Animals

For as long as we have been human, and perhaps well before that, animals have played key roles in our religious beliefs.2 More than 30,000 years ago, for example, the Paleolithic peoples of western Europe painted carefully detailed, naturalistic images of Ice Age animals on the walls of caves like Chauvet and Lascaux in France (Bahn and Vertut 1997; Chauvet et al. 1996). Without written records, we cannot know for certain what these animal images meant to the people who painted them. Nevertheless, we can be sure that these images, and the animals they depicted, were central to Paleolithic religious beliefs and practices. This is true both because of the very high quality of the paintings and their location in the spiritually charged, liminal spaces of caves, which are so often connected with death and rebirth by peoples around the world. Moving to more recent times, animals have been important subjects and

objects of religious belief to indigenous peoples around the world, from the Earth Diver duck of the creation stories of the Cheyenne people in North America (Grinnell 1926/1962: 242-244) to the Ancestral Kangaroo of the Yolngu Aboriginal people of Australia (Morphy 1989: 155-157). Animals also figure prominently in other religious traditions, from the symbolic lamb of Christianity to the sacred Mother Cow of Hindu religions. We should also note that human beings ourselves are animals, and so even when religions seem fully anthropocentric or speciesist (exclusively focused on human concerns over those of all other beings), they are nonetheless also discussing animals-human ones. Yet despite their importance in nearly every human religion, the roles of

other than human animals in religious beliefs have received little sustained, critical study until relatively recently. For example, the Animals and Religion Group of the American Academy of Religion was not officially founded until 2003 (Van Horn 2011), and A Communion of Subjects, the first comprehensive survey of the roles of animals in world and indigenous religious traditions, was not published until 2006 (Waldau and Patton 2006).3 Why has there been so little interest in studying animals and religion for so long?