People often feel deep emotions in response to the lives of animals.

Learning of one animal’s suffering or many animals’ suffering may touch us very deeply. Sometimes, we do not want to be that deeply touched since we know how much it hurts to care about another’s suffering.

Praying for animals allows us to unburden ourselves of these feelings by sharing them. In opening ourselves, we are kept open to the lives of others. Prayer connects us with God and all of Creation.

Through prayer, we are made one with all of God’s creatures. The Prayers for Animals book by author Carol J. Adams comes highly recommended.

Arranged across the arc of the day, this book includes original prayers by Carol J. Adams:

-Morning Prayers and Prayers of Adoration
-For Our Relationships with Creatures and the Creator
-For Our Special Friendships
-Prayers of Mourning and Grief
-Prayers of Petition and Intercession
-Evening Prayers

There are prayers for parents of children who have lost special animal friends, prayers for farmed animals or animals imprisoned in laboratories, for the hunted and endangered, for the well being of all animal caretakers, for animals in shelters:

May you know the touch of kindness.
May you know a warm blanket, a special treat.
May you know a walk outside.
May you know another day.

Carol J. Adams has a master of divinity from Yale University. Adams lives outside Dallas, Texas. Best known for her groundbreaking The Sexual Politics of Meat, she is also the editor of Ecofeminism and the Sacred and Violence against Women and Children: A Christian Theological Sourcebook with Marie Fortune. (Published by Continuum. 132 pages, 2004, $14.95)