Animal Rights

God made all the creatures and gave them
our love and our fear,
To give sign, we and they are his children,
one family here. Robert Browning

Animal rights? Have they got any? They're just animals. Sensate perhaps, but incapable of acting and reacting to stimuli other than a push here a shove there, a loud voice, maybe a whack in the ribs. That gets them moving, right? They are incapable of distinguishing nuances, of understanding human communication and mood. They just ... are. Lumps of flesh vastly inferior to the integuements of humankind. They do our bidding, or we discipline them. They disobey our orders and pay the price of violent reaction.

Nature teaches beasts to know their friends. William Shakespeare.

It's heart-rending to read newspaper accounts, little fragments of stories that appear from time to time about people violating the trust of companion animals. Cats and dogs tortured by idiotic teenagers. Whom psychiatrists tell us will mature to become abusive psychopaths, and that figures: apprenticing; try out the violence on those incapable of defending themselves before graduating to the higher animals, also unable to defend themselves from what has become a skilled predator.

The behaviour of men to the lower animals, and their behaviour to each other, bear a constant relationship. Herbert Spencer.

One reads on occasion - on too many occasions, if truth be told, and it should be - that people who start out with a distinct attraction to animals, with the intention of giving them safe haven, starting out with one or two abandoned animals, then compulsively picking up ever more to the point where they are functionally incapable of serving their needs, are outed. When animal welfare agencies move in and find the animals starving and diseased, their haircoats feces-clad, in an absolutely pitiable state.

A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast. Old Testament.

It does not really take all that much physical effort and mental determination to understand the needs of a companion animal. In fact, a dependent animal taken into a home as a companion is little different in needs than any other animal, humans as well. Paramount are the needs of security, food and water, fresh air and exercise, and emotional understanding. With those provisions the resulting companionship is worth its weight in gold.

Only a complete and utter imbecile would fail to understand.Behold a beast of nature black;
When one attacks it, it fights back! A Nony Mouse