Animal Rights Activists

"It is impossible for me to express my loathing and horror of the practice men have of killing things for pastime so-called 'hunting,' or 'sport. No one but a barbarian can engage in such pursuits, or can look upon them or know of them without pain and indignation. It makes me want to fight and cry whenever I think of them. And when I see men engaged in such execrable activities (the crippling, killing, and terrifying of whole communities of innocent and happy beings, shooting them down in cold blood, and with hellish enthusiasm), my feeling is that I must stop them at all hazards. And there have been times, when I have come upon men engaged in these fiendish doings, when I would have shot them down if I had been armed, the enormity of their crimes has come over me with such vividness and power."

"Why are non-human beings ostracized and treated by humans with no consideration save as they administer to selfish human ends? Whence the doctrine that non-human species were made for the hominine species, and that there is no logic or sanity in their existence save as they feed or slave for their human tyrants? Because they are dumb, that is, because their language is not understood by human minds, and because they are wild, that is, because they are for the most part unassociated with human animals, and because the civilized consciousness, which is barely able to realize the kinship of human beings, is yet too feeble and rudimentary to comprehend the solidarity of all beings."

"And what is it to act upon others as you would that others would act upon you? It is to put yourself in the place of others. It is consideration of others as ardent as consideration of self. It is the balancing of abilities, supplementation, the social ideal."

"The purpose of all penal schemes should be, not reciprocity, but reformation pure and simple; not the relentless and absurd infliction of misery commensurate with the crimes committed, but the achievement of the largest possible reformation with the gentlest and most strategic deprivation."

"The ideal universe is a universe so ordered or natured as to allow its inhabitants to understand and dominate it sufficient to satisfy their desires, and inhabited by beings with desires so poised and assorted that there is not only not mutual inhibition of desires, but such a dovetailing and intertwining of the consciousnesses that there is mutual aid in the satisfaction of desire—a universe responsive to the whims of its inhabitants, and inhabited by beings socially harmonious and helpful."

"Look at the manner in which the aborigines are swept away from continent after continent by the sword and beverage of the Aryans. See how the red children of America have been cheated and debauched and driven from homes where they and their fathers had lived from immemorial generations. When the banner of Castile first furled in Bahama breezes, America was inhabited by a noble, magnanimous, and happy people. They were not like the sodden, suspicious, revengeful remnants that to-day huddle on barricaded reserves, the vindictive survivors of four centuries of injustice. They were kind and generous. They came to the invading Europeans as children, with minds of wonder and with hands filled with presents. They were treated by the invaders like refuse. They were plundered, and their outstretched hands cut off and fed to Spanish hounds. They are gone from the valleys where once their camp-smokes curled to heaven, and their quaint canoes ruffle the moonlight of the rivers no more. They that remain are too weak to rise in warlike challenge to the aggressions of the mighty white. But the story of the meeting of the pale and the red, and of the wrongs of the vanquished red, will remain as one of the mournful tales of this world when the kindred of Lo, like fleecy clouds, have melted into the infinite azure of the past.""

"The weak submit because they are helpless and because they are ignorant, because they are incarcerated and disarmed, and because they have been taught and intimidated into believing that the conventional and the legal, whatever they are, have been ordained and established by the immeasurable manufacturer of things."

"Look at human industry! See the pounds of flesh daily torn by men everywhere from the skeletons of each other in the awful riot of business." Just look at it! The inequity, the unconsciousness, the hard-heartedness, the ruffianism, and the infernalism of the industrial relations and conditions of men! Watch an unfortunate approach a rich man's mansion and ask in the most graceful manner for a necessary of life. Observe the egoism the baron shows as he sends the sufferer away unfed. See the lord in his marble palace, upholstered with all the comforts of civilization and stuffed with the dainties of the zones, and around him the men and women who made his wealth feeding on garbage, suffocating in shanties, and working like wretches from morning till night. See the multi-millionaire, scraping the palms of his slaves till the blood starts for the last farthing their struggles have produced, not because he is hungry and would buy, but because he is a ruffian and can. No attention whatever is paid to the fact that some have all they can utilize in the satisfaction of their desires and multiples more, while others just as good-looking and more worthy have nothing. No attention is paid to the fact that this little pill of a world is to man the only accessible portion of the universe; that he is cut off from other balls by leagues of impassable space."

