Our duty towards animals : a question considered in the light of Christian philosophy / by Philip Austin.

  • Austin, Philip.
Date:
1885
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Our duty towards animals : a question considered in the light of Christian philosophy / by Philip Austin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    and the like, hold that it is immoral to put animals to death for any purpose, whether to procure a zoological specimen,* or to provide food or clothing, or for any other service of mankind. It is, then, not only the country gentleman and the biologist who are concerned in knowing what moralists may teach us as to our relations to the brutes. Every person who makes use of the forced labour of animals, who drives at any time in a carriage, or has anything brought to him by animals, or whose shoes are made of leather, or who consumes flesh, fish, milk, eggs, honeycomb, or any other animal product, or who collects beetles, butterflies, or shells, will soon have to ask himself what his duties towards the brutes may be. And he should be provided with some consistent grounds and reasons for his conduct towards the brutes, and not be dependent on the mere impulse of the moment for what he is pleased to condemn or approve. The animalists have attacked the physiologists first, because it was easy to raise an agitation against practices which must be imperfectly understood if no special training had been gone through, and * “ Animals, then, have in the abstract the same Right of Life and the same Right of Personal Liberty as we. . . . You have as much right to kill it [i.e. a beetle or a butterfly) for a 1 specimen ’ as you would have to kill a rare kind of Polynesian savage.”—E. B. Nicholson, “ Rights of an Animal,” chap. vii.