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 



