Animals

"One thing that specially saddened me was that the unfortunate animals had to suffer so much pain and misery. The sight of an old limping horse, tugged forward by one man while another kept beating it with a stick to get it to the knacker's yard at Colmar, haunted me for weeks. It was quite incomprehensible to me — this was before I began going to school — why in my evening prayers I should pray for human beings only. So when my mother had prayed with me and had kissed me good-night, I used to add silently a prayer that I had composed myself for all living creatures. It ran thus: "O, heavenly Father, protect and bless all things that have breath; guard them from all evil, and let them sleep in peace.""

"We will one day think it as horrible to eat animals as we now think it horrible to eat each other."

"Many dogs, cats and horses are loved and cherished, and are even mourned when they die. But pigs, chickens, calves and other animals grown in factory farms are treated in the most brutal and exploitative way, devoid of all affection. They are units in a production line; their only purpose is to produce the maximum amount of food at the minimum cost. Factory farms epitomize the mechanistic spirit. ... To justify this treatment, the less-favoured animals have to be regarded as inferior, unworthy of any sentimental attachment. A terrible conflict arises if the exploited animals are considered to have any value in themselves. One way to avoid this conflict is to keep the privileged and the exploited animals in separate categories in our minds. ... But if emotions spill over from pets to other animals, there is trouble. People become vegetarians, or even animal rights activists."

"Animals are among the first inhabitants of the mind's eye. They are basic to the development of speech and thought. Because of their part in the growth of consciousness, they are inseparable from the series of events in each human life, indispensable to our becoming human in the fullest sense."

"Longer than memory we have known that each animal has its power and place, each a skill, virtue, wisdom, innocence — a special access to the structure and flow of the world. Each surpasses ourselves in some way. Together, sacred, they help hold the cosmos together, making it a joy and beauty to behold, but above all a challenge to understand as story, drama, and sacred play."

"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither, though, by your smiling, you seem to say so."

"Lest I slight any creature, I must also mention the domestic animals, the beasts and birds from whom I have learned. Job said long ago (35:11): «Who teacheth us more than the beasts of the earth, And maketh us wiser than the fowls of heaven?» Some of what I have learned from them I have written in my books, but I fear that I have not learned as much as I should have, for when I hear a dog bark, or a bird twitter, or a cock crow, I do not know whether they are thanking me for all I have told of them, or calling me to account."

"The animals themselves are incapable of demanding their own liberation, or of protesting against their condition with votes, demonstrations, or boycotts. Human beings have the power to continue to oppress other species forever, or until we make this planet unsuitable for living beings. Will our tyranny continue, proving that morality counts for nothing when it clashes with selfinterest, as the most cynical of poets and philosophers have always said? Or will we rise to the challenge and prove our capacity for genuine altruism by ending our ruthless exploitation of the species in our power, not because we are forced to do so by rebels or terrorists, but because we recognize that our position is morally indefensible? The way in which we answer this question depends on the way in which each one of us, individually, answers it."

"When a human being relates to an individual nonhuman being as an anonymous object, rather than as a being with its own subjectivity, it is the human, and not the other animal, who relinquishes personhood."

"... the suffering or frustration of an animal of another species is an evil of the same general sort as is the suffering or frustration of a human being, and that we humans have the same general sort of moral obligation to refrain from causing, and to try actively to prevent, such evil when it concerns animals as when it concerns human beings."

"Criminal history shows us how many torturers of men, and murderers, have first been torturers of animals. The manner in which a nation in the aggregate treats animals, is one chief measure of its real civilization. The Latin races, as we know, come forth badly from this examination; we Germans, not half well enough. Buddhism has done more in this direction than Christianity, and Schopenhauer more than all ancient and modern philosophers together. The warm sympathy with sentient Nature which pervades all the writings of Schopenhauer, is one of the most pleasing aspects of his thoroughly intellectual, yet often unhealthy and unprofitable philosophy."

"To Indians the idea of the transmigration of the soul from animal to man, and man to animal, does not seem strange, and so from our scriptures pity for all sentient creatures has not been banished as a sentimental exaggeration. When I am in close touch with Nature in the country, the Indian in me asserts itself and I cannot remain coldly indifferent to the abounding joy of life throbbing within the soft down-covered breast of a single tiny bird."

"[Concerning the love La Fontaine felt for animals] He follows their emotions, he represents their reasonings, he becomes tender, he becomes gay, he participates in their feelings. The factis, he lived in them. [...] The animals contain all the materials of man-sensations, judgments, images."

"We can argue about their intelligence (which we would likely define in human-centric terms anyway), their ability to understand human language, or even the extent to which they really understand and know the world around them, but there's no argument that can convincingly show that animals don't feel pain, and that they have no interest in avoiding that pain. If anything, animals are more sensitive to the world around them than we are, given their heightened sensory abilities."

"The child who has been taught to realise the claims that God's lower creatures have upon him, whose heart has been touched by lessons of kindness and mercy, under their sweet influence will grow to be a large-hearted, tender-hearted, manly man. Then let the children be trained, their hands, their intellects, and above all their hearts. Let them be taught to have pity for the animals that are at our mercy, that cannot protect themselves, that cannot explain their weakness, their pain, or their suffering, and soon this will bring to their recognition that higher law, the moral obligation of man as a superior being to protect and care for the weak and defenceless. Nor will it stop here, for this in turn will lead them to that highest law—man's duty to man."

"When we study the habits of animals in a truly sympathetic way and become thoroughly acquainted with them and with the work that each one is performing, we shall see that each one has its place in the economy of God's world, that each has its part to play, and that even so far as the animal world is concerned we are all related and inter-related. If we destroy or permit to be destroyed that marvellous balance which the Divine Power has instituted in the Universe, we do it at our own peril. Instead, then, of being the enemies of the animal world, instead of being its persecutors and its destroyers, we should be its friends and helpers."

"It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions."

"What a pity and what a poverty of spirit, to assert that beasts are machines deprived of knowledge and sentiment, which affect all their operations in the same manner, which learn nothing, never improve, &c. [...] Some barbarians seize this dog, who so prodigiously excels man in friendship, they nail him to a table, and dissect him living, to show the mezarian veins. You discover in him all the same organs of sentiment which are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the springs of sentiment in this animal that he should not feel? Has he nerves to be incapable of suffering? Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in nature. [...] The animal has received those of sentiment, memory, and a certain number of ideas. Who has bestowed these gifts, who has given these faculties? He who has made the herb of the field to grow, and who makes the earth gravitate towards the sun."

"There are two things for which animals are to be envied: they know nothing of future evils, or of what people say about them."

"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men."

"If it is necessary that each sentient being must have the possibility of achieving an overwhelming good, then it is clear that there must be some form of life after earthly death. Despite the many pointers to the existence of God, theism would be falsified if physical death was the end, for then there could be no justification for the existence of this world. However, if one supposes that every sentient being has an endless existence, which offers the prospect of supreme happiness, it is surely true that the sorrows and troubles of this life will seem very small by comparison. Immortality, for animals as well as humans, is a necessary condition of any acceptable theodicy; that necessity, together with all the other arguments for God, is one of the main reasons for believing in immortality."

"As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right."