneath them. Stewardship is a model which implies the superiority of human beings over animals. There are also some dualistic associations with the stewardship model. Ruth Page has observed that stewardship is a form of management of resources and that this “immediately makes a distinction of kind and not degree between the steward and what is stewarded,” [2] Taking these two points together, stewardship still ‘invites’ us to see ourselves as different from, superior to, and more valuable than, other-than-human animals. So, although talk of ‘responsibility’ makes stewardship sound gentler and more benign than dominion, it still privileges the human and may be little more than dominion in disguise.
So where do we go from here? We are looking for a new way of speaking of our relationship with animals which carries forward none of the old associations of dominating, subduing, managing and even – possibly – of domesticating, of bringing them under our control.
St Francis might make a good starting point, with his talk of Brother Sun and Sister Moon. There is no hierarchy here. It has been said many times that Francis took the core Christian call to love God and love neighbour and expanded it so that it included all creatures, all creation. Everything that exists, including the animals, is drawn into a single fellowship of connection and obligation. And much as I struggle with the maleness of the term ‘fellowship’, I think it offers a possible way forwards: It carries a sense of all life being in this together, a level playing field of value for humans and animals, where differences and connection can both be honoured.
We might be able to free ourselves from the complications of gendered language by embracing the term ‘companionship’. At its linguistic root, a companion is one with whom we share bread. We can expand that image to embrace the reality of humans and other animals gathered around the single table that is planet earth: as our present Pope said so powerfully, we share a “common home”. Perhaps even more significant is to consider the way we understand human companionship and then extend that to our relations to animals. Companions are those with whom we are in relationship: there is a healthy recognition of interdependence, and yet each companion remains themself with a distinct identity. A model of companionship amongst humans and other animals might be helpful in fostering within us sensitive and respectful engagement.
And finally, I offer you the model of hospitality, one which I am only just beginning to explore, thanks to contact with Northumbria Community. You may be familiar with Rublev’s icon of the Trinity (a.k.a. The Hospitality of Abraham) where the three persons of the Trinity sit around a table at which there is an empty space to which we are invited. When we offer hospitality to other people, whether in our homes or in encounters in the world, we invite them into a free space – “a friendly emptiness”[3] – where they are welcome to be themselves, whatever that might mean, without judgement or any attempt by us to impose our own convictions and will on them. Wow! How different things might be if we offered such hospitality to animals: a free space in which they could be themselves and pursue their natural behaviours, free of our attempts to control or manage them. The cages would be empty, the enclosures would be gone and we would be stepping back from environmental destruction in order that our animal companions might still have space in our common home. Sounds almost as unbelievable as Isaiah’s vision of the Peaceful Kingdom.
[1] Karen Armstrong 1998 – In the Beginning: A new reading of the Book of Genesis p10, Fount, London
[2] Ruth Page 1996 – God and the Web of Creation p158, SCM, London
[3] Henri J M Nouwen – Reaching Out (quoted in a Northumbria Community internal resource)
The Revd Dr Jan Goodair is a retired School Chaplain who completed a PhD on Christian attitudes to animals. She shares her home with 3 cats and is working on a more wildlife friendly garden.
