essay how to treat animals kindly

We use cookies to enhance our website for you. Proceed if you agree to this policy or learn more about it.

• Essay Database >
• Essay Examples >
• Essays Topics >
• Essay on Abuse

How People Should Treat Animals Essay Examples

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Abuse , Violence , Animal Abuse , Animals , Pets , Treatment , Torture , Bullying

Words: 2000

Published: 02/17/2020

ORDER PAPER LIKE THIS

<Student’s name> <Professor’s name>

Introduction As it known, the recent issue of cruelty to animals is particularly acute. Many countries have adopted laws to protect animals; animal cruelty is a criminal offense. Thus, according to the social opinion, a person must not only prevent animal abuse, but also take care of them. But is it not dangerous – to concern excessively for animals? On the one hand, animal abuse is an act of cruelty which must be punished, but on the other hand, the excessive treatment sometimes can harm animals even not lesser than abuse.

In this report, the problem of animal abuse and excessive concern about them will be discussed.

Animal Abuse The issue of animal cruelty is long overdue. In fact, the world is full of cruelty and violence, but if a person is at least able to seek help, can somehow protect themselves, aware of their rights, the animals are deprived of such opportunities. Every now and then the stories about animal cruelty reveal, there are a variety of materials in the media, world wide web, which confirms that it is worth to think seriously about what animal rights protection and promotion of humane treatment of animals needed today as never before. Protecting the rights of animals is required, the animals, of course, have the right to be guarded against abuse, harassment or inappropriate content, as a result of which they suffer. Animals - this is not material for the spending allowance for experimental or scientific experiments. Unfortunately, many people who give birth to animals, do not realize that this is not mere entertainment. The cruelty to animals must be stopped, because just like humans, animals feel pain, the attitude towards them. But some individuals can simply take it out on the poor animals for their personal failures or bad mood. In addition, pet owners do not realize the responsibility they take on when they decide to shelter themselves a pet. Many cats and dogs on the streets because their owners got bored with the old toys. Humane treatment of animals is not known so the owners. Get a pet for fun, some forget that these animals need care. As a result, often the animals that were on the street, or are killed because they are not adapted to living in such conditions, if they grew up in an apartment, or altogether euthanized. Because animals need to be protected from such irresponsible owners. Millions of animals have never known the humane treatment by their own masters. So, unfortunately, there are cases where, for example, animal cruelty is evident in the fact that the birds are locked in small cells, inhospitable, and the latter are only a beautiful interior decoration. Animals have to live in deplorable conditions, limitation of movement, mud, and even at all - hunger. It is terrible to think how many animals subjected to abuse by people. And yet, all of that in these cases can the law do about animals - it's fine the offender. Sure, the fight against violations of the law to protect the rights of animals from abuse should be strengthened. Humane treatment of animals is a must. After all, if a person acquiring a pet, expect to find in him a friend for many single people pets - this is the only way to not feel alone. But why do people sometimes forget that animals need our care and protection? Sometimes there are strange and incomprehensible changes - once the pet becomes a burden to their owners when sick or old. For example, a dog who all his life faithfully served his master, can become useless when it becomes weak. People live in a civilized society, and cruelty to animals is just not compatible with the concepts of humanity and morality. Each of us, in the treatment of animals should be regulated not only by the law of the animals, but also their own morals. Animal protection should be a priority for every self-respecting man. Modern society often refers to an unprecedented abuse and cruelty to animals. Previously, the only form of animal cruelty, the media coverage was the mistreatment of circus animals. Today, thanks to the efforts of NGOs, people will learn more information and statistics about the ill treatment of animals. Outrage over the animals, called experiments on animals - the biggest danger, discovered in recent years. In 2006, the Council on Ethics for animals at the Ministry of Justice in Denmark found that the sexual relationship between man and dog is not subject to prohibition and can not be considered cruel treatment, except in cases where such a relationship demonstrates openly or animals used for the filming of pornography and sex show. Only one of the ten members of the Council opposed the decision. A deputy from the right Danish People's Party, Christian Hansen was shocked by the decision, demanding to bring this issue to a referendum. According to a study of the Fund for the Protection of Animal Rights in the United States in five states of the country the punishment for animal abuse "is not consistent with the values ​​of American society." According to Broom, D.M.,“in 2009 in the U.S. there were 832 cases of cruelty to animals. of ill- treatment of animals used for providing information online source. States such as Florida (68 cases), California (50 cases) and Pennsylvania (51 cases) were the leaders in the number of cases of animal cruelty” (10). It also have been found different ways of cruelty to animal. A recent report by non-governmental organizations reported that research laboratories do not fulfill the rules and regulations for animals. Some of those facts about the mistreatment of animals in laboratories are dire. Cruelty to animals is a fairly common phenomenon among laboratory workers. Animals suffer ill-treatment, for example, they poured water pressure hoses, they have a variety of harmful chemicals and bleaches. Animals were forced to swallow a variety of chemicals to conduct testing. This practice is carried out under the name of animal experiments, it is illegal and unethical, as well as other forms of animal cruelty. Prevent cruelty to animals is possible by taking the necessary measures. The following is information about the various forms of animal cruelty. There are many laws against cruelty and animal welfare programs that exist in all states and U.S. territories. These laws prohibit the abuse, torture, beating, mutilation and unnecessary killing of animals. They also include neglect, refusal or withdrawal of the animals with food, water and shelter. There are many organizations that have been established in order to monitor the animal cruelty and take action against violators. Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), an animal rescue agencies, animal shelters, etc., investigating cases of animal abuse. If these agencies do not have the police or sheriff's department may take appropriate action. Once it has gathered enough evidence, the prosecution filed a local, regional or federal attorney. According to the U.S. legislative history of Welfare Act, “the primary federal law relating to animal care and conditions in the US is the Animal Welfare Act of 1966, amended in 1970, 1976, 1985, 1990, 2002 and 2007. It is the only Federal law in the United States that regulates the treatment of animals in research, exhibition, transport, and by dealers. Other laws, policies, and guidelines may include additional species coverage or specifications for animal care and use, but all refer to the Animal Welfare Act as the minimum acceptable standard” (23)

Excessive Care of Animals

According to Caroline Hewson, “Animal welfare is the physical and psychological well-being of animals.” But some people harm animals in their longing to make animal welfare being perfect. Most of the problems with excessive care of the animals cause the pet owners. Most owners are often lightly to care for a pet and do not care about the daily routine pet. The most important role in the life of a pet plays his diet. Many people are overfed animal that causes him obesity and heart problems. Some just do not bother to clean up after him, and walk in timely manner. This is leading to unsanitary conditions at home and increases the risk of infectious diseases for animal. Pets are almost always different from their homeless relatives groomed appearance. But it should known that excessive care of a pet can have an adverse effect on his health. It's no secret that homeless animals are taking baths in the rain jets. This fact makes one wonder whether or not pets frequent water treatment? Veterinarians are often advised not to bathe the pet as it significantly lowers the immune system. Especially dangerous frequent water treatments using special detergents that simply destroys the protective function of the skin. Most cats are clean animals are considered. Therefore, cats rarely bathed, and the complete absence of water treatment does not prevent them stay clean. But dogs are less cleanly, so from time to time require bathing. But the use of special shampoos is relevant only if the dog get covered in something far from sanitary norms and it comes from simply unbearable stench. In other cases it is sufficient to wash the pet's usual clean under running water. Special mention deserves the nail clipping animals. By the way, cats are able to independently remove dead skin and nails in need of human assistance only in the event of illness or old age. But dogs need grooming claws every two weeks. Carefully inspect the animal's claw clearance – only the dark part can be cut. Another important aspect of the harm of excessive pet care are unskilled workers of humannity services for homeless or wild animals. Not every volunteer for working with such animals. The fact that the care of wild or stray animals in the first place, remember that sooner or later the animal is likely to have to let go at will, into the wild. Excessive concern about the animal may cause blunting of the natural instincts of the animal. Caught in the wild, the animal may not be able to find their own food or to survive in the cold - and all because it is already used to getting food from human hands and live in warmth. Professional vets know how to deal with these animals, so their work is very important.

