Cruelty to Animals

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Mar 16, 1876

Cruelty to Animals.

The man who gives unrestrained license to his violent passions must inevitably make a miserable end. “He that ill-treats his horses is insensibly led to ill-treat his wife and children.” There is much truth in this. If the people would learn to point to every man who abuses an animal of any kind as a brute, harsh and cruel to women, might he not be shamed into better action? One may be possessed of cruel instincts, but violence of temper and exhibitions of brutality are pretty much matters of education. If a man is early made to understand that his cruel propensities excite feelings of disgust in the hearts of those whose friendship he holds dear, he will try very hard to control himself. And if he seriously makes the effort, he will discover in the end that he is able to both speak and act with gentleness. But educate the child to acts of cruelty, and you make of that child a bad, unfeeling man, a man without charity or a spark of pity.

A royal child, afterwards Louis XIII., once crushed beneath the heel of his boot a little sparrow which had taken refuge in his bosom, seeing which the good King, his father, Henry IV., exclaimed to his Queen, “Wife,” said he, “I pray I may outlive that son, else he will be sure to maltreat his mother.” And the prediction was verified, for that mother, Catherine de Medicis, died in poverty and exile, inflicted by that same son. Peter the Cruel, King of Spain; Peter the Cruel, King of Portugal; Peter the Great, as well as cruel, Emperor of Russia, prepared themselves for the crimes which soiled their reigns by the little cruelties inflicted on inferior animals. Fathers and mothers, teach your children to be kind to the brute creation, and you will make nobler and better men and women of them. Cruelty to the animal world is a species of savageness that should be blotted out of enlightened humanity.