It is no part of my purpose to enumerate the various acts of injustice of which domestic animals are the victims; it is sufficient to point out that the true cause of such injustice is to be sought in the unwarrantable neglect of their many intelligent qualities, and in the contemptuous indifference which, in defiance of sense and reason, still classes them as “brute-beasts.” What has been said of horses in this respect applies still more strongly to the second class of domestic animals. Sheep, goats, and oxen are regarded as mere “live-stock”; while pigs, poultry, rabbits, and other marketable “farm-produce,” meet with even less consideration, and are constantly treated with brutal inhumanity by their human possessors. Let anyone who doubts this pay a visit to a cattle-market, and study the scenes that are enacted there.
The question of the castration of animals may here be briefly referred to.[22] That nothing but imperative necessity could justify such a practice must, I think, be admitted; for mutilation of this kind is not only painful in itself, but deprives those who undergo it of the most vigorous and spirited elements of their character. It is said--with what precise amount of truth I cannot pretend to determine--that man would not otherwise be able to maintain his dominion over the domestic animals; but on the other hand it may be pointed out that this dominion is in no case destined to be perpetuated in its present sharply-accentuated form, and that various practices which, in a sense, are “necessary” now,--_i.e._ in the false position and relationship in which we stand towards the animals,--will doubtless be gradually discontinued under the humaner system of the future. Moreover, castration as performed on cattle, sheep, pigs, and fowls, with no better object than to increase their size and improve their flavour for the table, is, even at the present time, utterly needless and unjustifiable. “The bull,” as Shelley says, “must be degraded into the ox, and the ram into the wether, by an unnatural and inhuman operation, that the flaccid fibre may offer a fainter resistance to rebellious nature.” In all its aspects, this is a disagreeable subject, and one about which the majority of people do not care to think--probably from an unconscious perception that the established custom could scarcely survive the critical ordeal of thought.