DEUT1029 While Jewish laws overwhelmingly mandate sensitive treatment of animals, there are a few laws that fall into the category of what Rabbi Natan Slifkin terms "commandments of insensitivity to animals." Generally, these laws permit brutal treatment of animals in order to convey spiritual lessons to human beings. For example, the Torah rules that when the body of a homicide victim is found in the open country and the identity of the killer is unknown, the elders of the town nearest to the corpse are obliged to take a heifer to an overflowing wadi, and break its neck. After doing so, they make a declaration: "Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it done" (Deuteronomy 21:1-9). In this case, the heifer was sacrificed as a form of atonement, to underscore that the elders, although not guilty of murder, bore a certain measure of responsibility for not maintaining a safe environment in their city and its environs. Rabbi Slifkin asks: "How can the same Torah that contains so many commandments teaching us sensitivity to animals, also contain commandments that involve such brutality? The answer is that that this is the whole point. These procedures are supposed to be horrific in order to have the desired effect upon the people performing them. When a murder takes place and justice cannot be performed, then the calf having its neck brutally axed impresses upon the elders of the city that they were negligent in their leadership. The…slaughter of animal sacrifices impresses upon us that we may be worthy of such a fate if we do not improve our ways.… these brutal rituals are the exceptions that prove the rule--that the Torah, in general, commands us to treat animals with great sensitivity." Slifkin, Man and Beast, 150. Do I find this explanation fully satisfying? No. Perhaps no explanation is adequate. But what is important to emphasize is that part of reason these laws disturb us is because the Bible itself has sensitized us to high standards of respect for animal life. In large measure, it is only because of the biblical laws commanding us to let our animals rest on the Sabbath, not muzzle an animal working for us, and not slaughter an animal and its young on the same day (laws that are still observed, which is not the case, for example, with the law concerning the breaking of the heifer's neck) that the idea took root in the Western world that animals should be treated with compassion; that is why these laws bother us. But, as Princeton philosopher Walter Kaufmann wrote about the bloody wars waged by Joshua against the ancient Canaanites, "to find the [distinctive] spirit of the religion of the Old Testament in Joshua is like finding the distinctive genius of America in the men who slaughtered the Indians." (Kaufmann, Faith of a Heretic, 193, 260-1).