I've had Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy by Matthew Scully for several months now. I finished it over a month ago, but every once in awhile I've been going back to note all the great quotes I found. This may be extremely long...hmm, first some short quotes and then a couple very long quotes. Some teaser quotes, and if you are interested, then you can read the extended quotes. I will put a double asterisk (**) after a quote included in an extended quote.
"When substitute products are found, with each creature in turn, responsible dominion calls for a reprieve. The warrant expires. The divine mandate is used up. What were once “necessary evils” become just evils." (43)**
"In fact, let us just call things what they are. 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." (121)**
“Pigs and lambs and cows and chickens are not pieces of machinery, no matter how cost-efficient it may to treat them as such. Machinery doesn’t cry or feel frightened or lonely. And when a man treats them this way, he might as well be a machine himself. Something dies in him, too. Something is lost in a society that rewards and enriches him, driving him on at this pace and in this spirit.” (288)
“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. It confronts us with the animal equivalent of Abraham Lincoln’s condemnation of human slavery: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” (289)
“If animals are the products of blindly amoral evolution, then of course...we, too, are shaped and driven by the same amoral forces. If they are victims in a universe without purpose or meaning or a Creator who made them, then so are we, and rights and entitlements become everything. If animals are just commodities, then we are just consumers, with no greater good than material pleasure and no higher law than appetite. And if there is a God and they are His creatures, not ours, then there is indeed a higher law regarding their care and we must answer to it – not just when it suits us, not just when we feel the spirit upon us, and not just when it’s cost-efficient, but always.” (308)
“Many people when they examine their beliefs about animals will find, I think, that they hold radically contradictory views, allowing for benevolence one moment and disregard the next. And the reality is that we have a choice of one or the other. As a practical matter we are free, of course, to do more or less as we please absent further changes in law. As a matter of conscience, however, we must each ask ourselves which outlook is truer, which is closer to our heart, which attitude leaves us feeling better and worthier when we act upon it, and then follow that conviction where it leads. And when we fail to act consistently with our own moral principles, when we profess one thing and do another, we must be willing to call that error by its name. It is hypocrisy.” (309)
“When we assert reason as our authority for dominion, we must use that authority reasonably. When we assert free will as our distinctive human quality, we must use our free will not only in acts of self-interest but in acts of self-restraint. When we call something a “necessary evil,” something requiring the suffering or death of a fellow creature, the evil is real and it had better be necessary.” (310)
[*in reference to the way of life that factory farming stands for*] "Looking into that mirror, what do you see? Where is the charity in it, where is the humanity? How does it square with the kind of society you wish to live in and the kind of person you hope to be? If you are a religious person, where in that scene is the God who loves these creatures and asks us to do the same? (312)**
“Sometimes tradition and habit are just that, comfortable excuses to leave things be, even when they are unjust and unworthy.” (314)
“Animal issues can be complicated, and though I do not myself claim to know where all the answers lie...I do know what the answers are not. I know that it is mean and unjust to treat such creatures in such a way. As in judging egregious wrongs committed against human beings, I start with the thing itself, the acts and its results, the spirit and its fruits, and work my way back from there. Some things cannot under any circumstances be justified, even in our dealings with animals. When we find them we must call them what they are, evils, and then set about ridding those evils from our midst.” (353)
“As in other legal prohibitions against human wrongdoing, we would be protecting important moral and social goods, framing standards we can live by and defend – while extending, in the phrase of the day, a little “compassionate conservatism” even to the lowly animals. In practice, a Humane Farming Act would make family farming the model, as is slowly happening already in the law of the European Union – barring over the next decade, for example, battery cages for poultry and veal crates for calves. In America it will take a law of this sweep to save the small farms now just barely surviving, and to end the moral race to the bottom – cutting costs by any and all means – that corporate farmers will always win.” (393)
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Want to read more? I have only 4 extended quotes that I took the time to write down. I underlined the parts of these extended quotes that I already quoted above. The first two are from the beginning of the book and involve some of the most interesting biblical passages to animal welfare issues. The third quote may be interesting to you if you have reservations about animal welfare issues because of the many activists that push the idea of animal rights. The fourth quote, I think, is a great sample of the message given in the whole book. Scully holds no reservations and this can be a confronting passage. Also, it can be very, very hard to get through with graphic descriptions of animal suffering.
