So I was watching this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIvwupbScpMAnd more importantly than any of the points he actually made, what I took away from it was "wait...can animals be circumcised? More importantly, should they be under God's covenant with Abraham (from which the Jewish and Islamic tradition at least nominally stems)?"
So I had another look at it:
Genesis 17:9 And God said unto Abraham: 'And as for thee, thou shalt keep My covenant, thou, and thy seed after thee throughout their generations. 10 This is My covenant, which ye shall keep, between Me and you and thy seed after thee: every male among you shall be circumcised. 11 And ye shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of a covenant betwixt Me and you. 12 And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every male throughout your generations, he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any foreigner, that is not of thy seed. 13 He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised; and My covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant. 14 And the uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken My covenant.'
It does say every male born in your house or bought with money, and it doesn't specify NOT animals. The argument I suppose one could make is that the last sentence says that "that soul shall be cut off from among his people", and you can infer from that that only those with souls need to be circumcised; but that doesn't actually hold up, imo, because it includes *all* your non-Jewish slaves and your non-Jewish slaves do not necessarily have souls under Jewish law or tradition, and circumcising the slaves does not make them Jews. And it's more about the dude who does the owning of the slaves than the owning of the penis that is responsible for ensuring this procedure gets done, so the last verse is better read as being about the Jewish free man and not slaves or other property.
The other argument you could make is that it would say something like "every male of your household, of man and of beast", if it meant to include animals, and it doesn't. So it doesn't directly exclude animals. It doesn't include them, but it doesn't exclude them, except perhaps by omission. I don't really know what to think about this.......
Topic: Animal circumcision