Balaam's Donkey

Genesis 1 describes humans as uniquely bearing the divine image (1:26-27) out of all the biological creatures on Earth.  The breath of life, or consciousness, is mentioned as being imbued into humans by God to spark the first human life (2:7), but like other people, non-human animals seem to be conscious.  Seeing facial expressions and outward motions, which appear to be evidence of interior consciousness, are all the evidence there is for the logical possibility that other partially physical beings besides ourselves are conscious, that they have minds with the potential for intellects, emotions, and wills.

The Genesis creation account alone already teaches enough to reveal that disregarding animals completely or needlessly harming them is immoral the Christian worldview.  If what God created is good (Genesis 1:31), even if not all of it is of equal value, then that would include animal life.  Moreover, if animals, like people (people are the supreme animal, but I mean non-human creatures by the term in this case), are conscious, then they would already have similar moral rights to humans for the same reasons humans would in Biblical philosophy: it is evil to trivialize or abuse the good things which God has created.

A passage with a strange event, and one that might be more renowned among those who know of it for its humorous aspects (not the beating of an animal, but Balaam's reaction to the creature talking aloud), Numbers 22:21-34 is relevant to Biblical animal rights in ways that are almost always ignored at least on the level of what people draw attention to.  These verses tell of God allowing a donkey being beaten for not walking towards the angel of the Lord and getting the chance to speak to its rider.  If the donkey merely received the capacity for speech, then it previously had thoughts equivalent to at least some human thoughts, and it only lacked the ability to verbalize things it remembered and to some extent understood.

The angel of the Lord appears before Balaam, a man asked by the leaders of Moab to curse the Israelites, three times, visible in each case to his donkey as it tries avoid the celestial being.  He beats the animal in every case.  At last, the donkey lowers itself to the ground and refuses to move, and Balaam only beats it all the more.  This is when God "opened" its mouth so that it could speak (Numbers 22:28).  The creature asks why it is being beaten as if it makes a habit of gratuitously interfering with his travel, and he insists he would kill his donkey if he had a sword.  However, he is then permitted to see the angel of the Lord (22:31), which also asks why he beat the donkey--and says that had the donkey continued onward, Balaam would have been killed and the donkey spared (22:32-33).

Numbers does not say that God provided the donkey with the ability to think beyond recognizing very basic sensory experiences in a passive, reactive sense.  No, according to the text, God simply bestowed the ability to speak to the animal, which would require, if true, that the donkey could already grasp reason (to some extent, even if it was not trying to discover necessary truth after necessary truth with no assumptions), intentional introspection, and the assigning of words to concepts.  This story is actually among the most relevant Biblical narratives when it comes to exposing the metaphysics of animals in Christian theology.  Mosaic Law, miscellaneous statements, and other stories make it clear that animals are not to be mistreated; the story of Balaam's donkey in part touches upon why this would be the case.