Rights and Duties Pertaining to Kept Animals

Rights and duties pertaining to kept animals
Although the classical texts cover a wide range of issues that are
applicable today, there are also many contemporary issues that are
in need of specific treatment. These issues include factory farming,
machine slaughtering, animal experimentation, pet abandonment
and caring for strays, declawing and debeaking, and the types of
animals that can be kept. Does the Sacred Law praise or censure the
way animals are kept in order to meet our demands for meat and
milk, or abandoning house pets who have never been out of doors
to fend for themselves once they become inconvenient, or dumping
fish down the toilet? Does the Sacred Law approve of sterilization,
or amputating the last joint of a cat’s digits in order to keep the
drapes and sofa pristine? Anyone who wishes to provide an Islamic
perspective on issues and questions such as these will benefit greatly
by first examining the literature that scholars have already written
related to the legal and ethical treatment of animals.
Knowledge of the laws and guidelines pertaining to animals is
essential to ensure that individual Muslims treat their own kept
animals in a way that is both legal and ensures welfare for all parties
(in this world and the Afterlife), to achieve an objective of Islamic
law, and to answer contemporary issues related to animals. This
paper will introduce these rules and guidelines in order to increase
awareness of Islamic legal and ethical norms regarding the treatment
of animals and their welfare, and to facilitate responding to
new issues.
The paper begins with a look at several key words from the
Arabic language that are used to refer to living creatures. Next the
paper presents a survey of texts from the Qur’an and hadith related
to the treatment of animals. The paper then presents a case study
of how rulings pertaining to kept animals developed within one
Sunni school of law (the Shāfiʿī school). This legal case study will
then be supplemented with literature from within the same school
that approaches the same topic from the perspectives of obtaining
animal welfare (maṣlaḥah), and beneficence (iḥsān). This case
study is the primary focus of this paper, as it serves as a basis for
Muslim and other scholars, ethicists, policy makers, activists (and
others) seeking to understand or apply Islamic moral theology to
the numerous contemporary issues related to kept animals.
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