PLEA FOR HUMANITY. 15 
well enough that they do inflict some pain to their 
victims. But they yield to the demands of neces- 
sity. We can not always avoid suffering pain, or 
giving pain. 
What is cruelty?) The needless infliction of pain. 
This is cruelty and decidedly a wrong. Yet many 
persons, too tender-hearted to stick a pig, or to 
castrate a hog, or to have a boil on their own back 
lanced, will, when provoked, use the whip freely on 
their children, or kick and strike their horses and 
cows most unmercifully on slightest provocation. 
All this is a needless infliction of pain, and there- 
fore cruelty and inhumanity. Wecan and should 
be merciful and decent, all the more 
when we are compelled to make other 
creatures suffer. It is not necessary 
to insert a hog-hook into a hog’s mouth and pull 
the animal into the scalding vat before it is dead. 
It is not necessary to begin skinning a calf or lamb 
when yet alive. I think these things are horrible, 
and people of any heart and feeling would not 
stoop to do things so mean. 
Nor do I think that it is merely a necessary and 
legitimate infliction of pain, or even reconcilable 
with mercy and decency, and the ordinary instincts 
of humanity to kill and dress fowls in the horrible 
manner practiced by many, and as I have seen it 
advised even by a renowned poultry editor. Tostripa 
fowl of feathers while suffering from a death wound 
in the throat, and to have it dressed clean before it 
is dead, seems to me a crime for which the perpe- 
trator himself ought to suffer. The French killing 
knife is made for the purpose of being inserted into 
A Plea 
for Humanity, 
