We have not yet become civilized
enough, so that we feel it incumbent upon us to recognize the fact that
animals can suffer pain, that animals can enjoy the air or the
sunshine, and that they have a right to each when they do not trespass
upon the larger rights of humanity. I was something of a boy when it
first came over me that it was not as amusing to animals to be shot and
killed as it was to me to shoot and kill them. From the time I was able
to lift a gun I had always carried one; but I soon learned that for me
there was no pleasure in taking needlessly the life of anything that
lived. We are only partially civilized as yet in the treatment of our
domesticated animals. How many people think of the torture of the curb
bit, of the check, of neglect in the case of cold, of thirst, of
hunger? How many people, I say, civilized and in our best society, are
careful yet as to the comfort, the rights, of those that serve them in
these humble capacities?
The time will come when our moral sympathetic sense shall widen its
boundaries even farther yet, and shall take in the trees and the
shrubs, the waters, the hills, all the natural and beautiful features
of the world. I believe that by and by it will be regarded as immoral,
as unmanly, to deface, to mar, that which God has made so glorious and
so beautiful. As soon as man develops, then, his power of sympathy, so
that it can take the world in its arms, so soon he will have grown to
the stature of the Divine in the unfolding of his moral nature.
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