ETHICS BETWEEN MAN AND BEAST. 645 



Beasts are still made to endure all the horrors to which slavers 

 were once wont to subject their cargoes of human chattels in sti- 

 fling holds on the notorious "middle passage." 



The late Henry Bergh states that the loss on cattle by " shrink- 

 age " in transporting them from the Western to the Eastern por- 

 tion of the United States is from ten to fifteen per cent. The 

 average shrinkage of an ox is one hundred and twenty pounds, 

 and that of a sheep or hog from fifteen to twenty pounds ; and the 

 annual loss in money arising from this cause is estimated at more 

 than forty million dollars. The amount of animal suffering 

 which these statistics imply is fearful to contemplate. Here and 

 there a solitary voice is heard in our legislative halls protesting 

 against the horrors of this traffic, but so powerful is the lobby in- 

 fluence of wealthy corporations that no law can be passed to pre- 

 vent them. Not a word ever falls from the pulpit in rebuke of 

 such barbarity ; meanwhile the railroad magnates pay liberal pew 

 rents out of the jDrofits, and listen with complacency one day in the 

 week to denunciations of Jeroboam's idolatry and the wicked 

 deeds of Ahab and Ahaziah, as recorded in the chronicles of the 

 kings of Israel. 



The horse, one of the noblest and most sensitive of domestic 

 animals, is put to all kinds of torture by docking, pricking, clip- 

 ping, peppering, and the use of bearing reins solely to gratify hu- 

 man vanity. As a reward for severe and faithful toil he is often 

 fed with unwholesome and insufficient fodder on the economical 

 principle announced by the manager of a New York tramway that 

 " horses are cheaper than oats." It is an actual fact, verified by 

 Henry Bergh, that the horses of this large corporation were fed 

 on a mixture of meal, gypsum, and marble dust, until the Society 

 for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals interfered and finally 

 succeeded in putting a stop to the practice. 



The Americans, as a people, are notorious for the recklessness 

 with which they squander the products of Nature, of which their 

 country is so exceedingly prolific. This extravagance extends to 

 all departments of public, social, and domestic life. No land less 

 rich in material resources could have borne for any length of time 

 the wretched mismanagement of its finances to which the United 

 States has been subjected ever since and even before the close of 

 the civil war. There is not a government in Europe that would 

 not have been broken down and rendered bankrupt by the tre- 

 mendous and wholly unnecessary strain put upon it by crass igno- 

 rance of the most elementary principles of finance and demagogical 

 tampering with the public credit. The same wasteful spirit in- 

 volves also, as we have seen, immense suffering to animals on the 

 part of soulless and unscrupulous corporations, in which intense 

 greed of gain is not mitigated by the influence of individual kind- 