"The earliest examples of human association were those practically of autocentricism. Each individual considered himself the only or chief end for which the universe existed. Each's own individual welfare was the end for which he struggled, and all the rest of the universe, sentient and insentient, was contemplated as means to this."

"A more pyramidal farce could not be framed at the present stage of the human imagination than that of human industry—the immense privilege and monopoly and the immense flatulence of wealth side by side with the most helpless and sickening deprivation—all brought about and perpetuated by hypocrites who lapse into hysterics over the injunction, "What you do not like when done to yourself do not do to others.""

"Ideal cooperation is rational and intentional rather than accidental. The clumsy, unsystematic production of existing societies is replaced by perfectly symmetrical and unified procedures. The whole of society constitutes one mighty organism carrying on the functions necessary to its maintenance and welfare in the most intelligent and magnanimous manner. The social ideal is an organized fraternity of perfectly articulating supplements, assaulting the inanimate as an individual personality, not as a mob of incompatible ruffians."

"It is not possible, and it never will be possible, to organize all the beings occupying space into one immense confederacy. This would be ideal, but from the inexorable nature of things it can never be. The denizens of the sea depths can not correlate with the inhabitants of the clouds. The lion can not fraternize with the lamb, nor the hawk with the sparrow. The natures of beings have been evolved thru war, and they are in large part irredeemably antagonistic. But the approximation, if honest, may be more successful than is supposed, and may include many species not human. The bird may contribute his song and plumage, the sheep his fleece, the horse, the ox, the elephant, and the camel their strength or speed, the cow and the fowl their secretions, the dog his fidelity, and man his art. The ultimate and ideal aggregation of the living universe will not be a pan-American union nor a Euro-American league, nor even an aggregation whose spirit is embodied in a parliament of man, but the widest and most consummate possible Confederation of the Consciousnesses."

"Justice is more than equity: it is benevolence. It is not enough to live and let live. We should live and help live. There is as much grace and utility, as genuine moral glory, in the lifelong succor of the helpless by the strong as there is in the temporary chivalry shown by a human being in extricating a fellow from passing misfortune."

"The relation of the inhabitants of the universe to each other most favorable to the satisfaction of the desires of the universe is, therefore, that which will enable the animate universe, as a whole, to attain that relation which an individual living being, if he were alone In the universe, would desire to achieve for himself—a relation such as is sustained to each other and to the whole by the individual cells of a multicellular organism—a relation in which each acts in the interests of all, including himself, and all act in the interests of each."

"Why should living beings struggle against each other, except as they struggle to advance the general welfare? Happiness is just as valuable and just as beautiful a thing in one being as in another. Some have greater talent for it than have others but it is a state of sweetness and elation always and everywhere. And each living being, in deliberating on the problem of the proprieties, should realize the fact that, as a matter of fact, it is a matter of indifference whether this relation belongs to his sensorium or to some other sensorium. It is insane for each being to insist that he, as an organism, is the one organism to whom pleasure is indispensable. The only indispensable is that pleasure be maximized. If a definite amount of happiness is to be experienced, it is, in the eyes of the absolute, a matter of indifference whether this happiness is experienced by one individual or by another, by self or by some other conscious portion of the universe."

"One thing is certain, however, and that is, that the most powerful instinct of human nature, the instinct to struggle and survive, the instinct to be superior, must be destroyed or greatly subordinated before the state here outlined can be realized; for the ideal state will be practically bereft of opportunity for its satisfaction."

"The earth is our mother, our habitation, and our tomb. In the presence of these facts, it would seem the highest sanity for us to be kind and merciful to each other, and to cultivate without hypocrisy the charming chivalry of the Golden Rule. The task of understanding and managing the tendencies which surround and beat upon us and in the midst of which we writhe and supplicate is certainly sufficient in itself without our turning upon and cudgeling each other."

