Animal torture

“ The feelings that prompt a cat to torture a captured mouse can only, I think, be assigned to the category to which by common consent they are ascribed—delight in torturing for torture's sake. Speaking of man, John S. Mill somewhere observes that there is in some human beings a special faculty or instinct of cruelty, which is not merely a passive indifference to the sight of physical sufferings, but an active pleasure in witnessing or causing it. ”

“ Algidus Station.
never really reach a vital part of the animal’s anatomy, but, after severely wounding it, they leave it, and the poor brute wanders about with a large gash, sometimes four or five inches across, on its rump, and torn open so much that the transverse processes of the vertebrae can be seen. The sheep struggles along until blood-poisoning, caused by filth and exposure, sets in, and the unfortunate beast lies down and gives up the struggle. The animals must suffer very severe torture as they wander about, the large wound exposing the flesh to insects and to extremes of weather. ”

“ The Emperor of the French has received a deputation from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. We sincerely trust that this interview may be the means of putting an end to the unjustifiable brutalities too often inflicted on the lower animals under the guise of scientific experimentation. IT HAS NEVER APPEARED CLEAR TO US THAT WE ARE JUSTIFIED IN DESTROYING ANIMALS FOR MERE EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES; but now that we possess the means of removing sensation during experiments, the man who puts an animal to torture ought, in our opinion, to be prosecuted. ”

“ I think they give rise to the utmost cruelty to the creatures hunted and shot, to the horses and dogs employed; and to witness torture inflicted on unoffending animals cannot but have a debasing effect on the human mind. ”

“ He who can deliberately inflict torture upon an animal, in order to heighten the pleasure his palate is to receive in eating it, is an abuser of the authority which God has given him, and is, indeed, a tyrant in his heart. ”

“ What has here happened is that the instinct of cruelty, which has turned inwards, has become self-torture, and all man's animal instincts have been reinterpreted as guilt towards God. Every Nay man utters to his nature, to his real being, he flings out as a Yea, an affirmation of reality applied to God's sanctity, his capacity of judge and executioner, and in the next place to eternity, the "Beyond," pain without end, eternal punishment in hell. ”

“ But we must not forget the branding and castrating operations; the journey to the slaughter-house, which when trans-continental and trans-oceanic must be a long drawn-out nightmare of horror and terror to the doomed beasts; we must not forget the insatiable cruelty of the average cowboy; we must not forget that the animal inevitably spends at least some minutes of instinctive dread and fear when he smells and sees the spilt blood of his forerunners, and that this terror is intensified when, as is frequently the case, he witnesses the dying struggles, and hears the heart-rending groans ”

“ E. Bell has written, “Dreadful are the revelations made by humane men, who, setting aside personal comfort and peace of mind, have endeavoured to sound the depths of animal agony and bloodshed. The process of flaying alive, and even of dismembering animals before the breath has left their bodies, is far from uncommon in private slaughter-houses.” ”

“ I have said that both reason and humanity rebel at the unnecessary killing of wild animals. For the humanity, that is self-evident—to torture is not humane: and for the reason, when one comes to think of it a little, how absolutely silly it is! It is destruction, the child's pleasure, the unmaking of what one could not possibly make, smashing, breaking up, dashing to pieces, vandalism applied to the living works of nature, leading to their eternal perishing, with a hideous void in their stead. ”

“ To thus destroy the animal may appear heartless, but, in reality, is an act of mercy; as it is much better for him to die a quick, painless death, than to be sold to a life of toil, pain, and cruelty, in which, perhaps, he may pass mouths, if not years, of a living death. ”

“ This author uses the squeal, or, rather, the wild death shrieks of agony of the ten millions of living creatures tortured to death every year in Chicago and the other tens of millions elsewhere, to pander to the old brutal, inhuman thirst of humanity for a diet of blood. The billions of the slain have found a voice at last, and if I mistake not this cry of anguish from the "killing-beds" shall not sound on until men, whose ancestors once were cannibals, shall cease to devour even the corpses of their murdered animal relatives. ”

