By The Reverend Professor Andrew Linzey, Director of Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics

Revised version of an address at the Memorial Service for Vicki Moore at Liverpool Cathedral, England, on 10 April, 2000. Originally published in The Ark, Journal of the Catholic Study Circle for Animal Welfare, Summer 2000.

All of us have moments of illumination. Moments when we see clearly. Moments that change us – sometimes forever. Moments when we decide that we must take a stand.

Vicki Moore’s moment of illumination is well-known. It happened in the most pedestrian of circumstances. She went to buy a newspaper for her mother. Flicking through the pages, she read of how in a small Spanish village a donkey was to be crushed to death in a religious fiesta. “And what are you going to do about it?” asked a reporter, to which she amazed herself by replying: “I’m going over there to stop it.”

The rest of the story we know: how the world’s press followed her to Spain; how Blackie the donkey was saved; how she and Tony (Vicki’s husband) repeatedly visited Spain to expose the gratuitous and grotesque mutilation of innocent creatures; how they founded the organisation FAACE (Fight Against Animal Cruelty in Europe), and how this work became their life’s work.

What Vicki could not have known however is that that moment of illumination and resolve would lead to her own Golgotha. To begin with it was the ridicule, the hostility, the personal abuse, the death threats, not to mention her own fears, not least of all her own phobia of bulls and cattle. Then came that terrible, unspeakable day of 25 June 1995. The so-called accident when Vicki was almost gored to death. It was those crucifying injuries that made her last years a daily battle with pain. Vicki died from a failure to recover from a routine operation due entirely to those injuries sustained five years ago.

Perhaps the most poignant memory that Tony has was when Vicki was lying in a Spanish hospital, three weeks after the goring. Vicki had a tracheotomy and was unable to speak but through signs she asked Tony what happened to the bull — called Argentino — that had attacked her. When Tony told her that Argentino had been shot, Vicki herself burst into tears. Up to the last she minimised her own sufferings lest she — rather than the animals — became the focus of media attention. Vicki died when she was only 44 years old.

It is not enough to marvel at Vicki’s personal qualities: her remarkable bravery, her patient endurance of suffering, her steadfast refusal to abandon hope; her total and unswerving dedication to achieving some alleviation of suffering.

Neither is it enough to say that she demonstrated in her life how facile and repugnant is the common media perception of animal protectionists as human-haters or advocates of violence. Here was someone who put her life on the line, who sacrificed everything she had in pursuit of a vision of a cruelty-free, violence free world. It was a life tragically cut short by a death ironically resembling the very forces of evil against which her life was dedicated.

Neither is it enough to offer homage because Vicki stands in a long tradition of saints and seers, poets, philanthropists and thinkers who have championed the cause of animals. Let us not forget that it was in Liverpool in 1809, almost 200 years ago, that the first animal protection society in the world was founded. It was called the Society for the Suppression of Wanton Cruelty to Animals. It may have been short-lived, but it provided the inspiration for that Anglican priest, Arthur Broome to found the SPCA (as it then was) in 1824. As long as the cause of animal protection is remembered Vicki’s name will be honoured.

All these things are true but they are not enough. We shall not understand Vicki or comprehend the significance of her life if we do not grasp her basic insight and illumination. It is this: the deliberate infliction of suffering upon innocent, defenceless, unprotected, sentient creatures is nothing less than intrinsically evil.

“What is it”, asks John Henry Newman, “that moves our very hearts and sickens us so much as cruelty to animals? First, that they have done no harm; next, that they have no power of resistance; it is the cowardice and tyranny of which they are the victims that makes their suffering so especially touching. There is something so dreadful, so satanic in tormenting those who have never harmed us, and who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power, who have weapons neither of offence or defence.” This then is the underlying theological rationale: the Christ-like innocence of animals. “For what was this,” thunders Newman, “but the very cruelty inflicted upon our Lord?” For Christians of all people whose eyes are fixed on the innocent suffering of the Crucified ought to be sensitised to the innocent suffering of fellow creatures.

It is fitting, though I fear a little ironical, that we are here in Liverpool Cathedral. For the very fiestas and spectacles that Vicki opposed, then as now, were defended as religious, even Christian, rituals. Vicki used to say, constrained by charity, that the sins of the Church were mainly ones of omission. I confess today that I do not feel so constrained. In the words of Helen Jones: “The Church should be a leader in the movement for the protection of animals but it is not even in the procession.” Why was the Church so weak-kneed and faithless in its own proclamation of the Gospel that it did not lift a finger to prevent the growth of Satanic animal crucifying rituals in its midst? Bulls burned alive, goats pushed off towers, doves literally crucified on cartwheels. No theology can justify the failure of the Church and no decent Christian would want to do so. Guilt may be a neurotic emotion, but shame, yes, is what we should feel when we hear that the churches passes by on the other side.

But shame — either for our lack of humanity or for the sins of the Church — is not enough. All around us there are new apologists for cruelty that must be confronted. We often pride ourselves that England is the place where bull fighting and bull baiting and cockfighting are no more but recently, only a few miles away, the barbarity of hare coursing reached its ugly summit in the annual Waterloo Cup. Those who do not want us to see the evil of taking pleasure in pain have found new friends in the media and the so-called ‘countryside’ lobby. If we want to keep faith with Vicki we must do more than commemorate the honoured dead, important though that is — we must turn our illumination into resolve, our insight into action, we must face the cruelty in our midst and have the same courage to act.

There can be no compromise with cruelty. I want to be heard saying this just in case someone from the Government is listening. You can no more regulate hunting for sport than you can regulate child abuse. Either you see the issue or you are forever in the moral wilderness.

If we are tempted to despair then we need to ponder Vicki’s story in the context of the Christian story of passion, crucifixion, and resurrection. The truth to be grasped is that God is on the side of the innocent, the defenceless, the weak, and the unprotected. We must be careful in speaking about God: she has often been misunderstood. But I have to say in all honesty I believe that Vicki’s cause is God’s own cause. The face of God is found on the faces of all those innocents who suffer in the world. Gethsemane, Calvary and the Empty Tomb are all one. In the words of Jurgen Moltmann: “God has made the suffering of the world his own in the Cross of his Son.” It is a matter of immense reassurance to me that there will be some human beings like Vicki in heaven alongside all those abused and tortured animals who will most certainly be there.

I end by asking you to support Vicki’s husband, loyal friend and co-visionary, Tony Moore. Tony’s agonies during the last fifteen years would have finished lesser men. He has kept faith both with Vicki and with the cause and he deserves our powerful support. I urge you to do all you can to make FAACE’s continuing work a living testimony to Vicki’s faith in a cruelty-free world.

Goodbye Vicki
Death will not defeat you
Nor will it blacken our darkness
Your vision will make the blind see
And your Christ-like ministry lives on
In those who see the face of the Crucified
In all the faces of suffering in our world.

Amen.

---

See images of bullfighting.