"This universe is not an ideal universe. It is impossible, without more fundamental revision of its character than human beings can ever hope to effect, to make of it an ideal place, or anything like an ideal place, for the satisfaction of desires. The cosmic processes which have evolved conscious beings on the earth—and these processes are but the hard-headed tendencies of matter—have so hopelessly nuptialed pleasure and pain that it is impossible to believe that fumbling philosophy will ever be able to divorce them. But we are here, useless and mysterious as it may seem, a set of incompatible vagrants, orphaned here on a dervish-like lump of something, in the midst of immensities so hard and arrogant that no wail from our worm-like larynxes can aught avail. And, so far as we can make out, it is the program of things that we are to remain here. We can not lie down peacefully and perish, for we are possessed by an instinct lashing us to live."

"I feel like saying over and over and over, what I have said many times before, that we do not know the world of living, longing, suffering, enjoying life in the midst of which we have evolved. The inhabitants of our own fields and dooryards are strangers to us. We are so little, and proud, and selfish, we never think it worth while to stop and look into their faces and get acquainted with them. It never occurs to us what a great favour it would be to them if we would actually get over into their places occasionally and realise what tragedies are constantly being enacted in their lives as a result of our insensate natures. We treat them with no consideration or respect because we have no understanding of them; and we do not understand them because we do not care anything at all about the matter. We are too busy tossing bouquets at ourselves to have much time or thought left for anybody else. We have grown up in the belief that all those who have a different shape from what we have were intended, not for life and happiness and immortality, as we were, but for death and wretchedness and chymification, and we are too dull-minded and selfish to make any change now."

"The psychology of the exploitation of nonhuman beings by human beings is not different in kind from the psychology of any other act of exploitation. The great first cause of man's inhumanity to not-men is the same precisely as the great first cause of man's inhumanity to man—Selfishness—blind, brutal, unconscionable egoism."

"How helpless human beings are—in fact, how helpless all beings are! How hopelessly dependent we are upon the past, and how impossible it is to be really original! What the future will be depends upon what the present is, for the future will grow out of, and inherit, the present. What the present is depends upon what the past was, for the present has grown out of, and inherited, the past. And what the past was depends upon a remoter past from which it evolved, and so on. There is no end anywhere of dependence, either forward or backward. Every fact, from an idea to a sun, is a contingent link in an eternal chain."

"Living beings who love themselves no more ardently than they love others are prodigies, and it will never be otherwise so long as beings are born as they are and live in like conditions."

"The question that arises in the mind of the ordinary man when a change in the arrangements of the world is suggested to him is not what will be the effect of the change on the universe, but what will be its effect on him—on that remarkable atom of the universe so zealously partitioned off from the rest by his own skin."

"Is it any wonder, therefore, that the young, accustomed to such an environment, grow up to consider life itself a game, in which they are to strive to outwit those about them? Is it any wonder that you and I and men and women everywhere are helplessly selfish, when we were born so, when all that we know of altruism has come thru Sunday-school rumors and straggling precepts, and when we have all our lives been surrounded by selfish people and occupied in selfish pastimes and professions? Nothing could be more natural. Altruism is anomalous on the earth, and it is not astonishing."

"From the time an individual human comes into the world a sprawling, squalling, unpeepered vagrant, to the hour he goes out in tragedy and pain, life is one continuation of the very conditions which brought him into the world a confirmed egoist."

"The twofold function of individual culture is so to develop beings that they shall be able to perceive their proper relations to the rest of the uiniverse, to the inanimate about them, and to other beings in space and time, and realizing their relations to others, to be disposed to assume them."

"Altruism should be inculcated from the cradle, and savagery should be denounced. Maxims and precepts, proclaiming the equal preciousness of all, should be assiduously dinned into the consciousness. The young should be convinced beyond all chance of deterioration that the only laudable thing in the world is the causing of happiness, and that happiness in others is just as precious and valuable as it is in themselves. They should be taught that only "happiness which comes like the red flowers of the oleander out of the bosom of the all" is true happiness, not that which is gleaned from the pain and discomfiture of others."