In this essay has been discussed how people should treat animals. On the one hand, animals abuse is a cruel action and must be prevented and punished, but on the other hand, the excessive care is also harmful. The schools need to teach children how they can deal with animal cruelty. Above all, children need to know about animal rights, and that cruelty to animals is illegal. Kindness and compassion towards animals - the most important factor. Some children enjoy the activities related to the torture of animals. Such behavior is harmful not only to animal suffering, but also the people who interact with these children. Animals, like humans, suffer from abuse. If a child understands this, he will most likely be suspended from such actions, and will also discourage people who do this. People should know this to know, how care about animals better.

Works Cited

Arluke, Arnold. “Brute Force: Animal Police and the Challenge of Cruelty”, Purdue University Press (August 15, 2004), hardcover, 175 pages, ISBN 1-55753-350-4. An ethnographic study of humane law enforcement officers. Lea, Suzanne Goodney (2007). “Delinquency and Animal Cruelty: Myths and Realities about Social Pathology”, hardcover, 168 pages, ISBN 978-1-59332-197-0. Lea challenges the argument made by animal rights activists that animal cruelty enacted during childhood is a precursor to human-directed violence. Munro H. (The battered pet (1999) In F. Ascione & P. Arkow (Eds.) “Child Abuse, Domestic Violence, and Animal Abuse”. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 199–208. Hewson, Caroline J. (2003). "What is animal welfare? Common definitions and their practical consequences". The Canadian Veterinary Journal, 44 (6): 496–9. PMC 340178. PMID 12839246. Broom, D.M., (1991). “Animal welfare: concepts and measurement”. Journal of Animal Science, 69(10): 4167-75 "Legislative History of the Animal Welfare Act". PDF, Retrieved 7 April 2010. Brown, Congressman G.E. (1997). “30 Years of the Animal Welfare Act”. Animal Welfare Information Center Bulletin 8: 1-2, 23.

Cite this page

Share with friends using:

Removal Request

Finished papers: 576

This paper is created by writer with

ID 270493163

If you want your paper to be:

Well-researched, fact-checked, and accurate

Original, fresh, based on current data

Eloquently written and immaculately formatted

275 words = 1 page double-spaced

Get your papers done by pros!

Other Pages

Sociology business plans, proton essays, living thing essays, milk powder essays, provitamin essays, mother board essays, space shuttle essays, billy joel essays, choreographing essays, woodside essays, contender essays, peggs essays, wever essays, boise essays, hackler essays, monte carlo essays, eagle mountain essays, intelligence tests essays, interculturalism essays, carol oates essays, cliffnotes essays, character analysis essays, infidel essays, example of research paper on policies to mitigate advanced persistent threats, report on a flow chart of the tool setup and cnc program check 2, internet copyright infringement research paper sample, example of the economic development in western europe article review, cerebrovascular accident course work examples, business case study home depot essay sample, the early warning system of rinderpest disease essay examples, free essay on dead movie by jhonny depp related to william blake poet, wc 814 report example, free research paper on interpretation of statistical significance of a study, critical thinking on critical response on gilles deleuzes the diagramme and michel foucaults panopticism, good example of why is slack important to the project manager 100 words essay, example of the organic coup essay, law and legal liability essay sample, good essay on allports study of values, emergency management essays examples 2, government intervention in markets essay samples, sample report on methods of measuring of the air, good example of risk factors and risk assessment essay, good critical thinking on nursing theory analysis paper peplaus theory of interpersonal relations.

Password recovery email has been sent to [email protected]

Use your new password to log in

You are not register!

By clicking Register, you agree to our Terms of Service and that you have read our Privacy Policy .

Now you can download documents directly to your device!

Check your email! An email with your password has already been sent to you! Now you can download documents directly to your device.

or Use the QR code to Save this Paper to Your Phone

The sample is NOT original!

Short on a deadline?

Don't waste time. Get help with 11% off using code - GETWOWED

No, thanks! I'm fine with missing my deadline

Short Essay on Kindness to Animals [100, 200, 400 Words] With PDF

In this lesson today, you will learn how to write short essays on the topic of Kindness to Animals. In this lesson, I am going to adapt a simplistic approach to writing these essays that all kinds of students can easily understand. 

Short essay on Kindness to Animals in 100 Words

All the living creatures on this planet have the right to live freely in nature. Today, however, many animals all over the world are suffering because of human cruelty. People don’t just kill animals for their meat but also their skins, tusks, horns, teeth, feathers and fur. Many animals are kept captive, tortured and made to perform in front of crowds of people.

Innocent lab animals are used all over the world to test newly developed chemical formulations. We should be kind to animals and all living creatures. We should never harm animals. Instead, we should feed them and take care of them whenever we can. After all, having compassion for others is what truly makes us human. 

Short essay on Kindness to Animals in 200 Words

For thousands of years, human beings have hunted animals not just for food, but also for sports and fun. Many animals like elephants and horned rhinoceros have been killed for centuries for their tusks and horns. Animals like lions, tigers, monkeys and even dolphins are kept captive, tortured and made to perform in front of crowds of people.

The livestock animals kept in farms for their milk and meat live in such terrible conditions, unable to move freely. And of course, we can not forget the lab animals. Rabbits, guinea pigs, rats and mice are used all over the world to test new chemical formulas developed for humans. 

In our day to day life, we all have come across people throwing stones at street dogs or kicking them. Many people don’t even think twice before running their cars over street animals. We must ask ourselves if the innocent animals deserve our cruelty.

They don’t bother us and just want to live peacefully. We should become more kind and compassionate towards animals and all other living beings. We shouldn’t harm animals or let others harm them. We should feed and take care of helpless animals. After all, having compassion for others is what truly makes us human. 

Short essay on Kindness to Animals in 400 Words

All living beings on this planet were created and given life by the same divine force. All of us, whether it is human beings, plants or animals, have the right to live and be free. In the olden days, most kings and emperors spent their free time going on hunts to kill animals like deer, tigers, lions and elephants. The hunted animals were not eaten but just served as a trophy for the king.

Many big animals like elephants and horned rhinoceros are still killed for their tusks, horns and skins. Marine animals like sharks and whales are also killed to be served as delicacies in several high-end restaurants. Over the years, the population of these animals has greatly decreased and many exotic species are on the verge of becoming extinct. 

We don’t have to go far to see animals suffering because of human cruelty. It is not hard to notice how mistreated the street dogs are. People throw stones at them, kick them and some even run their cars over them. Many animals are kept captive and made to perform in circuses. The livestock animals kept in farms for their milk and meat live in such terrible conditions, unable to move freely.

Their babies are taken away from them and killed as the people running the farms don’t see any value in keeping them alive. Horses and bullocks kept for pulling carts and ploughs are often not fed properly and made to work until they collapse. If we take a look at the cosmetic industry, so many high-end brands test their products on innocent animals. Rabbits, guinea pigs, rats and mice are all used to test new chemical formulas developed for beauty products. This greatly harms them. 

Animals have every right to live freely in nature. Just because they cannot defend themselves, does not mean that we should keep torturing them for our gain. Kindness to animals and all other living creatures is a virtue. We should not harm animals and we should stop others from harming them as well. Many animals have lost their habitat and food sources because of deforestation and infrastructure developments done by human beings.

We should feed and take care of such animals instead of viewing them as a nuisance. Governments all over the world have taken various steps to stop illegal hunting and many organisations are trying their best to make life less cruel for farm and lab animals. But they can only do so much. It is on each one of us to become more compassionate and kind towards animals so that all living beings can live freely on this planet. 

If you have any doubts regarding this session, kindly let me know through some quick comments below. To read more such essays on various important topics, keep browsing our website.

You can join us on Telegram to get the latest updates on our upcoming sessions. Thank you for being with us. All the best for your exam. 

