Quotes from Matthew Scully

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

Much as I admire anyone who bothers to take the matter seriously, some theorists, at least in their more abstract arguments, miss a crucial point by assuming that to be cared for, a creature must somehow be made our equal, which isn't even true in our human affairs, where often those we love most are the weak and vulnerable.

As Theodore Roosevelt observed in his safari diary, Death by cold, death by starvation - these are the normal endings of the stately and beautiful creatures of the wilderness. The sentimentalists who prattle about the peaceful life of nature do not realize its utter mercilessness. The problem with this outlook is that is obscures our own singular capacity to make choices, for good or evil.... it sees in nature's violence an invitation to compound nature's violence.

When standard agricultural practice treats billions of animals as unfeeling flesh, at the very moment when humankind has established beyond reasonable doubt their conscious mental and emotional lives, it is no good to go on as if nothing had changed.

Another determined skeptic of animal awarenss write that the definition of consciousness has eluded us for over a century. But this isn't the problem at all. The problem is that as animals meet the old definitions, like conscious pain and deliberate communication, the experts keep making up new definitions.

A reading skimming the preceding pages might never know it, but most people like animals and often love them, and indeed we live in a time of great change in attitudes about the care and treatment of animals. Animal protection in this way is like many other great moral and social causes now adopted into custom and law, ideas once viewed as a threat to civilized values but not accepted as the extension of civilized values.

The difference is that whereas hey defer to common sense, empathy, and decency in the case of human consciousness, in the case of animals they do the opposite. The creatures are held to an impossible standard of evidence, an ever receding empirical horizon, allowing us to declare in theory that since we can never really know how they think and feel, we may safely conclude that they do not and act accordingly.

Gratuitous cruelty cannot take cover behind the fact of inevitable suffering.

Slaughtering swine, he writes, is repetitive, brutish work..... Five thousand quit and five thousand are hired every year. You ear people say, 'They don't kill pigs in the plant, they kill people.

If this animal is to be protected, why not that identical one, too? If it is cruelty to confine or mistreat a dog, a cat, or even a pet lamb or pig, why is it not cruelty to confine and mistreat millions of equally sensitive animals at Smithfield, IBP, ConAngra, and other such places? When we speak of the unavoidable severity of livestock production or laboratory experiments or trapping, and so on, just how rigorously are we defining unavoidable?

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.

That is the whole idea of mercy, after all, that it is entirely discretionary, entirely undeserved.... There is no such thing as a right to mercy, not for the animals and not even for us.

For my part, even if it were demonstrated to me that these poor beasts have no rights at all while I have every right to subject them to such privation and torment, and to delegate that authority to the gentlemen of Smithfield, it is a right I do not want, a power I gladly surrender.

While we are dealing with different people, different cultures, and different standards, we are still dealing with the same whale.

When we condemn cruelty to animals, we don't call it un-American, or un-European, or un-Japanese. We call it inhumane.

I know a crime against nature when I see one. It is usually a sign of crimes against nature that we cannot bear to see them at all, that we recoil and hide our eyes and no one has ever cringed at the sight of a soybean factory.

If we are defined by reason and morality, then reason and morality must define our choices, even where animals are concerned.

When people say, for example, that they like their veal or hot dogs just too much to ever give them up, and yeah it's sad about the farms but that's just the way it is, reason hears in that the voice of gluttony. We can say that here what makes a human being human is precisely the ability to understand that the suffering of an animal is more important than the taste of a treat.

For me it was a simple moral step of extending that vision out into the world, for what are dogs but affable emissaries from the animal kingdom?

What gifts they all are if our hearts are inclined in the right way and our vision to the right angle - seeing animals as they are apart from our designs upon them, as fellow creatures on their own terms, some glorious and mighty like the elephant, some fearful and lethal like the tiger, some joyful and gentle like the dolphin, some lowly and unprepossessing like the pig, but not a one of them, however removed from our exalted world, hidden from its Maker's sight.

We may not know or agree upon moral truths. But we do know that opposite things cannot at the same time ne true: identical creatures at the same time capable of suffering and incapable of suffering, worthy of moral consideration and unworthy of such concern, within the reach of God's love and beneath it.

Just as in logic a thing cannot be and not be at the same time, in moral reasoning identical creatures cannot be worthy of moral consideration and unworthy of moral consideration; this dog or dolphin or elephant morally significant and those others are not.

We can challenge farming practices today without passing judgement on the whole of human experience.

There are truths greater than our own wishes.