I think about meat a lot.

I’m not a vegetarian. I probably should be, based on my worldview. It’s not omnivorism that I struggle with; that’s just what our bodies are made for. We’re animals, and animals must eat. The problem is industry. I have deep objections to the treatment of livestock and the conditions in slaughterhouses. All that fear, all that suffering. My constant consumption of meat, then, is everyday hypocrisy. It’s not fully a choice: the unsteady state of my mind and health put a stopper on any major dietary restrictions. I also like eating meat. That’s not a new or bold take. Enjoying meat is in our nature. Even so, I fixate on the ethics of it. What must it be like to be a chicken, or a cow, or, especially, a sheep (Ovis aries)?

Like a great many things, humans’ domestication of sheep probably began in Mesopotamia in around 10,000 BCE. Modern domestic sheep likely began as mouflon, a wild species still found throughout the Levant. We’ve had sheep for as long as we’ve had civilisation; or, we’ve had civilisation for as long as we’ve had sheep. We liked its meat before anything else: it wasn’t until around 3000 BCE that we seem to have gotten around fleece. As with all ancient history, this is speculative. We’ll never know who precisely loved sheep enough to consider them as useful in life as they are in death. Once we did figure out wool, it was a vital influence in human migration further north. We took sheep with us and they kept us warm. Since then, the story of humans and sheep has remained steady. We raise them, we shear them, we eat them. And because of us, they have been permitted to exist.

We’re not kind to livestock. The scale on which the current human population requires meat does not facilitate kindness. There are, of course, degrees to this. Slaughter is violent, but what comes before does not have to be. Antipodean sheep husbandry specifically has faced international pressure to cease our practice of mulesing, a mutilation performed to prevent certain diseases. It’s not the sheep we want to shield from disease—it’s their meat. Live export is another issue; one that I feel frankly unqualified to delve into in a silly little animal essay. Temple Grandin and I have significant overlap in our autisms, but they aren’t identical. I’ve never had the self-confidence necessary to be an assertive ethicist. I’m grateful that she does.

Livestock's survival is a matter of the food chain. Sometimes you survive by becoming useful to the thing that’s bigger than you. Sheep haven’t just survived this way, they’ve thrived. There are countries with more sheep than people. Even when they outnumber us, though, there’s no particular risk of them taking over. How do I put this delicately? Sheep are not smart animals. Most livestock aren't. It is disadvantageous for our meat to be too smart. This is what puts some people off octopus. It’s practical in terms of agriculture, lest we turn into a sort of Animal Farm situation, but it’s also about relativity. The closer an animal is to us, the harder it is to eat. Ape meat is taboo in most places. It is beneficial to people for sheep to be stupid, and so it has become beneficial for sheep to be stupid.

Sheep aren’t just a resource, though. An animal is never just an animal, at least not where humans are concerned. Metaphors about herding and following and flocks are almost ubiquitous. We count them to sleep, we use them as an insult, we refer to them when we want to talk about innocence. In Abrahamic faiths specifically, sheep are kind of the entire point.

My relationship with God is as normal as the next Catholic-raised transsexual with a PhD in Religious Studies. I’m religious in the absolute sense of the word, in that I engage in religious behaviour and thought. See? That’s the short of shit that gets you the degree. Maybe it’s possible to talk about sheep without thinking about God, but that’s certainly not the case for me. It always comes back around. Both of them come from the Levant. Both of them are about trust and betrayal.

Sheep show up constantly in the Bible, in both testaments. They show up in the Torah and Qu’ran, too, but I didn’t grow up with those. It’s difficult to move two metres in the Bible without running into a sheep. The Lord is my shepherd, the lamb of God, the Good Shepherd, et cetera, et cetera. It makes sense: there were a lot of sheep around the people writing the thing. It does, however, lend itself to certain interpretations of the human-God relationship. About how God thinks about us.

You can take the view of agriculture when it comes to God. Humans as livestock, producing something we can never understand. I get the appeal. I just don't find it convincing. I’ve never really bought into the idea that we’re cosmically that special. Anthropocentrism is both a secular and a religious issue. Maybe chinchillas are producing God’s equivalent of fossil fuels and we’re just set dressing. Did you ever think about that? More compelling, I think, is the equivalence of scale and intelligence. We raise sheep, and they trust us to raise them. They are entirely dependent on us and this is not a problem for them, right up until the slaughter, when it very, very quickly becomes a problem. Raising animals for meat requires betrayal. I don’t think that means we shouldn’t do it. The idea of agriculture is beyond a sheep’s comprehension. Sheep don’t really care that we want their meat, they just know that we keep them alive. If God is a shepherd, then I don’t know what the shepherd wants, and I don’t think I really have the capacity to understand, nor does anyone. All that I know is that we’re here and we keep being here, despite everything.

