On Animal Suffering
& Human Kindness

Norman Cousins, 1915-
Human Options
What is happening today is that the natural reactions of the individual against violence are being blunted. The individual is being desensitized by living history. We are developing new reflexes and new responses that tend to slow down the moral imagination and relieve us of essential indignation over impersonal hurt. We are becoming casual about brutality. We have made our peace with violence.

In Place of Folly
The heart of the matter is that some people like to cause injury or death to living things. And many of those who do not are indifferent to those who do. [TOP]

John Hoyt, 1932-
from a lecture
For too long we have occupied ourselves with responding to the consequences of cruelty and abuse and have neglected the important task of building up an ethical system in which justice for animals is regarded as the norm rather than the exception. Our only hope is to put our focus on the education of the young. [TOP]

John Vyvyan, 1908-1975
The Dark Face of Science
Knowledge without pity may well be the greatest danger that besets the world. [TOP]

Anna Barbauld, 1743-1825
The Mouse’s Petition
The well-taught philosophic mind to all compassion gives; casts round the world an equal eye and feels for all that lives. [TOP]

Ella Wheeler Wilcox, 1830-1919
Kinship
Oh, shame on the mothers of mortals
Who have not stooped to teach
Of the sorrow that lies in dear, dumb eyes,
The sorrow that has no speech. [TOP]

Immanuel Kant, 1724-1804
Lectures on Ethics
If [man] is not to stifle human feelings, he must practice kindness toward animals, for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of man by his treatment of animals. [TOP]

Anne Morrow Lindberg, 1906-
Suffering, no matter how multiplied, is always individual. [TOP]

Pamela Hansford Johnson
Man is an animal easily conditioned by almost anything. We must not allow our finer sensibilities to become blunted regarding animal suffering. [TOP]

Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788-1860
On the Basis of Morality
The assumption that animals are without rights, and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality. [TOP]

Ibid.
Boundless compassion for all living things is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct. Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no one, encroach on no man’s rights; he will rather have regard for everyone, forgive everyone, help everyone as far as he can, and all his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving kindness. [TOP]

STBC
Nothing shocks our moral feelings so deeply as cruelty does. We can forgive every other crime, but not cruelty. The reason for this is that it is the very opposite of compassion ... it is the greatest lack of compassion that stamps a deed with the deepest moral depravity and atrocity ... compassion is the real moral incentive. [TOP]

STBC
Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character; and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man. [TOP]

Saint Francis of Assisi, 1181-1226
quoted in Life by St. Bonaventura
If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men. [TOP]

George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950
Killing for Sport
Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom. [TOP]

The Devil’s Disciple
The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them. That’s the essence of inhumanity. [TOP]

STBC
Extreme horror of cruelty is the mark of the spiritual man. [TOP]

Mahatma Gandhi, 1869-1948
The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. [TOP]

E.S. Turner, 1909-
“Do not kick him,” said Pythagoras to a man abusing a puppy. “In his body is the soul of a friend of mine. I recognized the voice when he cried out.” [TOP]

Albert Einstein, 1879-1955
New York Post, 11/28/1972
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the “universe,” a part limited in time and space. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security. [TOP]

Dr. Albert Schweitzer, 1875-1965
Nobel Peace Prize address: The Problem of Peace in the World Today
The human spirit is not dead. It lives on in secret. It has come to believe that compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind. [TOP]

Civilization and Ethics
The thinking [person] must oppose all cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another. [TOP]

Ibid.
A man is really ethical only when he obeys the constraint laid on him to aid all life which he is able to help and when he goes out of his way to avoid injuring anything living. [TOP]

STBC
The ethics of respect for life makes us keep on the lookout together for opportunities of bringing some sort of help to animals, to make up for the great miseries men inflict on them. [TOP]

Pythagoras, 6th century b.c.
attributed (Ovid)
As long as man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love. [TOP]

Count Leo Tolstoy, 1828-1910
The First Step
If a man aspires toward a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals. [TOP]

Elizabeth Goudge, 1900-1984
The Joy of Snow
Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever is it that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because the time is short. [TOP]

Brigid Brophy, 1929-
Animals, Men and Morals
“Sentimentalist” is the abuse with which people counter the accusation that they are cruel, thereby implying that to be sentimental is worse than to be cruel, which it isn’t. [TOP]

Unlived Life: A Manifesto Against Factory Farming
Whenever people say, “We mustn’t be sentimental,” you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, “We must be realistic,” they mean they are going to make money out of it. [TOP]

Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832
Principles of Morals and Legislation
The question is not “Can they reason?” nor “Can they talk?” but “Can they suffer?” [TOP]

C.W. Hume, 1886-1981
The Status of Animals
Charity is indivisible. If a man resents practical sympathy being bestowed on animals on the ground that all ought to be reserved for the species to which he himself happens to belong, he must have a mind the size of a pin’s head. [TOP]

John Cowper Powys, 1872-1963
The one great commandment of culture is: Thou shalt not be cruel. [TOP]

The Enjoyment of Literature
The greatest miracle of evolution is man’s moral sense, his pity, his justice, his gentleness... [TOP]

James Herriot, 1916-1995
from a television interview
Animals are an obligation put on us, a responsibility we have no right to neglect, nor to violate by cruelty. [TOP]

A placard at animal protection rallies
Unseen they suffer,
Unheard they cry.
In agony they linger,
In loneliness they die. [TOP]

Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862
Familiar Letters
The squirrel you kill in jest, dies in earnest. [TOP]

Roger Caras, 1924-
The Fifth Day
I have said it again and again and I will say it on the day I die if I have time. It is wrong to cause pain. It is wrong to cause fear and to allow preventable pain and preventable fear to exist is no less an offense than causing them. That is my credo. I will argue it in Heaven and Hell. I will face any man or woman alive and argue it forever. I am more sure of that than I am of my private view of God and religion. I am more sure of that than I am of anything else in my experience as a man. I believe that credo is a valid view of my responsibility on earth. [TOP]

Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106-43 b.c.
Nothing cruel is useful or expedient. [TOP]

It is only a question between the wrong we do and the wrong we allow. [TOP]

Mahavira, c. 599-527 b.c.
All breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain or treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away. This is the pure unchangeable law. [TOP]

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1533-1592
The Essays
...there is nevertheless a certain respect, a general duty of humanity, not only to beasts who have life and sense, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men, and graciousness and benignity to other creatures... there is a certain commerce and mutual obligation between them and us. [TOP]

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822
Prometheus Unbound
I wish no living thing to suffer pain. [TOP]

Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1904-
Lost in America
I could never forget the cruelties perpetrated upon God’s creatures in slaughterhouses, on hunts, and in various scientific laboratories. [TOP]

William Blake, 1757-1827
Cruelty has a human heart, and jealousy a human face. Terror the human form divine, and secrecy the human dress. [TOP]

Alexander von Humboldt, 1769-1859
Cruelty to animals is one of the most significant vices of a low and ignoble people. Whenever one notices them, they constitute a sure sign of ignorance and brutality which cannot be painted over by all the evidences of wealth and luxury. Cruelty to animals cannot exist together with true education and true learning. [TOP]

Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519
O justice of God! Why dost thou not awake to behold thy creatures thus abused? [TOP]

Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784
The Idler
An infallible characteristic of meanness is cruelty. [TOP]

Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson
We may have uneasy feelings for seeing a creature in distress without pity; for we have not pity unless we wish to relieve them. [TOP]

William Cowper, 1731-1800
Man may dismiss compassion from his heart, but God will never. [TOP]

Walter Savage Landor, 1775-1864
Cruelty is the chief, if not the only, sin. [TOP]

continued on next page

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