Quotes from Matthew Scully

In the summer or fall of 1974, I read some books about factory farming, and decided that I wanted no part of it.

Factory farming came about from a moral race to the bottom, with corporations vying against each other to produce more and bigger animals with less care at lower cost.

To the factory farmer, in contrast to the traditional farmer with his sense of honor and obligation, the animals are production units, and accorded all the sympathy that term suggests.

Factory farming, like comparable evils throughout history, depends for its existence upon concealment. It depends on people either not noticing or willfully averting their gaze.

Religious people... hold a kind and merciful view of life, the faith of the broken, the hounded, the hopeless. Yet too often, they will not extend that spirit to our fellow creatures.

Philosophical theories can in this way become a destructive venture, confusing matters with false choices and sterile power schemes the cruel are only too happy to accept. In hostile hands, they become a pretext for doing nothing, for brushing off real and urgent moral duties in the care of animals.

lives when we may begin to see even the commonest animals on their own terms, fellow creatures with their own needs to meet and hardships to bear, joined with us in the mystery of life and death—and frankly, for all of our more exalted endowments, not all that much less enlightened than the sagest of naked apes about the meaning of it all.

Man thinks that he can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to his will, as though it did not have its own requisites and a prior god-given purpose, which man can indeed develop but must not betray. Instead of carrying out his role as a cooperator with God in the work of creation, man sets himself up in place of God and thus ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature, which is more tyrannized than governed by him.

Factory farming isn't just killing: It is a negation, a complete denial of the animal as a living being with his or her own needs and nature ... It confronts us with the animal equivalent of Abraham Lincoln's condemnation of human slavery: 'If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

Now what is it that moves our very hearts and sickens us so much at cruelty shown to poor brutes? … They have done us no harm and they have no power of resistance; it is the cowardice and tyranny of which they are the victims which make their sufferings so especially touching. Cruelty to animals is as if man did not love God…. There is something so very dreadful, so Satanic, in tormenting those who have never harmed us, who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power.21

Go into the largest livestock operation, search out the darkest and tiniest stall or pen, single out the filthiest, most forlorn little lamb or pig or calf, and that is one of God's creatures you're looking at, morally indistinguishable from your beloved Fluffy or Frisky.

at their disposal. So they assemble in protests to convey their objections. What's wrong with that? A similar outpouring came recently from American Walter Williams, one of my favorite columnists and a conservative economist known

Such terrifying powers we possess, but what a sorry lot of gods some men are. And the worst of it is not the cruelty but the arrogance, the sheer hubris of those who bring only violence and fear into the animal world, as if it needed any more of either.

It is our fellow creatures' lot in the universe, the place assigned them in creation, to be completely at our mercy, the fiercest wolf or tiger defenseless against the most cowardly man.

A helpless elephant hunted by sharpshooters waiting by the water hall, a deer fleeing the hunter or dying on a highway, a pig or lamb or calf trapped amid the bedlam, - they cannot draw a meaning from their hardship, or find refuge in God, or pray for deliverance. That still leaves the enduring of it, the deprivation and fear and panic and loneliness. We know those feelings too.

There is something so very dreadful, so satanic, in tormenting those who have never harmed us, who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power. -Cardinal John Henry Newman

The fact that creatures cannot act morally toward us in no way diminishes our ability to act morally toward them.

Harsher methods of producing animal commodities are always more cost-efficient than kinder ones - in the space and type of food and degree of human care afforded to them - just as harsher labor conditions are often the most economical. When no country is willing to make concessions, and thereby risk losing a market, the only alternative is to drop the subject of animal welfare entirely, and exactly this is happening.

Confronted with each nation's own questionable products and practices, we have two choices. We can say, as Mr. Komatsu hopes, Well they do X but we do Y, so who are we to judge? We then end up with no standard at all, instead using other people's cruelties as an excuse for our own.

For here we have the livestock industry and its best minds admitting that the production units suffer. They now concede, in theory and practice, that the animals are feeling pain, and not just physical pain either but emotional torment.

If a right is a prohibition on human wrongdoing, and if animals can be the object of wrongful human action, then to precisely that extent animals have rights - not, of course, among one another, but only in their encounters with us.

Even if our dealings with the lowly animals, this sort of relativism works its evils. What makes Mr. Komatsu's argument so insidious is its denial that there are realities about animals, that these realities are in crucial respects knowable, and that once known, we are morally obliged to accept and to act upon them regardless of culture or personal preference.

Everyone who derives pleasure from tormenting animals, or watching the torment, insists they do so for only the loftiest motives.

Why do any animals scream when they are wounded or killed, even when those screams can have no possible utility? Why do we scream, and why has evolution designed us to consciously experience our physical pain, but not them?