"Teach a child to love others as it loves itself; let this be the first and most impressive injunction that invades its ears; allow it never to infringe this rule in its conduct toward others, and never to associate with those who do; teach it that the highest virtue is forbearance and helpfulness; inculcate the equal rights of all to the joys of the universe; forbid all competitive indulgence as degrading and ungallant; teach it the propriety of exercising its combativeness against the tendencies of the inanimate, never against a fellow-creature; allow only those amusements which encourage kindness and the rivalry of good-doing;—and when that child grows to manhood or womanhood, and encounters the conditions of more serious life, it will encounter them, not ideally, perhaps, but in a spirit very remote from that in which it would have approached them had it come up thru conditions of incessant egoism."

"Who, that has pity, is disposed to censure a child for rebelling against the useless and absurd rumination, thru painful years, of mummified languages and fearful mathematical formulae, which have no more real bearing, and which to the average human being never will have any more real bearing, on the great, living, performing universe around him than the esoteric nonsense of the Five Kings?"

"All school-room competition should be abolished. The school should be a family, a fraternity, a colony of cooperating, helping, sympathizing brothers and sisters, not a camp of hot combatants bent on mutual discomfiture. Competition is not necessary, and if it were necessary, it would not be justifiable. If it is not possible to produce great intellects without crimes on character, then let us doze forever in the holy haze of mediocrity. A graceful nature is the most essential psychic possession of a living being."

"The Universal Kinship means the kinship of all the inhabitants of the planet Earth. Whether they came into existence among the waters or among desert sands, in a hole in the earth, in the hollow of a tree, or in a palace; whether they build nests or empires; whether they swim, fly, crawl, or ambulate; and whether they realise it or not, they are all related, physically, mentally, morally—this is the thesis of this book. But since man is the most gifted and influential of animals, and since his relationship with other animals is more important and more reluctantly recognised than any other, the chief purpose of these pages is to prove and interpret the kinship, of the human species with the other species of animals."

"Revision of character will be a much more tangible and scientific thing when the physiology of psychology becomes more than a controverted conjecture. There has been no attempt, no methodical attempt, to amend character thru physiological and neural violence; and about all we know about the possibilities of such a surgery consists of glimpses caught on occasions of casualty. We do know, however, that neural changes appear promptly and invariably in consciousness, and that there is every reason to suspect perfect parallelism between the neural and psychic processes. This unfailing attendance and dependence of mind on physical phenomena, and the superior tangibility of matter over consciousness, assure the prophet that an accomplished and sensitized attention is the all-essential to the achievement of psychical amendment by neural and physiological alteration. In the New Age which we prevision and approach, among the marvels to amaze our clumsy contemplations will be the miracles of cerebral surgery, the physics of the humors, the science of the physiology of consciousness."

"[M]an is an animal. It was away out there on the prairies, among the green corn rows, one beautiful June morning—a long time ago it seems to me now—that this revelation really came to me. And I repeat it here, as it has grown to seem to me, for the sake of a world which is so wise in many things, but so darkened and wayward regarding this one thing. However averse to accepting it we may be on account of favourite traditions, man is an animal in the most literal and materialistic meaning of the word. Man has not a spark of so-called 'divinity' about him. In important respects he is the most highly evolved of animals; but in origin, disposition, and form he is no more 'divine' than the dog who laps his sores, the terrapin who waddles over the earth in a carapace, or the unfastidious worm who dines on the dust of his feet. Man is not the pedestalled individual pictured by his imagination—a being glittering with prerogatives, and towering apart from and above all other beings. He is a pain-shunning, pleasure-seeking, death-dreading organism, differing in particulars, but not in kind, from the pain-shunning, pleasure-seeking, death-dreading organisms below and around him. Man is neither a rock, a vegetable, nor a deity. He belongs to the same class of existences, and has been brought into existence by the same evolutional processes, as the horse, the toad that hops in his garden, the firefly that lights its twilight torch, and the bivalve that reluctantly feeds him."

"[T]here is a Future. And the creeds and ideals, men bow down to to-day will in time to come pass away, and new creeds and ideals will claim their allegiance. Shrines change as the generations come and go, and out of the decomposition of the old comes the new. The time will come when the sentiments of these pages will not be hailed by two or three, and ridiculed or ignored by the rest; they will represent Public Opinion and Law."

