"Issue 7, Summer/Autumn 2010: It's a Culture Thing"

“Delightful representations of animated nature have indeed been made by the best authors, which I hope I shall be pardoned in dissenting from, and confess that though I am not blind to there being much enjoyment, the different evils of all animals, and of all classes of mankind, strike me with the most force. Those authors construe almost all things into so many tokens of happiness. If they look at a drop of water through a microscope, and see a multitude of animalcula swimming about, they seem to conclude that they must all be in a state of pleasure; not judging by analogy, that for one whose motions are the effect of happy sensation, there may be several which are struggling for food, from disease, and other such causes; that even the very fluid they inhabit is disputed by larger animals, who are continually destroying them and giving them the agonies of death after a very short life, whether it be of pleasure or of pain, and thereby embittering the draught of the thinking part of mankind. The different actions and cries indeed of all creatures, are adverted to as enlivening scenes of happiness; not noticing how many of them, which to the uninformed may appear to proceed from enjoyment, are in fact produced by fear, anger, pain, and the like; and which close observation will frequently discover them to be. How are the weak and sickly males oppressed by the strong and healthy ones, crossed in their amours, deprived of their food, injured in their bodies, and at last driven to end their lives in solitary places!”

“I do not see what right one animal has to deprive another of its small importance, to prevent himself from losing more: if this theory be generally admitted, a young man might kill an old man, to save his own longer expectant life. And are we authorized to kill one animal for the benefit of another of its species? If they should overstock the world, it will then be time to begin to destroy them. It seems however more just that nature should take her course, and that man should be neutral till provoked. It is certainly easier for him to destroy others than to suffer inconvenience himself; but that does not make it right. We have not however at present any reason to complain of the too great fecundity of those animals we use for food, etc., and we even take great pains to produce them, not for their own enjoyment, but for the good and pleasure we derive by destroying and tormenting them.”

“But the reader must particularly observe, that by the word “ soul” I do not mean precisely the same thing as most persons do—the general opinion of believers in soul being that it is the spirit of the person unencumbered, and set free of the body in a more perfect state than in this life, with all the feelings and senses, and even more than when united to the body. But my meaning is very different. I look on it as a thing totally devoid of feeling or thought, excepting when it is operated on by the body, and that when not, is totally insensible, and cannot be perceived unconnected with the body by any mortal eye, but only by the Almighty.”

“The force of custom or habits even proverbial; and accordingly we take advantage of the magnified representation in which we have been pleased to paint its effects, to veil our eyes from the sufferings of others, of mankind as well as of brutes; and whatever be their lots, if they suffer from over exertion, from being flogged, from exposure in danger, from want, from cold, from heat, etc., we lull our imagination with the idea that they do not feel those evils: custom we say is second nature.”

“Besides destruction by design to obtain the bodies of animals for food, another extensive sacrifice of life is committed in the very act of obtaining vegetable food and other necessaries, every plant having many disputants* and the ground, and even much of the water we drink being the habitation of numerous animated beings, which may be destroyed by every stroke of the spade, or every drought; but this mode of destruction is of a less blameable character than any other to which blame may attach, because not done with design, but should be avoided when unnecessary. Indeed even vegetables themselves should not be injured unnecessarily; who would be bold enough to assert that they are not imdued with sensation, when their similitude to animals and their exquisite and complicated organizations seem to affirm that they live and feel? The sensitive plant which droops on being touched, being one instance in favour of the idea. Another instance being in the plant which devours flies, this plant keeping open till a fly settles in it and then closes and devours it.”

“Respecting the state of savage or uncultivated life, man and other animals appear to be very similarly circumstanced; both of them being miserably subject to almost every evil, destitute of the means of palliating them; living in the continual apprehension of immediate starvation, of destruction by their enemies, which swarm around them; of receiving dreadful injuries from the revengeful and malicious feelings of their associates, uncontrolled by laws or by education, and acting as their strength alone dictates; without proper shelter from the inclemencies of the weather; without proper attention and medical or surgical aid in sickness; destitute frequently of fire, of candle-light, and also of clothing; without amusements or occupations, excepting a few, the chief of which are immediately necessary for their existence, and subject to all the ill consequences arising from the want of them.”