Strictly speaking, no activity and no industry is possible without a certain amount of violence, no matter how little. Even the very process of living is impossible without a certain amount of violence. What we have to do is to minimize it to the greatest extent possible.
Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.
Animal experimentation is the blackest of all the black crimes that a man is at present committing... We should be able to refuse to live if the price of living be the torture of sentient beings... I abhor [animal] experimentation with my whole soul. All the scientific discoveries stained with innocent blood I count as of no consequence... The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.
If it's a question about stuff that matters to you personally, like favorite food, favorite piece of knowledge, favorite animal, it's hard not to have an opinion and want to quantify things.
To the size of the state there is a limit, as there is to plants, animals and implements, for none of these retain their facility when they are too large.
Just give food without showing affection, [animals] might not get sort of 100% satisfaction. So they also, you see, when we human beings, we show affection, the poor animal also respond to us.
Water is an individual, an animal, and is alive, remove the hydrogen and it is an animal and is alive; the remaining oxygen is also an individual, an animal, and is alive. Recapitulation: the two individuals combined, constitute a third individual-and yet each continues to be an individual....here was mute Nature explaining the sublime mystery of the Trinity so luminously that even the commonest understanding could comprehend it, whereas many a trained master of words had labored to do it with speech and failed.
God made all the animals in a single day; he could have swept them all away in the flood and re-created them in one day when they were again needed. Therefore it was an odd idea to save specimens of them for eleven months in the ark, whilst aware that eight persons could not feed or water them by any human possibility. If they were to be preserved by miracle, the ark was not necessary - to let them swim would have answered the purpose and been more indubitably miraculous.
I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.