Didn't God give us animals to use?

The objection

“God gave humans dominion over the animals. Scripture is explicit, they were put here for us to use. Eating them isn’t a sin; it’s part of the order of creation.”

The answer

Take scripture seriously, then, and read the next few verses. The same Genesis chapter that grants dominion (1:26) goes straight on to prescribe the diet: “I have given you every herb bearing seed… and every tree… to you it shall be for meat” (1:29). The original creation in the text is plant-based. Animals as food appear only later, after the Flood (Genesis 9:3), and many theologians read that as a concession to a fallen, violent world rather than the ideal. Argue from Genesis and Genesis hands you Eden as the model.

Now the word itself. “Dominion” has been read as stewardship, responsible care rather than a right to exploit, for centuries, well before the modern animal movement. It’s the standard position of theologians like Andrew Linzey and a strand running through Catholic and Protestant teaching alike. A king has dominion over his people, and nobody thinks that entitles him to farm them. To rule as God rules is to protect what’s in your charge.

So the dominion argument cuts the other way. A steward who confines, mutilates and kills billions of creatures, most of them in conditions no scripture describes, for a pleasure he doesn’t need has abused the trust rather than exercised it. Whatever else “having dominion” means, it can’t mean that the welfare of the ruled counts for nothing.

You can hold that animals were given into our care. That is exactly why the care has to be taken seriously.