Animals make me believe in God, not because I believe in intelligent design, but because it’s such a miracle to exist alongside them. Every step of evolution is so unlikely. It’s taken us so, so long to get here, all just so we can be here now, together, all of us. The miracle has to come from somewhere, at least as far I can see it. That being said, I’m not in the slightest bit an evangelist. Everyone has their own way of seeing it, even if it means deciding there’s nothing to see. I am delighted and compelled by the thousands of ways humans have found to describe what is bigger than us. We all have to survive somehow. Evolution is a miracle to me as well. Creation is best understood as a verb. I believe in God as an abstraction, not as a literal force. Again, this is the kind of shit that gets you a PhD.

Like any well-adjusted person, I have a favourite Biblical sheep. It's the ram Abraham kills in place of Isaac in Genesis. Certain people who know me very well will be unsurprised by this. Abraham and Isaac are second only to Cain and Abel when it comes to Biblical families I think about constantly. My brain works awesome, thanks for asking.

For those unfamiliar with Genesis, the Binding of Isaac goes like this. As part of their newly formed covenant, God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, on the mountain Jehovah-jireh. Isaac accompanies his father up the mountain. The author doesn’t say if Isaac knew what was to be done to him. I don’t think any of us ever do. At the top, Abraham binds his son and places him on the altar and prepares to burn him alive. At the final moment, right before Abraham burns his pleading son, an Angel appears. Abraham has passed God’s test: he was willing to sacrifice his son. The Bible doesn’t say, but it sounds a lot like God learned something from Abraham in that moment. The Angel offers a ram for slaughter in Isaac’s place. Father and son descend the mountain together. The ram’s not the point of the story; neither is Isaac, really. We don’t get a lot on Isaac’s personality after his binding. Part of the Bible’s appeal is the opportunity for projection. I doubt Isaac ever forgot about that ram and what they shared. I certainly can't. 

My favourite William Blake poem is “The Lamb.” Lambs make an appearance in “Tyger, Tyger” as well, but “The Lamb” wins out for me.

Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee

  Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb I'll tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.      

I’m obsessed with the tone of “For he calls himself a Lamb.” It’s a cynicism towards God characteristic of Blake, one with which I resonate immensely. The problem of suffering is as old as faith. Monotheism makes it especially thorny. Polytheism’s range of forces of creation and destruction makes it notably easier to process the nuances of joy and suffering in the world. With just one guy in control of everything, though, what’s the deal? And why, knowing what we know, seeing what we see, should we trust that He has our best interests in mind? How can we trust Him after what He did to Isaac?

Blake believes in God, but he doesn’t trust Him. It’s not unreasonable. Humans use sheep for a lot of things, some of which the lamb must be dead for. I don’t know if sheep notice when one of their flock goes missing; if they note the considering eye of the shepherd. And if they did, what could they do about it? Pray?

The shepherd might find the sheep that’s wandered off, but that doesn’t mean the flock is meant to live. Love isn’t the same thing as mercy.

When a lot of bad things happen to you, it’s sort of inevitable that you begin to think about God. For some, this is a short process: atheism is appealing for a number of reasons, some of those the same as people’s reasons for faith. Certainty is comforting. Agnosticism is a state of perpetual doubt. I have always lived my life in a state of doubt.

I have a deep, consuming need to Figure Things Out. This much is probably obvious to anyone who’s ever met me. I write not because I know things, but because I want to work it out. I write about animals because I want to find out what it means for me to be an animal. I write about sheep because I feel guilty about eating meat. I write about God because I want to know why He’s doing this to me. To all of us. I write because I desperately want an answer to all this doubt. I’ll probably be writing forever.

Despite all this—my cynicism, my doubt, my immense distrust of whatever God may exist—I can’t avoid the comfort it brings. I’m writing this particular essay from my room in a psychiatric ward. During this stay I’ve taken to listening to hymns on repeat. In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me. I don’t know if that means anything for the long-term. All that I know is that in my most desperate moments, few things calm me like the absolute, unwavering faith expressed by those songs. If I can’t have confidence in all this, then at last someone can. Maybe that’s the comfort I find, ultimately: that even as I doubt and scream and pound at the earth with my bloody fists, there is some mode of existence that does not necessitate that. I don’t know if I’ll ever have access to that mode. But it’s comforting to know that it’s there for some. I guess agnosticism means that I, too, have some kind of hope that it’s all real, that there is relief to be had in the end. If Heaven’s not my home, O Lord, what will I do?

I don’t have a profound conclusion for this one. I fear I’ve gotten away from sheep a bit. There’s not an easy answer to the question of meat, nor to the question of God. Like Isaac, like Blake, I’ll probably spend the rest of my life with this uneasy, wavering faith. The idea of something greater is as much a threat as it is a comfort. I am Isaac, and I am a sheep, and the difference between God and a father and a shepherd is blurry at best. I’ll probably spend the rest of my life trying to figure out what that means. Like a sheep, all I can do is pray.