More from English Compositions

• 100, 200, 400 Words Paragraph and Short Essay [With PDF]
• Write a Letter to the Editor about Cruelty Towards Animals
• Short Essay on the Beauty of Nature [100, 200, 400 Words] With PDF
• Short Essay on Save Animals [100, 200, 400 Words] With PDF
• Short Essay on Tiger [100, 200, 400 Words] With PDF
• [FREE PDF] Nelson Mandela MCQs | CBSE Class 10 English Chapter 2 [TERM 1]
• Short Essay on Our Planet Earth [100, 200, 400 words] With PDF
• 10 Lines on Elephant in English [3 Examples]
• Madhyamik English Writing Suggestion 2022 [With PDF]
• Short Essay on River Pollution [100, 200, 400 Words] With PDF
• Notice Writing Format, Type, Writing Tips, Examples [PDF]
• Short Essay on Cat [100, 200, 400 Words] With PDF

Featured Topics

Featured series.

A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.

Explore the Gazette

Read the latest.

Arts First to kick off biggest festival yet

Art from a long-dead civilization springs back to life

All the world’s a stage 

Illustration by Katie Edwards

‘There they are, on our dinner plates’

Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite

Harvard Staff Writer

Philosophy professor’s book asks humans to rethink their relationships with animals

In her new book, “Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals,” Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy Christine Korsgaard makes the case that humans are not inherently more important than animals and therefore should treat them much better than we do.

Korsgaard, Ph.D. ’81, has taught at Harvard for almost 30 years and is an expert on moral philosophy. The book is a departure from her previous theoretical work on moral philosophy, as it deals with more practical ethical questions.

Drawing on the work of Immanuel Kant and Aristotle, she argues that humans have a duty to value our fellow creatures not as tools, but as sentient beings capable of consciousness and able to have lives that are good or bad for them.

The Gazette spoke to Korsgaard about her book, the future of animal rights, and writing accessible philosophy.

Christine Korsgaard

GAZETTE:   What made you decide to pursue this topic?

KORSGAARD:   Western moral philosophy is now more than 2,000 years old, and in all of that time very few moral philosophers have said anything about the treatment of animals. Animals are sentient beings and some are capable of interacting with us, but on the other hand there they are, on our dinner plates, pulling our wagons, hunted by us, and made to fight with one another for our amusement. It just seems like an obvious moral issue, and yet moral philosophers haven’t often asked questions like: Is this all right? Why is it OK to do these things?

I’ve had a personal belief for a long time that we should be treating other animals better and in particular that we shouldn’t eat them. I’ve been a vegetarian for more than 40 years and a vegan more recently. At the same time, I’m an advocate of the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who celebrates the value of humanity and rational nature and is one of the few philosophers to have said right out, “We have no duties to the other animals and we can use them however we please.” So I was trying to understand how to put these different positions together.

GAZETTE:   This is a personal subject for you, so was your approach to writing this different from your previous work?

KORSGAARD:   Writing about practical questions is really difficult. People talk as if the way you solve a practical problem is that you take a theory and then just apply it to a case, but it’s not like that. It takes a lot of work to put the whole battery of ideas involved in a theory to work on a practical question. In that sense, the book represents a kind of work I haven’t done before, at least not to this extent.

GAZETTE:   Were there issues that were particularly challenging for you to write about?

KORSGAARD:   One difficult thing was to articulate a position in the face of knowing that there’s a passionate but often inadequately argued objection out there to what I’m saying. If I say, “We shouldn’t experiment on animals, because we have no right to use them as mere means to our ends,” that will be met with a heated defense of the practice. People say, “We should never give that up, because it does so much good to humans.” To me that doesn’t seem to meet the point, so I am at cross-purposes with my opponents.

Another difficult thing about this book was to get the audience properly in focus. I wanted to make a book that nonphilosophers could understand and think about, at least if they are willing to bear down a little on the arguments, but I also wanted to convince my colleagues in philosophy that there’s a serious philosophical topic here.

“Some people think that humans are just plain more important than other animals. I ask: More important to whom?”

GAZETTE:   “Tethered importance” or “tethered goodness” is an integral element of your book. Can you explain more about that?

KORSGAARD:   The idea of good or importance being “tethered” is based on the idea that anything that is good is good for someone; anything that is important is important to  someone. Kant’s idea is that when we pursue things that are good for us, we in effect make a claim that those things are good in an absolute sense — we have reason to pursue them and other people have a reason to treat them as good as well, to respect our choices or pursue our ends. But if we think that way, we have to say that things that are good or bad for any creature for whom things are good or bad, including animals, are good or bad in an absolute sense.

Some people think that humans are just plain more important than other animals. I ask: More important to whom? We may be more important to ourselves, but that doesn’t justify our treating animals as if they’re less important to us, any more than the fact that your family is more important to you justifies you treating other people’s families as if they are less important than yours.

GAZETTE :  With the growing popularity of “impossible” plant-based meat and meat grown from animal cells, do you think more people are coming to a moral realization about how to treat animals?

More like this

Raising the profile of animal law to match the stakes

Brainy birds

KORSGAARD :   I’m not very optimistic about people coming to care more about animals and what’s good or bad for them. But the issue of how we treat animals overlaps with two issues that people care a lot about, even if it’s only for the sake of human beings: climate change and biodiversity. Factory farming is one of the major causes of global warming, and biodiversity is something people are concerned about too, even if [just] for the sake of having a healthy environment for human beings.

If we got rid of factory farming, that would help animals. Biodiversity is related to that too because one of the main reasons why so many species are dying out is because of lack of habitat caused by factory farming in general and the production of meat. Many people care about the preservation of species, but that’s not the same as treating individual animals in an ethically correct way. But thinking about these issues has brought attention to the ways that we treat animals, and so there’s some room for hope that people will think more about these things.

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Share this article

You might like.

Departing longtime leader reflects on two decades of growth

Moving experience at the Museum of the Ancient Near East adds ‘layer of mixed reality’ to exhibits

Richard Sennett urges revitalizing public life, spaces, politics by creating spaces that engage imagination 

So what exactly makes Taylor Swift so great?

Experts weigh in on pop superstar's cultural and financial impact as her tours and albums continue to break records.

Exercise cuts heart disease risk in part by lowering stress, study finds

Benefits nearly double for people with depression

Good genes are nice, but joy is better

Harvard study, almost 80 years old, has proved that embracing community helps us live longer, and be happier

Find anything you save across the site in your account

What Would It Mean to Treat Animals Fairly?

By Elizabeth Barber

A few years ago, activists walked into a factory farm in Utah and walked out with two piglets. State prosecutors argued that this was a crime. That they were correct was obvious: The pigs were the property of Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the country. The defendants had videoed themselves committing the crime; the F.B.I. later found the piglets in Colorado, in an animal sanctuary.

The activists said they had completed a “rescue,” but Smithfield had good reason to claim it hadn’t treated the pigs illegally. Unlike domestic favorites like dogs, which are protected from being eaten, Utah’s pigs are legally classified as “livestock”; they’re future products, and Smithfield could treat them accordingly. Namely, it could slaughter the pigs, but it could also treat a pig’s life—and its temporary desire for food, space, and medical help—as an inconvenience, to be handled in whatever conditions were deemed sufficient.

In their video, the activists surveyed those conditions . At the facility—a concentrated animal-feeding operation, or CAFO —pregnant pigs were confined to gestation crates, metal enclosures so small that the sows could barely lie down. (Smithfield had promised to stop using these crates, but evidently had not.) Other pigs were in farrowing crates, where they had enough room to lie down but not enough to turn their bodies around. When the activists approached one sow, they found dead piglets rotting beneath her. Nearby, they found two injured piglets, whom they decided to take. One couldn’t walk because of a foot infection; the other’s face was covered in blood. According to Smithfield, which denied mistreating animals, the piglets were each worth about forty-two dollars, but both had diarrhea and other signs of illness. This meant they were unlikely to survive, and that their bodies would be discarded, just as millions of farm animals are discarded each year.

During the trial, the activists reiterated that, yes, they entered Smithfield’s property and, yes, they took the pigs. And then, last October, the jury found them not guilty. In a column for the Times , one of the activists—Wayne Hsiung, the co-founder of Direct Action Everywhere—described talking to one of the jurors, who said that it was hard to convict the activists of theft, given that the sick piglets had no value for Smithfield. But another factor was the activists’ appeal to conscience. In his closing statement, Hsiung, a lawyer who represented himself, argued that an acquittal would model a new, more compassionate world. He had broken the law, yes—but the law, the jury seemed to agree, might be wrong.

