Quotes from Matthew Scully

It is a terrible thing that religious people today can be so indifferent to the cruelty of the farms, shrugging it off as so much secular, animal rights foolishness. They above all should hear the call to mercy. They above all should have some kindness to spare.

History is full of other hidden foundations too long unexamined, old ways that people could not part with, practices about which they were proud and sure and defiant when they should have been ashamed.

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, with 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?

We may not know or agree upon moral truths. But we do know that opposite things cannot at the same time be 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.

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 the 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.

That is the whole idea o 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.

History is full of other hidden foundations too long unexamined, old ways tat people could not part with, practices about which they were proud ad sure and defiant when they should have been ashamed.

Every age, as Allan Bloom observed, is blind to its own worst madness.

Self-actualization, for a man, is self-mastery, the strength to govern his appetites and passions and not be governed by them.

We are constantly told that concern over the supposed cruelties of farming, as Stephen Budiansky puts it in The Covenant of the Wild, is a product of the soft urban mind-set, unaccustomed to the harsh realities of rural life. Another way of looking at this is that the urban types are not steeped in the ways of blood spilling and have no financial and emotional attachments to the practices in question. In other contexts, that's usually called objectivity.

Nature has its own hardships, but its own kindnesses, too, like straw and room to sleep and the are of a mother for her young.

Tolerance of the factory farms dictates a tolerance of just about everything else, in effect moving the ethical bar lower and lower until, after a while, the critical faculties break down and one cruelty is used to justify another - new necessary evils defended and permitted merely because the old ones still go on.... We cannot seriously question anything because we are not thinking seriously at all.

Our laws concerning animals are a system of inconsistencies, special privileges, and arbitrary dispensations best described as codified caprice.

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

In a strange way mankind does seem to be growing more sentimental about animals, and also more ruthless. No age has ever been more solicitous to animals, more curious and caring. Yet no age has ever inflicted upon animals such massive punishments with such a complete disregard, as witness scenes to be found on any given day at any modern industrial farm.

From Africa to the western United States to the story of the rainforest of the Amazon, it is the fate of many wild creatures either to be unwanted by men or wanted too much, despised as a means to progress or desired as a means to progress - beloved and brutalized all at once, like the elephant and whale and dolphin.

Animals are so easily overlooked, their interests to easily brushed aside. Whenever we humans enter their world, from our farms to the local animal shelter to the African savanna, we enter as lords of the earth bearing strange powers of terror and mercy alike.

Those who dismiss love for our fellow creatures as mere sentimentality overlook a good and important part of our humanity.

For all we know it, their pain may sometimes seem more immediate, blunt, arbitrary, and inescapable than ours. Walk through an animal shelter or a slaughterhouse and you wonder if animal suffering might not at times be all the more terrifying and all-encompassing without benefit of the words and concepts that for us, after all, confer not only meaning but consolation. Whatever is going on inside their heads, it doesn't seem mere to them.

The very industries clinging to such theories employ cats and dogs and chimps and so many other animals in laboratory test of analgesics and surgeries, a useless exercise unless they experience physical pain comparable to ours.

Veal, by definition, is the product of a sick, anemic, deliberately malnourished calf, a newborn dragged away from his mother in the first hours of life. Veal calves are dealt the harshest of punishments for the least essential of meats.

'Cost-saver' in industrial livestock agriculture may usually be taken to mean 'moral shortcut.'

The truth is that at the White House and in Congress, you are as likely to find sympathy for animal issues among Republicans as among Democrats.

Conservatives like to think of animal protection as a trendy leftist cause, which makes it easier to brush off. And I hope that more of us will open our hearts to animals.