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5948a23
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Animals are more than ever a test of our character, of mankind's capacity for empathy and for decent, honorable conduct and faithful stewardship. We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality, but in a sense because they don't; because they all stand unequal and powerless before us.
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ethics
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Matthew Scully |
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e599648
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When you start with a necessary evil, and then over time the necessity passes away, what's left?
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carnism
factory-farms
animal-welfare
necessity
meat
animals
evil
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Matthew Scully |
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a2c1f68
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Sometimes tradition and habit are just that, comfortable excuses to leave things be, even when they are unjust and unworthy. Sometimes--not often, but sometimes--the cranks and radicals turn out to be right. Sometimes Everyone is wrong.
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Matthew Scully |
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47a9e72
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Wildlife, we are constantly told, would run loose across our towns and cities were it not for the sport hunters to control their population, as birds would blanket the skies without the culling services of Ducks Unlimited and other groups. Yet here they are breeding wild animals, year after year replenishing the stock, all for the sole purpose of selling and killing them, deer and bears and elephants so many products being readied for the m..
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hunting
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Matthew Scully |
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5f76111
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Factory farming isn't just killing: It is negation, a complete denial of the animal as a living being with his or her own needs and nature. It is not the worst evil we can do, but it is the worst evil we can do to them.
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Matthew Scully |
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5f7111b
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The only thing worse than cruelty is delegated cruelty.
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Matthew Scully |
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a95c32f
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If we are defined by reason and morality, then reason and morality must define our choices, even when animals are concerned. When people say, for example, that they like their veal or hot dogs 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 what makes a human being human is precisely the ability to understand that the suffering of an ..
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morality
reason
gluttony
taste
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Matthew Scully |
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4c12bda
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It is true, as we are often reminded, that kindness to animals is among the humbler duties of human charity--though for just that reason among the more easily neglected. And it is true that there will always be enough injustice and human suffering in the world to make the wrongs done to animals seem small and secondary. The answer is that justice is not a finite commodity, nor are kindness and love. Where we find wrongs done to animals, it ..
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Matthew Scully |
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527eb49
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When we shrink from the sight of something, when we shroud it in euphemism, that is usually a sign of inner conflict, of unsettled hearts, a sign that something has gone wrong in our moral reasoning.
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morality
reason
euphemism
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Matthew Scully |
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5e6c392
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Tradition with all its happy assumptions and necessary evils, all of its content majorities and stout killers, is not always a reliable guide.
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Matthew Scully |
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1d73cf5
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I know many people far more upright and conscientous than I am who disagree, who think nothing of it. I know that vegetarianism runs against mankind's most casual assumptions about the world and our place within it. And I know that factory farming is an economic inevitability, not likely to end anytime soon. But I don't answer to inevitabilities, and neither do you. I don't answer to the economy. I don't answer to tradition and I don't ans..
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Matthew Scully |
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86841a6
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My earliest recollection is of coming upon some rabbit tracks in the backyard snow. I must have been three or so, but I had never seen a rabbit and can still recall the feeling of being completely captivated by the tracks: Someone had been here. And he left these prints. And he was alive. And he lived somewhere nearby, maybe even watching me at this very moment. Four decades later, I do not need to be reminded that rabbits are often a nui..
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Matthew Scully |
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ca2300d
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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. Their lives entail enough frights and tribulations without the modern fire-makers, now armed with perfected, inescapable weapons, traipsing along for more fun and thrills at their expense ev..
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Matthew Scully |
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977d492
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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. I also know phony arguments when I hear them--unbridled appetite passing itself off as altruism, and human arrogance in the guise of solemn 'duty.' We must, as C.S. Lewis advises, 'reject with detestation that cov..
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Matthew Scully |
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f51c0f0
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Some readers will say that animals awaken fantasy, if not heresy, in those who attach moral significance to them. Yet often I think it is the more violent among us who are living out the fantasy, some delusion in which everything in nature is nothing and all is permitted.
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Matthew Scully |
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fb4dbeb
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Intellectuals are a pretty unique species all by themselves, given to advocating things out of sheer brazenness that they could not themselves stomach if they were ushered in to witness the scene.
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Matthew Scully |
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78392a4
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In any case I just cannot imagine attaching so much importance to any food or treat that I would grow irate or bitter at the mention of the suffering of animals. A pig to me will always seem more important than a pork rind. There is the risk here of confusing realism with cynicism, moral stoicism with moral sloth, of letting oneself become jaded and lazy and self-satisfied--what used to be called an 'appetitive' person.
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meat
ethics
eating
food
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Matthew Scully |
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c6819cb
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I think he overlook a phase: that empathy stage in our 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. That kinship is to me reason enough to go abou..
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Matthew Scully |
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1a778a5
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When a man's love of finery clouds his moral judgment, that is vanity. When he lets a demanding palate make his moral choices, that is gluttony. When he ascribes the divine will to his own whims, that is pride. And when he gets angry at being reminded of animal suffering that his own daily choices might help avoid, that is moral cowardice.
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Matthew Scully |
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49b7096
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Though reason must guide us in laying down standards and laws regarding animals, and in examining the arguments of those who reject such standards, it is usually best in any moral inquiry to start with the original motivation, which in the case of animals we may without embarrassment call love. Human beings love animals as only the higher love the lower, the knowing love the innocent, and the strong love the vulnerable. When we wince at the..
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humanity
love
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Matthew Scully |
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6ddf899
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The elephants we have seen taunted and tormented and slaughtered by the likes of Safari Club do not have time to wait while the world's ethicists work out some centuries-long paradigm shift in moral thought.
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Matthew Scully |
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264b969
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As sentimentality towards animals can be overindulged, so, too, can grim realism, seeing only the things we want in animals and not the animals themselves.
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Matthew Scully |
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ae683b0
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Where we find wrongs done to animals, it is no excuse to say that more important wrongs are done to human beings, and let us concentrate on those. A wrong is a wrong, and often the little ones, when they are shrugged off as nothing, spread and do the gravest harm to ourselves and others.
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Matthew Scully |
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0fb9afe
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An author describing the methods of intensive farming, or the excesses of sport hunting, or even the harsher uses of animals in science writes with confidence that most readers will share his sense of concern and indignation. Sounding the call to action--convincing people that change is not only necessary, but actually possible--is more problematic. In protecting animals from cruelty, it is always just one step from the mainstream to the fr..
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Matthew Scully |
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24f6cb5
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Reforms will come as all great reforms have always come in ridding us of evils against both man and animal--not as we change our moral principles but as we discern and accept the implications of principles already held.
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morality
reform
principles
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Matthew Scully |
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5ab7ac2
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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.
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Matthew Scully |
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02c4d11
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If animals are just commodities, then we are just consumers, with no greater good than material pleasure and no higher law than appetite.
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Matthew Scully |
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a0c1962
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The corporate farmer is the absent farmer, the stranger on his own property, too important to worry about little details like whether a pig has room to turn or straw to sleep on. He is our modern hireling, too busy with bigger business than the care of his own animals, and we were warned about him long ago: The hired hand--who is no shepherd nor owner of the sheep-- catches sight of the wolf coming and runs away, leaving the sheep to be sna..
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Matthew Scully |
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1304c87
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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.
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Matthew Scully |
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fbf908b
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Animals are more than ever a test of our character, of mankind's capacity for empathy and for decent, honorable conduct and faithful stewardship. We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality, but in a sense because they don't; because they all stand unequal and powerless before us. Animals are so easily overlooked, their interests so easily brushed aside.
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Matthew Scully |
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93f8732
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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
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Matthew Scully |