A lot has changed in our relationship with animals since 1975, when the philosopher Peter Singer wrote “ Animal Liberation ,” the book that sparked the animal-rights movement. Gestation crates, like the ones in Utah, are restricted in the European Union, and California prohibits companies that use them from selling in stores, a case that the pork industry fought all the way to the Supreme Court—and lost. In a 2019 Johns Hopkins survey, more than forty per cent of respondents wanted to ban new CAFO s. In Iowa, which is the No. 1 pork-producing state, my local grocery store has a full Vegan section. “Vegan” is also a shopping filter on Sephora, and most of the cool-girl brands are vegan, anyway. Wearing fur is embarrassing.

And yet Singer’s latest book, “ Animal Liberation Now ,” a rewrite of his 1975 classic, is less a celebratory volume than a tragic one—tragic because it is very similar to the original in refrain, which is that, big-picture-wise, the state of animal life is terrible. “The core argument I was putting forward,” Singer writes, “seemed so irrefutable, so undeniably right, that I thought everyone who read it would surely be convinced by it.” Apparently not. By some estimates, scientists in the U.S. currently use roughly fifteen million animals for research, including mice, rats, cats, dogs, birds, and nonhuman primates. As in the seventies, much of this research tries to model psychological ailments, despite scientists’ having written for decades that more research is needed to figure out whether animals—and which kind of animals—provide a useful analogue for mental illness in humans. When Singer was first writing, a leading researcher created psychopathic monkeys by raising them in isolation, impregnating them with what he called a “rape rack,” and studying how the mothers bashed their infants’ heads into the ground. In 2019, researchers were still putting animals through “prolonged stress”—trapping them in deep water, restraining them for long periods while subjecting them to the odor of a predator—to see if their subsequent behavior evidenced P.T.S.D. (They wrote that more research was needed.) Meanwhile, factory farms, which were newish in 1975, have swept the globe. Just four per cent of Americans are vegetarian, and each year about eighty-three billion animals are killed for food.

It’s for these animals, Singer writes, “and for all the others who will, unless there is a sudden and radical change, suffer and die,” that he writes this new edition. But Singer’s hopes are by now tempered. One obvious problem is that, in the past fifty years, the legal standing of animals has barely changed. The Utah case was unusual not just because of the verdict but because referendums on farm-animal welfare seldom occur at all. In many states, lawmakers, often pressured by agribusiness, have tried to make it a serious crime to enter a factory farm’s property. The activists in Utah hoped they could win converts at trial; they gambled correctly, but, had they been wrong, they could have gone to prison. As in 1975, it remains impossible to simply petition the justice system to notice that pigs are suffering. All animals are property, and property can’t take its owner to court.

Philosophers have debated the standing of animals for centuries. Pythagoras supposedly didn’t eat them, perhaps because he believed they had souls. Their demotion to “things” owes partly to thinkers like Aristotle, who called animals “brute beasts” who exist “for the sake of man,” and to Christianity, which, like Stoicism before it, awarded unique dignity to humans. We had souls; animals did not. Since then, various secular thinkers have given this idea a new name—“inherent value,” “intrinsic dignity”—in order to explain why it is O.K. to eat a pig but not a baby. For Singer, these phrases are a “last resort,” a way to clumsily distinguish humans from nonhuman animals. Some argue that our ability to tell right from wrong, or to perceive ourselves, sets us apart—but not all humans can do these things, and some animals seem to do them better. Good law doesn’t withhold justice from humans who are elderly or infirm, or those who are cognitively disabled. As a utilitarian, Singer cites the founder of that tradition, the eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who argued that justice and equality have nothing to do with a creature’s ability to reason, or with any of its abilities at all, but with the fact that it can suffer. Most animals suffer. Why, then, do we not give them moral consideration?

Singer’s answer is “speciesism,” or “bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species.” Like racism and sexism, speciesism denies equal consideration in order to maintain a status quo that is convenient for the oppressors. As Lawrence Wright has written in this magazine , courts, when considering the confinement of elephants and chimpanzees, have conceded that such animals evince many of the qualities that give humans legal standing, but have declined to follow through on the implications of this fact. The reason for that is obvious. If animals deserved the same consideration as humans, then we would find ourselves in a world in which billions of persons were living awful, almost unimaginably horrible lives. In which case, we might have to do something about it.

Equal consideration does not mean equal treatment. As a utilitarian, Singer’s aim is to minimize the suffering in the world and maximize the pleasure in it, a principle that invites, and often demands, choices. This is why Singer does not object to killing mosquitos (if done quickly), or to using animals for scientific research that would dramatically relieve suffering, or to eating meat if doing so would save your life. What he would not agree with, though, is making those choices on the basis of perceived intelligence or emotion. In a decision about whether to eat chicken or pork, it is not better to choose chicken simply because pigs seem smarter. The fleeting pleasure of eating any chicken is trounced by its suffering in industrial farms, where it was likely force-fed, electrocuted, and perhaps even boiled alive.

Still, Singer’s emphasis on suffering is cause for concern to Martha Nussbaum , whose new book, “ Justice for Animals ,” is an attempt to settle on the ideal philosophical template for animal rights. Whereas Singer’s argument is emphatically emotion-free—empathy, in his view, is not just immaterial but often actively misleading—Nussbaum is interested in emotions, or at least in animals’ inner lives and desires. She considers several theories of animal rights, including Singer’s, before arguing that we should adopt her “capabilities approach,” which builds on a framework developed by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, and holds that all creatures should be given the “opportunity to flourish.” For decades, Nussbaum has adjusted her list of what this entails for humans, which includes “being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length,” “being able to have attachments to things and people outside ourselves,” and having “bodily integrity”—namely, freedom from violence and “choice in matters of reproduction.” In “Justice for Animals,” she outlines some conditions for nonhuman flourishing: a natural life span, social relationships, freedom of movement, bodily integrity, and play and stimulation. Eventually, she writes, we would have a refined list for each species, so that we could insure flourishing “in the form of life characteristic to the creature.”

In imagining this better world, Nussbaum is guided by three emotions: wonder, anger, and compassion. She wants us to look anew at animals such as chickens or pigs, which don’t flatter us, as gorillas might, with their resemblance to us. What pigs do, and like to do, is root around in the dirt; lacquer themselves in mud to keep cool; build comfy nests in which to shelter their babies; and communicate with one another in social groups. They also seek out belly rubs from human caregivers. In a just world, Nussbaum writes, we would wonder at a pig’s mysterious life, show compassion for her desire to exist on her own terms, and get angry when corporations get in her way.

Some of Nussbaum’s positions are more actionable, policy-wise, than others. For example, she supports legal standing for animals, which raises an obvious question: How would a pig articulate her desires to a lawyer? Nussbaum notes that a solution already exists in fiduciary law: in the event that a person, like a toddler or disabled adult, cannot communicate their decisions or make sound ones, a representative is appointed to understand that person’s interests and advocate for them. Just as organizations exist to help certain people advance their interests, organizations could represent categories of animals. In Nussbaum’s future world, such a group could take Smithfield Foods to court.

Perhaps Nussbaum’s boldest position is that wild animals should also be represented by fiduciaries, and indeed be assured, by humans, the same flourishing as any other creature. If this seems like an overreach, a quixotic attempt to control a world that is better off without our meddling, Nussbaum says, first, to be realistic: there is no such thing as a truly wild animal, given the extent of human influence on Earth. (If a whale is found dead with a brick of plastic in its stomach, how “wild” was it?) Second, in Nussbaum’s view, if nature is thoughtless—and Nussbaum thinks it is—then perhaps what happens in “the wild” is not always for the best. No injustice can be ignored. If we aspire to a world in which no sentient creature can harm another’s “bodily integrity,” or impede one from exploring and fulfilling one’s capabilities, then it is not “the destiny of antelopes to be torn apart by predators.”

