Quotes from Matthew Scully

So too have many other animals served us well over the ages. It was the use of livesock that first freed us from the chase, allowed man to settle and civilize himself, slowly rendering the hunter a useless and ever more ridiculous figures so engaged in what the name itself, game, implies.

The biological and moral realities - to say nothing of Go's own plan, whatever it may be - do not change with our own wishes.... a person is a person just as a dog is a dog, a deer a deer, a pig a pig, and so on through the animal kingdom. And either they suffer or they do not suffer.

When substitute products are found, with each creature in turn, responsible dominion calls for a reprieve. The warrant expires. The divine mandate is used up. What were once necessary evils become just evils.

When we assert our reason as our authority for dominion, we must use that authority reasonably. When we assert free will as our distinctive human quality, we must use our free will not only in acts of self-interest but in acts of self-restraint.

When we call something a necessary evil, something requiring the suffering or death of a fellow creature, the evil is real and it had better be necessary.

It would be enough if more of us would simply compare our own principles, our own vision of life and nature, whether secular or religious or somewhere in between, wit the reality of how animals are actually treated, often in our name. If such things cannot be justified, if the great majority of us find them reprehensible and wrong and unworthy of humanity, then why on earth are they all permitted? Why do we tolerate them, in our lives and in our laws?

Compassion for animals doesn't drain away some finite reserve of moral energy and idealism, to the detriment of human welfare, but surely adds to the supply.

Why just say grace when you can show it?

Mr Wallace is sitting beside a dying elk. If elk could scream, he reflects, the woods would have fewer hunters.

The moral value of any creature belongs to that creature, acknowledged or not, a different value from our own but just as much a hard and living reality. Just as our own individual moral worth does not hinge on the opinion of others, their moral worth does not hinge upon our estimation of them. Whatever it is, it is.

Granting Digby that one can be too emotional about animals, it seems fair to ask if one cannot also be a little to emotional about food. Why is it excessive sentimentality to see rabbits as our harmless fluffy tailed friends, but not excessive sentimentality to go on and on about rabbits soaked in rich gravy with the parsley and Dijon mustard and stock from the paws and head and old England and all the rest?

Defended over the ages as necessary to human survival, now all of a sudden hunting is necessary to the animals' survival, at least those favored species deigned fit to exist. But think about what he is saying. What a jaded, selfish view of the world and our place within it - a kind of reverse Genesis in which every species shall now be summoned before almighty man to justify their existence or be banished from creation, man the Unmaker of all things.

There's probably some truth in the idea that killing for sport is an act of rebellion against one's own mortality, as if in possessing the power of death one somehow defeats or deflects it.

In the same way, one might well ask what good it does to keep the elephants alive at all if their sole value on earth is a hunter's fee. Why even bother if we think so little of these creatures, after all that they have endured at the hands of man, that we are now willing to let them be farmed and administered in this nice, systematic way by the very people who have already done them so much evil?

The more we understand about life, in general, the more we value the lives of all creatures. -Paul Johnson, British historian

All predators are limited in the kind and duration of suffering they can inflict and in the level of moral degradation of which they are capable. We are not.

Since when does love ever diminish as we spread it around? Among humans it usually works the other way. So too in our dealings with the animals we know best.

Such.... evenhandedness. If we are exploiting one kind of animal, by this standard, why then it is only fair to exploit all others of comparable capacities. From there Mr. Komatsu returns to his collective guilt theme: Who are we to judge X when we ourselves are doing the same thing, and where do Westerners get off judging Japan or any other culture, and just what is so special about whales?

My brand of conservatism also brings with it a basic realism, accepting that there is a certain amount of suffering in the world beyond our power to avoid or spare, especially in the case of animals.

So too have many other animals served us well over the ages. It was the use of livestock that first freed us from the chase, allowed man to settle and civilize himself, slowly rendering the hunter a useless and ever more ridiculous figures so engaged in what the name itself, game, implies.

Leave us to our whale, as the whalers say, and we will leave you to your McDonalds and pork chops. They have a point. If you can have your favorites treats from the factory farm, why on earth can't others have their whale meal, or others their racks or ivory or fur coats or macaque brains or whatever? By what moral standard may we condemn any practice?

The more we understand about life, in general, the more we value the lives of all creatures. -Paul Johnson, British historian

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 now accepted as the extension of civilized values.

Having granted some protections to some animals, we are constantly confronted with the logic of our own laws, troubled by perfectly rational connections between the random or wanton acts of cruelty" the law forbids and the systematic, institutional cruelties it still permits.