Clergy and congregations were asked to say a prayer for animals on Animal Welfare Sunday which this year fell on Sunday 2 October 2005.

A service booklet, published by the RSPCA, was been distributed to clergy in an attempt to raise consciousness amongst churches about the plight of animals.

The Service for Animal Welfare, which has received international interest, contains prayers asking people to think about the suffering inflicted on animals and urging them to be kind to them.
The Revd Professor Andrew Linzey, an Oxford don, wrote the service booklet. He said: “The prayers are designed to help Christians think at a deeper level about our responsibility to animals.

“Leading church people founded the RSPCA in 1824. They saw the work of the Society as an extension of Christian charity. It is high time that churches began to take up our treatment of animals as a moral issue.”

RSPCA Director General Jackie Ballard, who attended an animal welfare service at Arundel Cathedral, West Sussex, on Saturday 8 October, said: “Animal welfare should be a cause of concern to all who value morality and recognise that animals are sentient beings which are not always treated well by mankind. I am delighted that many of the world’s religions acknowledge that animals are a blessing to be valued and cared for.”

A London vicar, the Revd Arthur Broome, called together the meeting that led to the foundation of the Society. Since then a series of church leaders have supported the RSPCA’s work. The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams is a vice-patron of the Society.

Hundreds of churches of all denominations hold animal services or animal blessing services during the first week of October each year.

Professor Linzey holds the world’s first post in Theology and Animal Welfare - the Bede Jarrett Senior Research Fellowship - at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, and is Honorary Professor of Theology in the University of Birmingham.


He is author of Animal Rites: Liturgies of Animal Care (London: SCM Press and Cleveland, Ohio: The Pilgrim Press) and is the leading theologian on animals and creation. Copies of the service can be obtained from the Purchase and Supply Department at the RSPCA.