Here, Nussbaum’s world is getting harder to imagine. Animal-rights writing tends to elide the issue of wild-animal suffering for obvious reasons—namely, the scarcity of solutions. Singer covers the issue only briefly, and mostly to say that it’s worth researching the merit of different interventions, such as vaccination campaigns. Nussbaum, for her part, is unclear about how we would protect wild antelopes without impeding the flourishing of their predators—or without impeding the flourishing of antelopes, by increasing their numbers and not their resources. In 2006, when she previously discussed the subject, she acknowledged that perhaps “part of what it is to flourish, for a creature, is to settle certain very important matters on its own.” In her new book, she has not entirely discarded that perspective: intervention, she writes, could result in “disaster on a large scale.” But the point is to “press this question all the time,” and to ask whether our hands-off approach is less noble than it is self-justifying—a way of protecting ourselves from following our ideals to their natural, messy, inconvenient ends.

The enduring challenge for any activist is both to dream of almost-unimaginable justice and to make the case to nonbelievers that your dreams are practical. The problem is particularly acute in animal-rights activism. Ending wild-animal suffering is laughably hard (our efforts at ending human suffering don’t exactly recommend us to the task); obviously, so is changing the landscape of factory farms, or Singer wouldn’t be reissuing his book. In 2014, the British sociologist Richard Twine suggested that the vegan isn’t unlike the feminist of yore, in that both come across as killjoys whose “resistance against routinized norms of commodification and violence” repels those who prefer the comforts of the status quo. Wayne Hsiung, the Direct Action Everywhere activist, was only recently released from jail, after being sentenced for duck and chicken rescues in California. On his blog, he wrote that one reason the prosecution succeeded was that, unlike in Utah, he and his colleagues were cast as “weird extremists.”

It’s easy to construct a straw-man vegan, one oblivious to his own stridency, privilege, or hypocrisy. Isn’t he driving deforestation with all his vegetables? (No, Singer replies, as the vast majority of soybeans are fed to farm animals.) Isn’t he ignoring food deserts or the price tag on vegan substitutes, which puts them out of the reach of poor families? (Nussbaum acknowledges that cost can be an issue, but argues that it only emphasizes the need for resourced people to eat as humanely as they can, given that the costs of a more ethical diet “will not come down until it is chosen by many.”) Anyone pointing out moral culpability will provoke, in both others and themselves, a certain defensiveness. Nussbaum spends a lot of time discussing her uneasiness with her choice to eat fish for nutritional reasons. (She argues that fish likely have no sense of the future, a claim that even she seems unsure about.) Singer is eager to intervene here, emphasizing that animal-rights activism should pursue the diminishment of suffering, not the achievement of sainthood. “We are more likely to persuade others to share our attitude if we temper our ideals with common sense than if we strive for the kind of purity that is more appropriate to a religious dietary law than to an ethical and political movement,” he writes. Veganism is a boycott, and, while boycotts are more effective the more you commit to them, what makes them truly effective is persuading others to join them.

Strangely, where Singer and Nussbaum might agree is that defining the proper basis for the rights of animals is less important, at least in the short term, than getting people not to harm them, for any reason at all. Those reasons might have nothing to do with the animals themselves. Perhaps you decide not to eat animals because you care about people: because you care that the water where you live, if it’s anything like where I live, is too full of CAFO by-products to confidently drink. Perhaps you care about the workers in enormous slaughterhouses, where the pay is low and the costs to the laborer high. Perhaps you believe in a God, and believe that this God would expect better of people than to eat animals raised and killed in darkness. Or perhaps someone you love happens to love pigs, or to love the idea that the world could be gentler or more just, and you love the way they see the future enough to help them realize it. Nussbaum, after all, became interested in animal rights because she loved a person, her late daughter, an attorney who championed legislation to protect whales and other wild animals until her death, in 2019. Nussbaum’s book is dedicated to her—and also, now, to the whales. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

A Harvard undergrad took her roommate’s life, then her own. She left behind her diary.

Ricky Jay’s magical secrets .

A thirty-one-year-old who still goes on spring break .

How the greatest American actor lost his way .

What should happen when patients reject their diagnosis ?

The reason an Addams Family painting wound up hidden in a university library .

Fiction by Kristen Roupenian: “Cat Person”

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Molly Fischer

By John Cassidy

By Leslie Jamison

By Manvir Singh

• PRO Courses Guides New Tech Help Pro Expert Videos About wikiHow Pro Upgrade Sign In
• EDIT Edit this Article
• EXPLORE Tech Help Pro About Us Random Article Quizzes Request a New Article Community Dashboard This Or That Game Popular Categories Arts and Entertainment Artwork Books Movies Computers and Electronics Computers Phone Skills Technology Hacks Health Men's Health Mental Health Women's Health Relationships Dating Love Relationship Issues Hobbies and Crafts Crafts Drawing Games Education & Communication Communication Skills Personal Development Studying Personal Care and Style Fashion Hair Care Personal Hygiene Youth Personal Care School Stuff Dating All Categories Arts and Entertainment Finance and Business Home and Garden Relationship Quizzes Cars & Other Vehicles Food and Entertaining Personal Care and Style Sports and Fitness Computers and Electronics Health Pets and Animals Travel Education & Communication Hobbies and Crafts Philosophy and Religion Work World Family Life Holidays and Traditions Relationships Youth
• Browse Articles
• Learn Something New
• Quizzes Hot
• This Or That Game New
• Train Your Brain
• Explore More
• Support wikiHow
• About wikiHow
• Log in / Sign up
• Education and Communications
• Personal Development

How to Be Kind to Animals

Last Updated: January 29, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Pippa Elliott, MRCVS . Dr. Elliott, BVMS, MRCVS is a veterinarian with over 30 years of experience in veterinary surgery and companion animal practice. She graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1987 with a degree in veterinary medicine and surgery. She has worked at the same animal clinic in her hometown for over 20 years. There are 16 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 190,208 times.

Animals of all kinds enrich our lives. They can be our friends or inspire our imagination. Whether it’s a house pet such as a cat, a domesticated animal like a horse, or even a wild animal like an owl or alligator, animals deserve kindness from humans. By caring for pets and domesticated animals and respecting animals in the wild, you can show your kindness to any animal.

Caring for Pets or Domesticated Animals

• Why do I want a pet?
• Do I have enough time and money to care for my pet?
• How well would an animal fit in my home? Am I allowed to have pets in my rental property?
• Who will care for my pet if I am away, ill, or pass away?

• Make sure your animals receive yearly vaccinations against rabies and other diseases. Schedule vaccinations as a part of your pet’s annual visit to the vet.
• Groom your animals as necessary for their species. For example, brush your horses, dogs, and cats regularly. [3] X Trustworthy Source American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Leading organization dedicated to the prevention of animal cruelty Go to source
• Watch for fleas and other pests like ear mites and treat them accordingly.

• Prepare a cozy sleeping space with items like a pet bed, box with a blanket, or a nice pile of clean hay. Put a personal item in the space to remind her of your scent.
• Create other spaces where your animals can eat, play, and go to the bathroom. Keep eating and bathroom spaces as far apart as possible because many animals won’t eat near where they defecate.
• Allow smaller animals like cats and dogs to live inside with you.
• Make sure smaller pets and domesticated animals that stay outside have proper shelter. For example, any animal needs a roof to protect it from rain, snow, or other bad weather. This is especially important for smaller animals because they are not able to regulate their body temperatures in extreme hot or cold. [4] X Research source
• Keep your pets’ and animals’ spaces as clean as possible. For example, if you have turtles or fish, clean the tank once a week. Likewise, clean a kitty litter box every day. [5] X Research source

• Give your animals food at the same times every day to establish a routine. [7] X Research source Ask your vet or conduct online research to figure out how often you should feed your pet for optimal health.
• Feed your animals food that is appropriate for their species. For example, give cats and dogs a mixture of moist and dry foods and pigs vegetables and fruits. [8] X Research source You can ask your vet or local pet store or conduct online research to figure out what brands and types of food are best for your best. Aim to get the highest quality food you can afford to promote your pet’s health.
• Make sure pets and other animals always have bowl of fresh and clean water in addition to their food. [9] X Research source Change the water at least once daily and more often if your pet drinks it or something like food falls in the bowl.
• Avoid giving your pet or domesticated animal table scraps or other human foods like chocolate because these can harm their health and even be fatal. [10] X Trustworthy Source American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Leading organization dedicated to the prevention of animal cruelty Go to source Talk to your vet about what types of foods to absolutely keep away from your pets.
• Reward your pet with treats when they are being good. Be careful not to feed your animals too many treats, which are often filled with sugar and can contribute to unhealthy weight gain.

