UNIVERSAL ETHICS 293 



authors, called bad. Kindness, courtesy, justice, 

 mercy, generosity, sympathy, love, and the like, are 

 good, and selfishness, cruelty, deceit, pillage, in- 

 justice, and murder, are bad, because they are 

 respectively the promoters and destroyers of well- 

 being and happiness in the world. 



But these two kinds of conduct produce the 

 same respective effects upon non-human beings as 

 they do upon human beings. The emotion of a 

 mangled sensory is it not the same terrible thing 

 whether the sensory hang to the brain of a quad- 

 ruped or a man ? Do shelter and food not affect 

 shivering and empty cattle, horses, and fowls, 

 precisely as they do human beings? Thunder 

 harsh words at your dog. Will he not shrink 

 and suffer, just as your child or hired hand will 

 under like acts of terrorisation ? Speak kindly to 

 him, love him, and accord to him a quarter of the 

 consideration you claim for yourself. Is he not 

 caused to be one of the happiest and most devoted 

 of associates ? To take squirrels or song-birds, 

 the most active of animals, and shut them up in 

 narrow cages, and keep them there shut off from 

 their companions and their own green world their 

 whole lives long; to take an animal as sensitive 

 and high-minded as the horse and put a pack on 

 his back and a bit in his mouth, and then strike 

 him dozens of times a day with a lash whose touch 

 is like fire ; to shoot off the legs and wings of birds 

 and fill their vitals with lead, and leave them to 

 flounder out a lingering death in the reeds and 

 grasses do these things not cause misery and 