"Deeds are right and wrong in themselves; and whether they are right or wrong, good or evil, proper or improper, whether they should be done or should not be done, depends upon their effects upon the welfare of the inhabitants of the universe."

"The supposed psychical gulf between human and non-human beings has no more existence, outside the flamboyant imagination of man, than has the once-supposed physical gulf. It is pure fiction. The supposition is a relic of the rapidly dwindling vanity of anthropocentricism, and is perpetuated from age to age by human selfishness and conceit. It has no foundation either in science or in common-sense. Man strives to lessen his guilt by the laudation of himself and the disparagement and degradation of his victims."

"The story of Eden is a fabrication, bequeathed to us by our well-meaning but dimly-lighted ancestors. There has been no more miracle in the origin of the human species than in the origin of any other species. And there is no more miracle in the origin of a species than there is in the birth of a molecule or in the breaking of a tired wave on the beach. Man was not made in the image of the hypothetical creator of heaven and earth, but in the image of the ape. Man is not a fallen god, but a promoted reptile. The beings around him are not conveniences, but cousins. Instead of stretching away to the stars, man's pedigree slinks down into the sea. Horrible revelation! Frightful antithesis! Instead of celestial genesis and a 'fall'—long and doleful promotion. Instead of elysian gardens and romance—the slime. Instead of a god with royal nostrils miraculously animating an immortal duplicate—a little lounging cellule, too small to be seen and too senseless to distinguish between midnight and noon. But the situation is not half so horrible as it looks to be to those who see only the skin of things. Is it not better, after all, to be the honourable outcome of a straightforward evolution than the offspring of flunky-loving celestials? Are the illustrious children of the ape less glorious than the sycophants of irrational theological systems? Darwin dealt in his quiet way some malicious blows to human conceit, but he also bequeathed to a misguided world the elements of its ultimate redemption."

"Kinship is universal. The orders, families, species, and races of the animal kingdom are the branches of a gigantic arbour. Every individual is a cell, every species is a tissue, and every order is an organ in the great surging, suffering, palpitating process. Man is simply one portion of the immense enterprise. He is as veritably an animal as the insect that drinks its little fill from his veins, the ox he goads, or the wild-fox that flees before his bellowings. Man is not a god, nor in any imminent danger of becoming one. He is not a celestial star-babe dropped down among mundane matters for a time and endowed with wing possibilities and the anatomy of a deity. He is a mammal of the order of primates, not so lamentable when we think of the hyena and the serpent, but an exceedingly discouraging vertebrate compared with what he ought to be. He has come up from the worm and the quadruped. His relatives dwell on the prairies and in the fields, forests, and waves. He shares the honours and partakes of the infirmities of all his kindred. He walks on his hind-limbs like the ape; he eats herbage and suckles his young like the ox; he slays his fellows and fills himself with their blood like the crocodile and the tiger; he grows old and dies, and turns to banqueting worms, like all that come from the elemental loins. He cannot exceed the winds like the hound, nor dissolve his image in the mid-day blue like the eagle. He has not the courage of the gorilla, the magnificence of the steed, nor the plaintive innocence of the ring-dove. Poor, pitiful, glory-hunting hideful! Born into a universe which he creates when he comes into it, and clinging, like all his kindred, to a clod that knows him not, he drives on in the preposterous storm of the atoms, as helpless to fashion his fate as the sleet that pelts him, and lost absolutely in the somnambulism of his own being."

"The frail, narrow, fantastic character of human sympathy is the most mournful fact in human nature. 'Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn,' and his inhumanity to not-men makes the planet a ball of pain and terror."