• Avoid moving or playing with your animal when she is sleeping, eating or drinking, and cleaning herself. Doing so may scare, stress, or annoy animals, which could result in an unpleasant reaction.
• Avoid chasing pets because this can scare them. Although you might be tempted to show your animal love by following her and picking her up or interacting with her, this often goes against animal behavior. Allow pets and other animals approach you whenever they want. [11] X Research source
• Position yourself at your animal’s height to appear less threatening. This can relax them and ensure they are comfortable getting your attention.

• Pet or stroke and pick up your animals gently. Avoid squeezing your animal or pull her tail while you pet or stroke her. [13] X Research source
• Reciprocate any affection your animal shows you. This helps form a bond of trust and love between you and your animal. Part of this includes talking to your pet and referring to her by name.
• Play with your animal. Most pets and animals are naturally energetic and require play to stay happy and healthy. Give them toys, take them for walks, and do any other type of activity your animal enjoys.
• Be patient with your animal if she makes a mistake. Don’t yell, hit, or do anything else retaliatory towards her. Pets learn best from positive responses and may learn to fear you if you yell at or hit them.

• animals that are chained in yards without proper food, water, or shelter
• hitting or kicking animals, or even screaming at them.

Handling Animals with Care

• Consider putting yourself at the level of the animal to help calm it. [14] X Research source Kneel down to smaller animals such as dogs, cats, rabbits, or turtles. Avoid putting your face directly in front of an animal’s face, which may stress it and cause you harm.
• Keep in mind that animals respond to you the way you treat them.

• Avoid approaching an animal from its blind spots, which can startle it. This may traumatize the animal or could wind up in an injury for you.
• Let dogs, cats, and other animals sniff you before you handle it. Extend your hand and let the animal smell you. It will decide if you can approach it more closely from here. Consider washing your hands if you are touching multiple animals as some pets may not like the smell of another species.
• Give the animal a few seconds or minutes to approach you. Some animals may be naturally timid and need a little while to get used to your presence. Approaching them before an animal shows it wants your attention can cause it stress.

• Place your hands under the animal’s legs or on the legs and belly. This provides a stable base so she feels safe. You can also gently move your arms underneath your animal if she is larger. Remember to stay calm and be patient so that you don’t startle your animal. If the animal shows any signs of not wanting to be picked up, allow it to go free and try again another time.
• Use proper methods for larger animals. For example, if you need to pick up a horse, cow, or a pig, make sure you have the proper equipment such as a crane that supports the legs, head, and belly.
• Stand up slowly once you have a good handle of your pet. This can minimize the risk of startling the animal and traumatizing it.
• Avoid picking up an animal by its head, individual legs, or tail. No exceptions, otherwise you can seriously harm and traumatize the animal.

• Keep your animal in a balanced position so that she feels safe. Avoid flipping animals, which can not only traumatize, but also harm them. [15] X Research source
• Consider sitting down with your pet to help both of you relax. This may allow the animal to snuggle into you and further establish your bond of trust. Make sure you talk to your pet and stroke her while you are holding her.

Respecting Wild Animals

• Be aware that many species of animals, such as alligators, cannot be tamed and you shouldn’t make an attempt to tame them or their offspring. [17] X Research source
• Be aware that it is often against the law to keep wild animals without a special permit. [18] X Research source

• Avoid chasing, touching, or picking up wild animals.
• Remain quiet and still when watching wildlife. Use binoculars and cameras to get close to wildlife with your eyes.
• Keep your pets away from wild animals to prevent disease transmission or any unpleasant interactions.
• Stay away from habitats or wild animal areas at mating times or when they are protecting their young.

• Keep any food, including pet food, you have outside securely stored in containers with lids.
• Place trash in secured bins or sealed bags. If you are camping, hiking, or taking a nature walk, look for areas designated for trash. Never throw garbage on the ground or leave it sitting in your yard or elsewhere.
• Be aware that the salt from sweat on shoes or boots and scented toiletries can also attract wild animals.
• Never use food to bait a wild animal to come closer to you.

• Use organic lawn and garden treatments. Not only can this protect wildlife, but also your pets.

• Avoid swerving to not hit an animal on major roads. This can lead to major accidents and even human fatalities. Do your best to not hit the animal.
• Never go out of your way to hit an animal with your car. It’s cruel and could get you in legal trouble if someone sees you.

• Contact park rangers if you are in a natural park.
• Call your local wildlife rehabilitator, conservation commission, or police department if you are not in a park. Your local humane society will also have information about who you can contact.

• Consider making an annual donation to conservation groups such as the World Wildlife Foundation. [21] X Research source Groups like this can use the money to protect threatened and endangered species around the world. However, if you want to help animals in your local area, make a donation to a local nature reserve or park.
• Offer your time to a local part or animal facility. This can help them save administrative funds and divert them to important efforts such as vaccinations or rebuilding natural habitats.

Expert Q&A

• It can take a little while for new pets and domesticated animals to approach you; don't be discouraged if it doesn't happen quickly. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• Engaging an animal—by holding or petting, for example-- against its wishes may traumatize or harm them or you. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• If an animal appears agitated, leave the area and allow it to calm down. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://online.uwa.edu/news/empathy-in-animals/
• ↑ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/cats-secure-attachment/
• ↑ https://www.aspca.org/news/hair-comes-trouble-why-pets-need-regular-grooming
• ↑ https://animalfoundation.com/whats-going-on/blog/basic-necessities-proper-pet-care
• ↑ https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/10668/dog_nutrition_final_fix.pdf
• ↑ https://www.saugusanimalhospital.com/blog/2017/october/-what-kind-of-food-how-much-and-how-often-/
• ↑ https://www.msdvetmanual.com/dog-owners/routine-care-and-breeding-of-dogs/routine-health-care-of-dogs
• ↑ https://www.aspca.org/pet-care/animal-poison-control/people-foods-avoid-feeding-your-pets
• ↑ https://vcahospitals.com/know-your-pet/why-punishment-should-be-avoided
• ↑ https://www.southernazvets.com/5-healthy-ways-to-show-your-love-for-your-pet/
• ↑ https://www.vetstreet.com/our-pet-experts/how-to-pet-a-dog
• ↑ https://www.ruralareavet.org/PDF/Animal_Handling.pdf
• ↑ https://www.eekwi.org/animals/leave-wild-animals-wild
• ↑ https://aldf.org/article/laws-that-protect-animals/
• ↑ https://www.gov.uk/report-dead-animal
• ↑ https://www.worldwildlife.org/

About This Article

To be kind to animals, always respect their personal space by allowing them to approach you when they’re ready. Additionally, try to avoid chasing or grabbing them, since that can be quite scary to an animal. When a domesticated animal approaches you, pet or stroke it gently so that it feels comfortable with you. However, if you encounter a wild animal, only admire it from afar so you don’t disturb it in its natural habitat. For more advice from our Veterinary co-author, including how to pick up and hold a domesticated animal, keep reading. Did this summary help you? Yes No

• Send fan mail to authors

Reader Success Stories

Malachi Samuels

Oct 27, 2016

Did this article help you?

Arutla Hansika

Apr 10, 2017

Corey Smith

Nov 1, 2021

Priyankshu Ghosh

Jan 19, 2021

Akshat Singh

May 1, 2018

Featured Articles

Trending Articles

Watch Articles

• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Do Not Sell or Share My Info
• Not Selling Info

Don’t miss out! Sign up for

wikiHow’s newsletter

Rewriting Morality III: How Should We Treat Animals?

After darwin, how should we treat other animals.

Posted July 10, 2010

This is the third and final post dealing with the implications of evolutionary theory for our traditional moral beliefs and practices (see Rewriting Morality I and Rewriting Morality II ). In this installment, we'll look at the question of the proper treatment of nonhuman animals in the light of Darwin's theory.

