On a Christian approach to animal suffering

Andrew Linzey considers whether any of the putative differences between humans and animals make animal suffering 'less deserving of moral solicitude'. Concluding that they don't, he goes on to present an argument, due to John Henry Newman, why the suffering of animals should be a matter, specifically, of Christian moral solicitude:

Preaching on the text from Isaiah 53, 7, which compares the Messiah to "a lamb that is led to the slaughter", Newman says that since scripture compares Christ to this "inoffensive and unprotected animal" so we may "without presumption or irreverence take that image as a means of conveying to our minds those feelings which our Lord's suffering should excite within us".

Narrating examples of suffering, Newman exclaims: "For what was this but the very cruelty inflicted on our Lord?" With that question he posits the moral equivalence between the suffering of animals and the suffering of Christ himself. He concludes: "Think, then, my brethren, of your feelings at cruelty practised on brute animals, and you will gain one feeling which the history of Christ's Cross and Passion ought to excite within you."

Although Newman elsewhere seems to endorse the usual Christian position of animals, his view here is unmistakable: the innocence of the suffering of animals is Christ-like.

Now, if one wants a 'christological basis for sensitivity to all innocent suffering' such as Linzey says Newman here provides, then appealing to the comparison in Isaiah 53, 7, seems fair enough to me. Some Christians may indeed want the christological basis, and I can see no reason why they shouldn't do.

At the same time, there's something about the way Linzey sets out Newman's lesson that prompts a further thought. I don't know Newman's text, and haven't been able to find it on the internet; but the order of Linzey's presentation suggests that before Newman treats the suffering of animals as like the suffering of Christ, he uses the suffering of lambs to invite our understanding of the kind of suffering Christ endured. In other words, he takes us from empathy with the suffering of innocent lambs to a feeling for the suffering of Christ, and only then - in Linzey's gloss - reverses direction so as to see the animal suffering as Christ-like. What that says to me, as a non-Christian atheist, is that an understanding of suffering, of suffering tout court - for don't we have a feeling for animal suffering because humans also suffer, as we know at first-hand? - is the fundamental moral datum here and it needs nothing else outside (or 'above') it as a basis of moral solicitude and further moral reasoning. This has a bearing on the claim one sometimes encounters that morality without religion is insufficiently anchored. As relayed by Andrew Linzey, Newman's argument suggests that, in the simple experience of suffering, morality has as good an anchoring as you'll be able to find.