“ If something is by chance left over, it goes to satisfy the hunger of the humbler creatures of prey. In a state of nature, where wild creatures prey upon wild creatures, such a thing as wanton, wholesale and utterly wasteful slaughter is almost unknown!
When the wild mink, weasel and skunk suddenly finds himself in the midst of scores of man's confined and helpless domestic fowls, or his caged gulls in a zoological park, an unusual criminal passion to murder for the joy of killing sometimes seizes the wild animal, and great slaughter is the result. ”

“ When he has seized his victim, he tears open its neck, and laps its blood before he begins to eat. He devours every part of a small animal, but the larger ones he eats only in part—the head, neck, and shoulders—burying the rest. ”

“ Dogs, again, that had been quite law-abiding as regards domestic poultry, tame rabbits, sucking pigs, or sheep and lambs, suddenly took to breaking beyond the control of their masters, and killing anything that they were told not to touch. It was held that any animal killed by a dog had died a natural death, for it was the dog’s nature to kill things, and he had only refrained from molesting farmyard creatures hitherto because his nature had been tampered with. ”

“ Every animal killed knows the one who takes its life, but it is helpless, yet it resists, but cannot escape the death blow; realizing the cruelty, and wrong, that makes every nerve cry out in remontrance, and its blood curdles and boils in its veins with fear and dread of what is coming; and this condition produces a high state of fever that poisons every atom of its flesh; and when eaten it causes disease that brings death to the eater, sooner or later." J. H. Neff.
"CIVILIZED CANNIBALS."
Murdering is the business of the people! ”

“ Often they only tear a mouthful of flesh from the body of their victim; sometimes they do not even kill the animal but leave it to suffer a slow and painful death. The animals that are only slightly bitten are sure to die from blood poisoning, according to the western ranchmen. ”

“ The church folk encourage the killing of quadruped, fish and fowl and then have the audacity to say grace at meal time, thanking God and imploring Him to shower blessings upon them.
You believe in all that elevates man to the highest standard of excellence and yet in the eating of a slaughtered animal you are an accessory to the crime of murder—a crime that is far more morally wrong and horrible than any so-called venial sin. ”

“ According to their belief, animals also have souls which wander about after their death; thus, when they have killed one, fearing lest its soul should come and torment them, they ask pardon for the evil they have done to it, and offer sacrifices proportioned to the strength and size of the animal. ”

“ The slaughter of an animal is therefore of necessity painful, except in the special cases where means have been taken to do away with pain. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, when an animal is slaughtered by man, it is the death of the animal which benefits man, the pain itself which accompanies the death does him no good at all. While justified, therefore, in killing the animal, he is not justified in causing it pain. He is bound, in fact, to kill the animal in such a way as to cause as little pain as is consistent with his own interest. ”

“ In modern France the sacrifice of a fowl to the Devil still holds good: 'Celui qui veut devenir sorcier doit aller à un quatre chemins avec une poule noire, ou bien encore au cimetière, sur une tombe et toujours à minuit. Il vient alors quelqu'un qui demande: "Que venez vous faire ici?" "J'ai une poule à vendre," répond-on. Ce quelqu'un [est] le Méchant.' [619]
It is possible that the custom of burying a live animal to cure disease among farm animals, as well as the charm of casting a live cat into the sea to raise a storm, are forms of the animal sacrifice. ”

“ In its circumstances, the killing of animals may be sinful, and even gravely sinful, as when one kills the animals of one’s neighbor (Exod, xxii. 10, 11) , or hunts against the law, or injures society by prodigal destruction of animal or plant life, or kills animals in cruel ways. The skinning of animals alive, in order to secure finer-looking furs to satisfy the vanity of women, is an inhuman barbarism of the worst type that should be reprobated by everybody. ”

“ They moreover believe that evil-doers, after death, become united to the bodies of lions, tigers, wolves, dogs, swine, bears, reptiles, plants, and minerals, in this world, and receive under these forms their well merited punishment; but that those who have been guilty of aggravated crimes are hurried off to the infernal regions, where they remain suffering 37 torture during a period of time proportioned to their evil deeds ”

