The Bible’s respect for mothers of farm animals
A few years ago the city of Ucacha, Argentina, replaced wooden light posts with concrete ones. But they cut parts of the wooden posts where woodpeckers nested to attach them firmly to the corresponding concrete post at the same height. And voilà, those nests were saved to honor the love and care of a mother bird for her nestlings.
This weekly Torah portion (Emor) relates to forbidden cruel practices towards mother animals. More specifically, as my new book Taming the Beast: Human-Animal Encounters in the Bible (Wipf and Stock Publishers) notes, “the Torah tries to show a veritable degree of compassion to bovine mothers even within the realm of meat offerings. [Hence,] a newly born calf must not be slain for a sacrifice before it is at least eight days young, presumably to allow its mother a sense of motherhood, if not bonding, with her child.
[Unlike the pervasive merciless practices in the factory farm where calves are removed for good from their mothers a short time after birth]… the Torah seems to recognize here the need of the mother bovine to nurture her child. It would be heartlessly cold to butcher the young of a bovine, or even a fowl before its mother experiences a measure of maternal nurturing. Allowing her to do that would earn such livestock farmers the unique accolade of ‘people of holiness’ (Exod 22:30). Similarly, slaughtering them both on the same day on the altar would exhibit indifference to the motherly primal sentiments; it is prohibited too.
Maimonides avers that butchering a bovine child before its mother’s eyes (as she is next in line)—even on the altar as an offering to God, or even when the two slayings were not to be performed by the same butcher—would be a very cruel infliction, for there is no difference between the emotional pain that a human suffers to that of an animal. Why, the ‘maternal love and her compassion for the child do not derive from the individual’s wit,’ even as it is shared by most animals (birds included), just like humans experience these emotions.”
Besides these two cruel practices, the Torah bars two more insensitive or callous practices to be wielded against mother animals: “Concurrently eating meat and milk … and harming a mother bird (and effectively her nestlings too). All four prohibitions deliver the ‘sense that the order of nature is violated when the destruction of life includes the biological producer and nurturer of life’ comments Robert Alter.
Indeed, Nachmanides discerns—in the cases of the same-day slaughter of parent and child, and of the bird’s nest—a biblical grave concern with the resultant elimination of two generations: the ‘extinction of a whole species,’ or something akin to its ‘mass extermination.’ Yet, the overarching purpose, à la Nachmanides, of these biblical prohibitions is to ward off a person from developing ‘an evil heart’ and to ‘teach us the value of compassion lest we become cruel’; if it is not contained and overcome, it would ‘expand further in a person’s soul‘” (Taming the Beast …).