As I argued in my first post , traditional moral systems are undergirded by a view known as the doctrine of human dignity . The central tenet of this doctrine is the idea that human life is sacred - that it has supreme worth and infinite value. The flipside of the doctrine of human dignity is the idea that all other animals occupy a lowly ranking on the scale of life. Saint Thomas Aquinas expressed this view when he suggested that animals exist for the sake of humans, not for their own sake, and thus that ‘It is not wrong for man to make use of them, either by killing or in any other way whatsoever'.

This is a sentiment many people have lived by. Historically, and even today, we have treated other animals abysmally. This is one of my favourite quotations; it comes from the Reverend W. R. Inge:

"We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form."

A number of commentators have gone so far as to liken our treatment of the animals to the Nazi Holocaust. Here's another quotation, this one from the author Isaac Bashevis Singer:

"They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka [a Nazi extermination camp]."

Let's now look at what an evolutionary perspective contributes to the debate. First and foremost, evolutionary theory challenges the doctrine of human dignity. As we've seen, Darwin's theory undermines the idea that we were made in the image of God, and it undermines the idea that we are distinguished in any morally significant way from the other animals by our possession of the faculty of reason. Moreover, it undermines the brute distinction between human beings and all other life, a central element of the doctrine. It does this by stressing our common origin and our kinship with the animals. Chimpanzees, dolphins, frogs - Darwin taught us that these are literally our distant relatives. Certainly, it is easy enough in practice to draw a human/animal distinction, and to import this into our moral reasoning. But evolutionary theory shows that this distinction has none of the significance it was once assumed to have. As such, its application in the moral sphere - that is, our habit of extending our moral concern only as far as the outskirts of our own species - suddenly starts to look arbitrary and unjustified. Why should our moral circle be limited to our species rather than to, say, our taxonomic class (i.e., mammals)? Why, for that matter, should it be limited to our species rather than to the racial group we belong to?

Evolutionary theory also undercuts a number of other arguments aimed at justifying the exploitation of animals. This includes the argument that God put the animals here for our sake. Before scientists pieced together a picture of the history of life on earth, this might have seemed like a reasonable claim. It's not reasonable anymore. We know now that the vast majority of animals finished their sojourn on this planet long before we evolved. We also know that we and the other animals came about through the same natural process, and that our so-called ‘creator' (i.e., natural selection) had no special affection for us. In light of these facts, the suggestion that animals are here for our use seems self-centred, quaint, and - to be clear about this - patently false. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker wrote, nonhuman animals ‘were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men'.

Another traditional justification for the exploitation of other animals comes from the Cartesian view that nonhuman animals are merely nonconscious automata, and thus that we need not worry that the way we treat them could cause them any suffering. But an evolutionary perspective drastically lowers our confidence in this view; after all, we are conscious beings (conscious automata perhaps), and we came about through the same process as every other animal. This being the case, it seems unreasonable to deny that any species other than our own is conscious or has the capacity to suffer, especially in the case of those animals that have very similar brains to our own.

And this brings us to a crucial point. If we decide - and this is our decision; it's not imposed on us from above - if we decide that reducing the amount of suffering in the world is a good ethical principle to live by, then it seems unwarranted and ultimately arbitrary to extend this principle to human beings but not also to extend it to other animals capable of suffering. Why should the suffering of nonhumans be less important than that of humans? Surely a universe with less suffering is better than one with more, regardless of whether the locus of suffering is a human being or not, a rational being or not, a member of the moral community or not. Suffering is suffering, and these other variables are morally irrelevant.

Of course, this is not to imply that all animals should be treated equally; no one would accept that the life of an ant is as important as the life of a human or a chimpanzee, or that swatting a fly should be considered an act of murder. But if we take the reduction of suffering as the foundation stone of our moral system, we may find a principled solution to this conundrum. The solution is to accord animals moral status in proportion to their degree of sentience or their capacity to suffer. Think about it. Why do we consider it morally repugnant to torture human beings? It's not because they're capable of language or rational thought, or because they're embedded in a social network of reciprocal rights and duties, or because they're members of our own species. It's because it causes them pain and trauma . If it didn't, we wouldn't worry about it. Of course, there is no ultimate justifaction for adopting the reduction of suffering as the basis of our morality . It comes down to a choice. I don't know about you, though, but I'd prefer to live in a world with less suffering than with more. I'd also prefer to live in a world where the ascendent moral principle is "reduce unnecessary suffering" than one in which it is "only be nice to creatures who can return the favour, or who can talk, or who happen to have the same kind of genome as you".

With the reduction of suffering as our guiding principle, we now have a solid and sensible rationale for many of our core ethical intuitions. Humans have a far greater capacity to suffer than flies; therefore, it is far worse to harm a human than to harm a fly. Similarly, humans presumably have a greater capacity to suffer than chimpanzees - we are locked into tighter emotional bonds, we grieve for longer - and therefore it is somewhat worse to harm a human than a chimp.

A lot of people would happily go along with me this far. However, this approach to morality also has some implications that many will find hard to swallow. For a start, if we accept that moral worth should be apportioned on the basis of the capacity to suffer, we would also have to accept that it would be worse to harm a member of a hypothetical species with a greater capacity to suffer than us than it would be to harm a human. For a more down-to-earth example, we need look no further than the work of the Australian bioethicist Peter Singer. Singer has argued, for instance, that the life of an anencephalic human infant (an infant born with little or no cerebral cortex) is worth less than the life of a healthy adult chimpanzee, or even a healthy dog, and that it would therefore be worse to kill or experiment on the chimp or the dog than it would be the infant. This is because the infant doesn't experience pain (or anything else), whereas the chimp and dog do. Such a view is utterly incompatible with the doctrine of human dignity, and if this view seems wrong to you, presumably this is because that pre-Darwinian moral outlook is still operative in your thinking. But can you justify it?

Once we accord nonhuman animals the moral standing they deserve, our relationship with them is transformed. For one thing, we recognize that prejudice and discrimination against other species ( speciesism ) is just as morally abhorrent as any other form of prejudice and discrimination, including racism and sexism. Indeed, Singer has made the extremely interesting and challenging point that the amount of suffering and pain caused by the tyranny of human beings over other animals (particularly in food production) far exceeds that caused by sexism, racism, or any other existing form of discrimination, and that for this reason, the animal liberation movement is the most important liberation movement in the world today . A moral system anchored in evolutionary theory is entirely consistent with this position. Women and disadvantaged ethnic groups have never been farmed, killed for sport, or systematically experimented on in anything like the numbers that nonhuman animals have. Furthermore, unlike women and slaves, nonhumans cannot talk or campaign for their own liberation, and, because they can't vote, they're not a high priority for most politicians. This further underscores the importance of the animal liberation movement.

None of the ethical conclusions we've surveyed in this post, or in the earlier post on suicide and euthanasia , are logically necessary implications of evolutionary theory, and it is certainly not the case that everyone who accepts the theory accepts these ideas. The reason evolutionary theory is important is that these kinds of ideas would be virtually unthinkable from a pre-Darwinian standpoint. Darwin shows us, if nothing else, that the ideas should be thinkable. His theory opens up the floor for debate on these issues, freed from the dogma that human life is infinitely valuable whereas the lives of nonhuman animals are utterly devoid of any value.

-For a more detailed discussion of this and related issues, see Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life by Steve Stewart-Williams - available now from Amazon.com , Amazon.ca , and Amazon.uk .

Follow Steve Stewart-Williams on Twitter

Steve Stewart-Williams, Ph.D. , is a professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham Malaysia, and the author of the book Darwin, God, and the Meaning of Life .

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Teletherapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Therapy Center NEW
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

Understanding what emotional intelligence looks like and the steps needed to improve it could light a path to a more emotionally adept world.

• Coronavirus Disease 2019
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

SAVE 10% ON PUPPY BUNDLE, GET A BONUS GIFT

• PAWD® Puppy Bundle
• PAWD® Pet Crate

PAWD® Pet Pad

• PAWD® Lounger Pet Bed
• PAWD® Divider

Your Cart is Empty

• $0.00 Subtotal

Taxes and shipping calculated at checkout

PAWD® Pet crate

• PAWD Puppy Bundle
• PAWD Pet Crate
• Lounger Bed
• KindTail Mug

PAWD® Lounger

Medium PAWD Divider

Why Kindness Matters: 10 Ways to Be Kind to Animals

November 15, 2021 5 min read

Why kindness matters is a topic that doesn’t often come up in conversations. And yet, everyone deserves kindness, especially your pets.