"I have seen a mother mouse in a moment of peril flee from her home among the falling pieces of a cord-wood pile, and disappear under the roots of a neighbouring oak. I have seen her a little later, recovered from her initial dismay, making her way back again, clambering along among the tangled timbers, stopping now and then to look and listen, her eyes wild and anxious, and her whole little body quaking with excitement. I have seen her go among the ruins of her dwelling, take a poor little squeaking young one in her mouth, and hurry away with it to the gloomy refuge in the roots of the oak. I have watched her return again and again, each time taking in her careful teeth the tiny body of a babe, until five mouthfuls of precious pink were safely lodged within the fortress of the oak. And I could as soon believe that woman, when she saves her children from some fearful harm, is a soulless machine as think that that brave little woodmother, out there alone under the trees, snatching her darlings from the jaws of death, was a heroine without sense or feeling."

"We know what a lion looks like when painted by a man, but human eyes have never yet been allumined by the sardonic lineaments of a man painted by a lion. Being boiled alive in order to look well as corpses in store-windows, and having wooden pegs thrust into our muscles and left there to rot for a week or two to keep us in our agony from doing something desperate—we know what these experiences are like when they are delegated to lobsters, and we take no more serious part in them than to insure their infliction, but we are too fervent barbarians to bother our heads about what they are like from the crustacean point of view."

"[T]he difference in mental method between the man of learning and the ordinary man or woman is the same as the difference between mature men and children and between men generally and other animals. It is one of degree, not of kind. The philosopher, the clodhopper, and the ape, all use precisely the same methods of reasoning, differing only in exactness and in the materials of consciousness dealt with."

"To the initiated, therefore, it is not strange that we civilised folk in our conduct display so freely the phenomena of the savage. There is nothing more inevitable in the life of the convert than the haunting inclination to give way to original impulses. It is not strange that we are powerless to be as good and beautiful and true as we would like to be, that our divine efforts are our half-hearted efforts, and that the only time we get terribly in earnest and put forth really titanic energies is when we are dominated directly or indirectly by the instincts of the pack. Human aspiration is fettered by the fearful facts of human origin. It is not strange that we are continually conscious of being torn by contending tendencies, conscious of ghastly masteries, and of horrible goings on in our innermost beings. The human heart is the gladiatorial meeting-place of gods and beasts."

"The fact that altruism has been evolved by the cooperation of individuals with each other and against others is a significant fact in the analysis and understanding of the ethical phenomena of the earth. To this fact is due the restricted and illogical character of all altruism."

"I saw the fishes playing there; I saw all that was in the whole world round; In wood, and bower, and marsh, and mead, and field, All things which creep and fly, And put a foot to earth. All these I saw, and say to you, That nothing lives among them without hate."

"Egoism is preference for self, partiality toward that part of the universe bounded by one's own skin. It may consist simply of regard for self, but with regard for self is usually associated enmity toward others. Egoism manifests itself in such qualities of mind as selfishness, cruelty, intolerance, hate, hardheartedness, savagery, rudeness, injustice, narrowness, and the like. It is the primal impulse of the living heart. Enmity is older and more universal than love. Enmity constituted the very loins from which long ago came the original miscreants of this world."

"The evolution of consciousness in its social and ethical aspects consists in the evolution of the ability to make real and vivid the phenomena that are more and more distant in both space and time."

"The denial by human animals of ethical relations to the rest of the animal world is a phenomenon not differing either in character or cause from the denial of ethical relations by a tribe, people, or race of human beings to the rest of the human world. The provincialism of Jews toward non-Jews, of Greeks toward non-Greeks, of Romans toward non-Romans, of Moslems toward non-Moslems, and of Caucasians toward non-Caucasians, is not one thing and the provincialism of human beings toward non-human beings another. They are all manifestations of the same thing. The fact that these various acts are performed by different individuals and upon different individuals, and are performed at different times and places, does not invalidate the essential sameness of their natures. Crimes are not classified (except by savages or their immediate derivatives) according to the similarity of those who do them or those who suffer from them, but by grouping them according to the similarity of their intrinsic qualities. All acts of provincialism consist essentially in the disinclination or inability to be universal, and they belong in reality, all of them, to the same species of conduct."

"All the barbarism is not behind us nor around us. History looks dark and discouraging to us, as we turn its terrible pages, but we would see something just as discouraging if we would look into a mirror."

"Inconsideration by human beings toward the rest of sentients is an aspect of that vast unconsciousness which taught that blacks were made for whites, females for males, and barbarians" for Romans."