Talk like this in my conservative circles, and there’s no surer way to bring conversation to a throat-clearing silence. For many of my friends it has the scent of Far Eastern mysticism, some eerie New Age creed alien to their own moral outlook, not a part of our own Western tradition. But if you want to get scriptural about it, that very same Bible always invoked for harsh dominion insistently calls mankind in just this spiritual direction, as in the post-Flood Second Covenant – right after the creatures are delivered into our hands – when we are told:
…I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood…And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations…And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud…and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth. [Genesis 9:11-16]
I don’t know how much preachin’ and teachin’ I have heard over the years about all of the covenanting between God and man. I do not recall ever once hearing that our fellow creatures were included, too. Yet there it is. The whole “fear and dread” scene is an act of leniency toward man, with quite explicit reminders to extend that spirit of clemency all around. When He says, “the fear of you and dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth,” [Genesis 9:2] it is not exactly our proudest moment and He is not bidding us to pursue that vision. The drama, an epoch of renewal unfolding even as the dove debuts as symbol of peace, comes in the context of a divine concession to our incorrigible weakness and taste for violence. Echoing throughout the Old Testament is a call to rapprochement, at least in our hearts – as when Hosea, pausing in his rebuke of Israel, reminds us of the restoration to come:
And in that day I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven, and with the creeping things of the ground; and I will break the bow and the sword and the battle out of the earth, and will make them to lie down safely. And I will betroth thee unto me forever; yea, I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness, and in justice, and in loving kindness, and in mercies. [Hosea 2:18-19]
Isaiah, hardly the maudlin type, prophesizes that one day:
The wolf shall also dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf with the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox…They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. [Isaiah 11:6-9]
Granted, that doesn’t seem like one of Scripture’s more practical sayings. The wolf and lion are going to need a lot of convincing. It’s a mysterious image. So also are many other images in the Bible mysterious and wildly impractical, like beating swords into plowshares or loving both your neighbor and your enemy, or when a man asks for your coat, giving him your cloak, too. That doesn’t prevent us from seeing the general idea, which here as throughout the Bible would seem to be the way of peace toward man and beast alike, bringing closer the promised age when there is no more bloodshed and no more death. Why, when it comes to dominion, are we always stern literalists in the subduing parts and scornful skeptics in the peace-bringing parts?” (26-28)
If we take Isaiah at his word, maybe the moment prophesied is arriving an unexpected turn in our human story, not an onerous moral demand but a wonderful moral opportunity. Perhaps we are getting uneasy about our mistreatment of animals because we should be uneasy about it. Maybe we wonder about these practices because we are supposed to be wondering about them. There comes a time when the service is no longer needed, and the master, if he is just, will turn to the suffering creatures in his dominion, from the mink to the pig to the elephant to the great leviathan, and say, “Dismissed.”
I understand the staggering complexities of reforming our treatment of animals, though the “conservation” imperatives where wildlife are concerned are wildly exaggerated. Here I only put to you one simple proposition about the animals we raise for fur and flesh. If, in a given situation, we have it in our power either to leave the creature there in his dark pen or let him out into the sun and breeze and feed him and let him play and sleep and cavort with his fellows – for me it’s an easy call. Give him a break. Let him go. Let him enjoy his fleeting time on earth, and stop bringing his kind into the world solely to suffer and die. It doesn’t seem like much to us, the creatures’ little lives of grazing and capering and raising their young and fleeing natural predators. Yet it is the life given them, not by breeder but by Creator. It is all they have. It is their part in the story, a beautiful part beyond the understanding of man, and who is anyone to treat it lightly? Nothing to us – but for them it is the world.
The economic complexities? The world is complex no matter how you arrange it. Take one impulse, your hankering for a hot dog. Multiply it a hundred million times over and follow the lines as they meet in Utah at that 50,000-acre facility, housing all those hogs never once allowed outside. That is the complex world one craving creates. Most people can’t even face the details behind it.
Now take another impulse, your compassion for a fellow creature. Multiply that a hundred million times over and see where it leads. It is a world and an economy employing just as many people now called to produce the substitute products. In all the complexities required by change, that world you can at least look at without cringing. Indeed, if Genesis is any guide, it bears a much closer resemblance to the world meant for us. In those pre-Fall days, after all, animals were off the Garden menu:
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. [Genesis 1:28]
In the very next breath man is told to keep his mitts off the critters (and vice versa) and be content with the herbs and the fruit of the trees:
And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding fruit; to you it shall be for meat. [Genesis 1:29]
If any passage in Scripture lends credibility to the writers, it is this, for of course they were not themselves vegetarians. The alternative vision must simply have seemed inconceivable – a world in which it actually pleased our Maker to see His creatures stalking and slaying and absorbing one another. The Catholic “meatless Friday” as a sign of penance, purity, and peace came to use (via a papal boost to the fishing industry, with the Friday of course symbolizing something else) from this same idea of predation as a consequence of the Fall and corruption of the world, as does the “grace” before meals. Indeed there was a time when Christians fasted from animal products throughout all forty days of Lent, a form of self-denial still found among the orthodox and matched in Islam by the prohibition on killing game while on pilgrimage. Certain Jewish dietary laws, such as the prohibition against mixing milk with flesh – in effect basting the animal in the milk of his or her mother – carry a similar sense of meat as bearting the stain of violence and needing sanctification.