“ Sadistic Acts with Animals.—In numerous cases, sadistically perverse men that are afraid of criminal acts with human beings, or that care only for the sight of the suffering of a sensitive being, make use of the sight of dying animals, or torture animals, to stimulate or excite their lust. ”

“ This treatment inspires such terror, that, if any person happen to find one of these animals dead, he goes to a distance from it, and by his cries and groans indicates that he has found the animal dead. ”

“ SLAUGHTERING ANIMALS. In killing animals for food all painful processes are avoided. Under the old system the cruelty with which the animal was treated, and its suffering from the violence of the death-struggle greatly affected the quality of the meat, lessened its nutritive powers, and rendered it less digestible, and very often exciting and injurious. Now, when an animal is to be killed, it is placed in a large lighted stable, over which is a loft, communicating with it by means of a grating. ”

“ This may well give pause to the devourer of flesh, to the man who calls the murder of animals `sport,' and most of all to the vivisector; the man who kills or tortures an animal may be inflicting unspeakable suffering upon a human being.
I have little doubt that the possibility for a material-minded man of this uncanny blunder is at least part of the rationale of the belief of various tribes that certain creatures must never be killed “lest one should unawares be dispossessing the spirit of an ancestor. ”

“ The blood-madness of some of the Dukes of Milan no doubt began early with unrestricted torture of animals. Not all at once do men bring themselves to hunt their prisoners with dogs fed on human flesh. ”

“ This is, after all, exactly the way in which the Yezdi Mussulman treats the human being whom he considers unclean. He has alternative principles which he chooses according to his mood and circumstances. Sometimes the prejudice against killing animals gives rise to very great cruelty. It is generally considered a sin to kill an animal except in self defence or for food, but you may do anything to it short of extinguishing life with your own hand. ”

“ Vainly you get the upper hand and ward off the animal’s assaults, vainly you kill it: a tiny scratch, insignificant enough from any other animal, will in the near future cause your death, a horrible death, more atrocious than any other in the world. As a result of that tiny wound a day will come, and it will come soon, when, seized all at once with a furious madness, shaken by horrible convulsions, frothing with drivel, and not recognizing either relatives or friends, you will spring upon them like a ferocious beast, to bite them savagely and give them [238] your disease. ”

“ Luther Snow said, with sincerity in his voice.
“But, Will, I hope the beast didn’t scratch you anywhere,” Frank went on; “for you know it’s sometimes a dangerous thing to be wounded by the claws of any wild beast that lives on animal food. Lots of hunters have died from blood poisoning, even when they thought the scratches hardly worth washing, they were so small.” ”

“ And it cannot be denied, hide it how we may, either from our eyes or our conscience, that however skilfully the actual killing may usually be carried out, there is much unavoidable suffering caused to the beasts that have to be transported by sea and rail to the slaughter-house. The animals suffer violently from sea-sickness, and horrible cruelty (such as pouring boiling oil into their ears, and stuffing their ears with hay which is then set on fire, tail-twisting, etc.,) has to be practised to prevent them lying down lest they be trampled on by other beasts and killed ”

“ While the eating of animal food thus stimulates propensity, and unbalances the higher and lower natures, the act of slaughtering animals blunts moral sentiment, and is revolting to the most ennobling instincts and sympathies of human nature. Children invariably shrink with horror at sight of butchery—as do all persons whose native sympathies have not been habitually violated, blunted and crushed. ”

“ You know what a terrible thing the bite of a mad dog is. The wound may be so small as hardly to leave a scar, and it may heal, and be forgotten, perhaps for weeks and months; still, the deadly poison is in the person’s blood, and when it breaks out, a most fearful death follows, after such sufferings as nobody, who has not seen them, can have an idea of. But, perhaps, you do not know that the angry bite of a dog, when teased or hurt, has often produced the same awful madness. ”