“It is perfectly true that ... the lower animals are not susceptible to those moral obligations which we owe to one another; but we owe a seven-fold obligation to the Creator of those animals. Our obligation and moral duty is to Him who made them, and if we wish to know the limit of the broad outline of our obligation, I say at once it is His nature and His perfections, and among those perfections one is most profoundly that of eternal mercy.... And, in giving a dominion over His creatures to man, He gave it subject to the condition that it should be used in conformity to His own perfections, which is His own law, and, therefore, our law.”
Archbishop Bagshawe in speaking on the subject, said: “We have the duty to imitate the Creator; but the Creator is infinite Mercy, and to cultivate in ourselves habits of cruelty, when He is infinite Mercy, is assuredly not fulfilling that duty.” In another land, an eminent Cardinal has asserted, that “Peccatum est crudelitas etiam in bestias ponit actionem dissonam a fine et ordine Creatoris.” (Cruelty to animals is a mortal sin, because it is contrary to the purpose and rule of the Creator.) From another Catholic theologian come the words “... in animals there is a something—call it right or call it claim—which is an intrinsic bar to cruelty, and renders that cruelty a sin. In other words, there is a real objective counterpart to the acknowledged sin of cruelty to animals and that is to be found in the animal’s nature.... That animals are meant, in the Providential order of things, to educate both the thought and affection of man, is proved by the fact that they have that influence. The wrong treatment of them must produce a distorted character, as experience shows. No one will deny that great and habitual cruelty in a child towards animals is rightly looked on everywhere as a very bad augury, and is a proof of a depraved disposition.”
From the pen of one whose historical studies have brought him a world-wide reputation—the Right Rev. Abbot Gasquet—we learn that early in the fifteenth century, when the art of printing was still in its infancy, a book was brought out that, among other duties, inculcated that of kindness to animals. The book was called “Dives et Pauper,” and was announced as being “a compendious treatise ... fructuously treating upon the Ten Commandments.” To quote from the modernised form in which the Abbot gives the passages, we find the following: “For God that made all, hath care of it all, and he will take vengeance upon all that misuse His creatures.” And again, “... so men should have thought for birds and beasts, and not harm them without cause, in taking regard that they are God’s creatures.”
And since those far-off days Englishmen and Americans, of all ranks and various professions, have been ready to urge the rights of our dumb friends to consideration and humane treatment at the hands of all. The eloquent words of Canon Wilberforce, from the pulpit in Westminster Abbey and elsewhere, have in stirring tones brought these duties home to large bodies of attentive listeners. The terrors of vivisection have been the theme of his pen in articles contributed to our monthly press; and in one of them, that appeared in the New Review in the year 1893, he asks the stern question, “What victory over diseases known to be fatal can scientific experts point to as the result of vivisection?” “Meanwhile,” the writer adds, “evidence accumulates that untold sufferings have been inflicted upon the human race from the erroneous conclusions adduced from experiments on animals.” Could any darker picture be drawn of suffering on the part of those who are powerless in the hands of man, and its hideous reflection on the members of the race who are responsible for it?
But it is vain to attempt to give complete instances of those who have done their best to bring the fuller light of a more perfect understanding on the true relationship of man towards the lower animals. Their name is legion, even without going beyond the bounds of our English-speaking land. Poets, churchmen, men of science and of literature, have all contributed to the noble work of rousing their fellow men to a fuller realisation of their duties towards their dumb friends. From France, from Spain, from Italy, and from Austria and other countries, earnest voices have been raised in the same cause.
Few Englishmen have done more good work in the study of the habits, dispositions, and nature of animals, than Dr. Lauder Lindsay. In his most interesting work on “Mind in the Lower Animals” we find the following passage, which it would be well if the young of the rising generation were taught to appreciate.
“At least those animals with whom we have most to do, think and feel as we do; are effected by the same influences, moral or physical; succumb to the same diseases, mental or bodily; are elevated or degraded in the social scale, according to our treatment; may become virtuous and useful, or vicious and dangerous, just as we are appreciative, sympathetic, kindly disposed towards them.”
If such teaching were given to those who are starting on their way through life, we might look for a rich harvest of appreciative and kindly treatment for our dog friend and his companions, in the years that are to come.
That loving heart, that patient soul,
Had they indeed no longer span