The next step seems obvious to me. If sanctity is the goal, and flesh-eating a mark of the Fall, the one is to be sought and the other is be avoided. Why just say grace when you can show it? Maybe, in the grand scheme of things, the life of a pig or cow or fowl of the air isn’t worth much. But if it’s the Grand Scheme we are going by, just what is a plate of bacon or veal worth? The skeptical reader can write me off as misguided, if not mad. I am betting that in the Book of Life “He had mercy on the creatures” is going to count for more than “He ate well.” The Reverend Andrew Linzey, a profound writer on the subject, puts it this way: “Whatever the difficulties in conceiving of a world without predation, to intensify and heighten – without any ethical necessity – the parasitical forces in our world is to plunge creation further into that darkness from which the Christian hope is that we shall all, human and animal, be liberated.” [Animal Theology]
Whenever we are called to decide the fate of an animal, the realism comes in at least facing up to the price of things whenever man with all his powers enters the picture. It requires discernment and care and humility before Creation. It means understanding that habits are not always needs, traditions are not eternal laws, and the fur salon, kitchen table, or Churchill Room are not the center of the moral universe. It means seeing “the things that are” before we come marching along with our infinite agenda of appetites and designs and theories, and not covering it up with phony science or theological niceties or the unforgiving imperatives of tradition or economics or conservation.” (43-45)
For my part, even if it were demonstrated to me that these poor beasts have no rights at all while I have every right to subject them to such privation and torment, and to delegate that authority to the gentleman of Smithfield, it is a right I do not want, a power I gladly surrender. That is the whole idea of mercy, after all, that it is entirely discretionary, entirely undeserved. “It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.” [William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene I] There is no such thing as a right to mercy, not for the animals and not even for us.
We tell ourselves that all this carnage is inevitable, traditional, the way of the world. And until our own day, when we have removed all compassion from the process even as a wide array of meat substitutes appear, this was a plausible position.” (312)
This always surprises me. If you express concern for the fur bearer in question, his or her paw all but severed by the time the trapper comes along for the forking and bludgeoning, or huddled for its entire life in a tiny cage in 32 degree temperatures – why, then, you must be one of those ridiculous, killjoy fanatics. A bore. But rise in furious defense of a coat – now there’s the mark of a serious man. Likewise, express qualms about some little delicacy like foie gras – fifteen thousand tons of the stuff every year in France alone, all of it obtained by forcing a metal pipe down the ducks’ throats and pumping in pounds of food until their livers are grotesquely enlarged – and that makes you petty and trifling and sentimental, and why don’t you have your mind on bigger things? But reach for the knife and crackers, never mind the damned duck. And then you’re thinking straight. Now you’ve got your priorities in order.
Nobody likes being preached to, especially about meals and clothing. I sure don’t, and most of us who worry about animal welfare have learned to let the point go. But spare us the haughty airs. If moral seriousness is the standard, I for one would rather be standing between duck and knife than going to the mat in angry defense of a table treat.
In fact, let us just call things what they are. 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.
Conservatives in particular would do well to examine the huffy impatience they sometimes bring to questions of animal welfare. We are talking, after all, about some fairly simple connections here, and after a while it becomes perverse not to make them. I think for example of some wrenching footage aired in late 1998 by the NBC News program Dateline documenting the use of some two million cats and dogs a year by Chinese fur manufacturing for export mostly to the West. Filmed by undercover agents for the Humane Society of the United States, on the video we saw the dogs tied down while being skinned alive, whimpering for mercy, actually licking the hand of the skinner, and the cats stuffed into little cages, huddled in terror as one after was strangled to death – literally noosed and hung inside the cage, this to avoid bleeding or other damage to the fur.
A horrible scene for any American (and still going on throughout China and Korea) because, of course, we don’t do that with cats and dogs. We like cats and dogs. We only allow that to happen to other animals. It’s okay to stuff millions of other creatures like mink and beaver and fox into cages and torture and terrify and electrocute them – precisely the method, despite those comforting assurances the furriers gave Walter Williams. Indeed, the very fact that Dr. Williams thought it necessary to seek such assurances is an admission of the moral relevance of the question. Only he doesn’t seem to really want the facts, which threaten upheaval of his world and wardrobe.
Whatever motive is at work there, it is not reason. What principle of reason or morality permits us to disapprove of one kind of fur trade and not the other? It’s easy for us to look aghast on the Chinese. How uncivilized of them! Yet all they are doing is applying our own logic and economics to the fullest, with none of the arbitrary and dainty moral distinctions we bring to the matter.” (120-121)
