Dog Aggression: Children and Their Pets
If you bless an animal, does that mean it has a soul, and if it has a soul, does that mean you shouldn’t eat it? Dina Litovsky, a photographer who has long had a conflicted relationship with meat, brought these questions to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on the Upper West Side last weekend for the 34th annual blessing of the animals, a ceremony meant to invoke harmony between people and nature.
Owners arrived with camels and cows, with vipers and rodents and all sorts largest maine coon cat of house pets. One man brought the frozen body of a dog that had died during the year. A tortoise cruised the aisle on a cart because it would have taken too long to let it walk. Spectators or congregants brought cameras and cellphones. Animals brought their best behavior. Ms. Litovsky, who is not religious — and who calls herself an “occasiotarian,” meaning that she eats meat occasionally — focused her camera on the animals as spectacles, treating their owners and the clerics as support figures.
“I tried to avoid taking cute animal photos,” she said. “I want it to be unsettling, where the animals are the main subject, and then the people are handling them and looking at them with so much care that each animal becomes a spectacle within itself. It was interesting to see how each animal was handled with such care and love. There were spiders and rats being cradled like precious objects.”
The Rt. Rev. Clifton Daniel, dean of the cathedral — also owner of a Maine coon cat named Max — had some answers. Yes, animals and all living things carry some aspect of God’s image. And no, this did not preclude eating them. Such is the way of the world since the Fall.
On the question of whether animals go to heaven, Bishop Daniel begged off, saying it was “above my pay grade,” but that he sure hoped they do. “Do I think I’ll meet my animals in heaven?” he asked. “Surely they’ve made sacrifices and given us great joys. I can’t imagine that their sacrifice goes unnoticed by God.”
The ceremony, he said, was meant to remind people of their stewardship over God’s creation, and how they’ve cared or not cared for it. Lately, the report card was not good, he added.
But at least this year he did not have to stand next to the camel, which sneezed on him last year. “I had to get my cassock cleaned,” he said.
Animals!
