p. 267 | THE RIGHTS OF ANIMALS by Ouida

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 27, 1893

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 19, No. 17.

THE RIGHTS OF ANIMALS.

By Ouida

It is granted as a general premise that animals have a nervous system of acute sensibility, rendering them susceptible of pain as great as that which human bodies feel. Even their scientific tormentors admit this, and no one can doubt it who has seen them suffer. Yet in actual fact scarcely anyone who has to deal with them remembers this, or is in any way influenced by it. Animals are usually treated as if they were without any feeling, mental or physical. They are sold from hand to hand, bartered from owner to owner, torn from their homes and from their habits, forced into alien and unnatural ways of existence, flogged, struck, chained, overdriven, often starved as well, and, unless in some cases of extreme cruelty, the law does not interfere; in many countries it does not interfere even then.

Societies for the defense of animals are ridiculed, and even where they exist in some force are almost useless through the apathy or reluctance of the tribunals to which they appeal for authority to act. Of the hundreds of thousands who use and profit by animals there is not one in ten thousand who cares how they are treated, or would incur a personal danger or a passing opprobrium to save them from suffering. The whole attitude of man toward the animal is mean and unworthy; it is simply the bullying brutality of the stronger over the weaker, or rather of the cunning over the frank, for the dominance of man over the larger animals is entirely obtained by the exercise of ruse and ingenuity. No kind of warfare is deemed too treacherous to use in pursuit of wild animals, and no usage too barbarous to be given to tamed ones, if the interests or pleasures of the human race are thereby promoted. This may be natural, it may be inevitable, but it is certainly ignoble; and the boastful self-admiration with which men speak of it is singularly out of place.

The whole attitude of that nineteenth century god, science, is surely most unscientific toward animals. Since man is to the scientist merely like all other forms of life, a thing of gases and of phosphates, alive a little while, to be blown out like a spent match in the dark, wherein does he differ so greatly from all other animals that these others should be sacrificed in tens of millions to him?—Ouida, in the Animals' Guardian.