As animal lovers, we know better than anyone that a lot of animals out there, aside from your four-legged companions, still need help to live a better life.

Although they become our companions through thick and thin, they cannot speak for themselves to tell us when something feels wrong to them.

So, as human beings, it is our responsibility to care for and be kind to our animal companions .

But, in general, what are the ways to be kind to animals?

10 easy tips on how to be kind to animals

1) approach animals slowly..

When meeting animals for the first time, you don’t want them to see you as a threat or trigger their fear and anxiety. Animals are more sensitive than humans regarding smell and behaviors, so you have to be careful.

One way to be kind to animals is to let them sniff you first.

For instance, you can offer them your hand for them to sniff so that you will know if it’s possible to approach them closely.

Just remember to wash your hands every time you pet an animal since some of them dislike other animals’ smell.

Aside from that, you should also avoid approaching an animal from their blind spots.

Moreover, if you want them to be comfortable with you, you can also wait for them to approach you instead of the other way around. Some animals need more time to get used to you.

2) Hold the animal calmly.

When picking up an animal, one thing you need to remember is to pick them up calmly.

You must also already know the correct methods of picking up a particular animal, especially if you want to hold them.

In holding them, be at ease and stable to reassure the animal that they are in safe hands. The trick here is to make yourself relax so that the animal can relax and enjoy your bonding.

You may want to balance the animal’s position without flipping them. You can also sit down and let them snuggle with you.

3) Foster an animal.

One of the kindest acts you can do for an animal is by joining a foster program.

This is a great opportunity for you if you’ve got no resources to live with an animal companion in the long run but have the resources to take care of one temporarily. 

You can go to a local shelter and help them allocate free spaces for another homeless animal by taking care of one rescued animal until someone adopts your chosen foster.

Why this kindness matters is because it helps animals move forward, both mentally and physically.

This act makes you a beacon of light, as it encourages them to trust other humans. This way, you can contribute to their wellness by becoming a foster parent who can provide them with the social skills they need so that dog parents would adopt them.

4) Respect wildlife animals.

Kindness is not only for domestic animals. On the contrary, it also applies to animals in the wild.

One thing you have to be aware of is that domestic animals are a lot different from a wild one.

Wild animals may exhibit behaviors that you may not be comfortable with. Some of them may also be difficult to tame or are even untamable at all. 

For this reason, aside from showing kindness, you also need to treat wildlife animals with respect.

Respecting the lives of animals living in the wild may come in a number of forms. For one, if you want to keep a wide animal in your home, you need to secure a special permit first.

You should also avoid feeding them in the wild because it may disturb their natural behaviors or damage their health.

5) Choose cruelty-free products.

When making a product that caters to human needs, conducting experiments to prove its effectiveness or toxicity is inevitable. Unfortunately, people usually evaluate the potential hazards of these products on our four-legged companions.

To encourage everyone to be kind to animals, we recommend opting for animal cruelty-free products instead.

Just this simple act can already support the lives of thousands of guinea pigs, bunnies, rats, and many more. So, do your research well on which products you should buy and use.

6) Avoid single-use plastic.

An indirect act of kindness that you may never know has a significant impact on animals is not using single-use plastic.

Why this kindness matters is because it helps animals, especially strays, to avoid accidentally eating plastics and choking on them.

If using plastic is hard to let go of, then make sure to dispose of the plastic responsibly.

Having no proper waste disposal system would be a waste in the end because stray animals don’t tend to choose as long as there is a portion of food they can take.

7) Adopt an animal.

If you think you can do more than fostering an animal and are confident that you can offer one a permanent home, why not adopt one?

The animal you choose will be lucky to have a parent like you.

To adopt an animal, you can go to nearby shelters or any adoption events and talk to the volunteers about your plan.

Choose the dog you feel you want to take care of or you feel you’d be comfortable being with at your home. 

8) Report injured or abandoned animals.

When you encounter an injured or abandoned animal,  never ignore them.

In fact, and better yet, report to the shelters you know that you encountered an animal with injuries or that has found itself without a home.

Contacting the proper authorities immediately will ensure that animal welfare organizations can quickly check on their conditions.

Your local humane society may have the contact information you need if you see animals that needs rescue.

You can also contact the police department, a wildlife rehabilitator, local rescue shelters, or park rangers (if you are in a park).

Acknowledging animals’ suffering and taking action to address them is one of the easy ways you can take to be kind to animals.

To make these animals live long is why kindness matters.

9) Support animal charities or any animal shelters.

Another way you can make a direct impact on the lives of animals is to help the people who take care of animals hands-on.

To be specific, you can be kind to animals by making donations to shelters and rescue groups so that they have enough budget for all the animals they will rescue.

If you don’t want to stop at donations, you can also volunteer at your local shelter and adequately train yourself to handle the animals they have.

10) Teach children to be kind to animals.

Keeping animals safe and healthy doesn’t stop with you. In fact, we even suggest that you educate your kids about why kindness matters to animals and the appropriate actions to be kind to animals.

Change always starts from the beginning, so teaching children how to show kindness to animals and spreading the love for them leaves a legacy and hope for the future.

After all, as with other life lessons, teaching youngsters about being kind to animals early on means that that they can also pass it on.

The reason why kindness matters to animals is simple: they don’t deserve to be in pain.

Therefore, always be kind to animals. As long as you are careful and don’t forget how to show kindness to animals, you can make an impact and save an animal’s life.

Just like with any other creature, animals deserve kindness, too.

Leave a comment

Comments will be approved before showing up.

Home — Essay Samples — Environment — Animal Ethics — Persuasive Animal Rights And The Importance Of Treating Animals With Respect

Persuasive Animal Rights and The Importance of Treating Animals with Respect

• Categories: Animal Cruelty Animal Ethics

About this sample

Words: 1394 |

Published: Jan 28, 2021

Words: 1394 | Pages: 3 | 7 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, works cited.

• American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). (n.d.). Animal cruelty laws in Canada. Retrieved from https://www.aspca.org/animal-cruelty/canada
• Animal Equality. (n.d.). Animal testing. Retrieved from https://www.animalequality.org/issues/animal-testing
• Animal Welfare Act. (1966). 7 U.S.C. § 2131 et seq.
• Bekoff, M. (2013). The emotional lives of animals: A leading scientist explores animal joy, sorrow, and empathy — and why they matter. New World Library.
• Cartmill, M. (1996). A view to a death in the morning: Hunting and nature through history. Harvard University Press.
• Dawkins, M. S. (2006). Through our eyes only? The search for animal consciousness. Oxford University Press.
• Francione, G. L. (1995). Animals, property, and the law. Temple University Press.
• Herzing, D. L. (2010). Dolphin communication: A window into the complexity of human language. In S. M. Reader & K. Laland (Eds.), Animal social complexity: Intelligence, culture, and individualized societies (pp. 293-311). Harvard University Press.
• Regan, T. (1983). The case for animal rights. University of California Press.
• Singer, P. (2009). Animal liberation. Harper Perennial.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Dr Jacklynne

Verified writer

• Expert in: Law, Crime & Punishment Environment

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

2 pages / 1084 words

2 pages / 804 words

4 pages / 1970 words

2 pages / 868 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Animal Ethics

Martinez, Diana Rowe. “Rodeo Animals Are Not Abused.” Greenhaven Press, 2004 and Gale 2001. 07 May 2001. Opposing Viewpoints Context. Accessed 27 Oct. 2019.O’Connor, Jennifer. “Animal Abuse at The Rodeo.” New York Times, 07, [...]

Pollan, Michael. "An Animal's Place." The New York Times. 10 November 2002. Salzman, J. "Animal Law." Foundation Press, 2011. Singer, P. "Animal Liberation." Harper Perennial, 2009.

The concept of zoos has long been a topic of debate, raising questions about the ethical implications of confining animals for human entertainment and conservation purposes. This essay delves into the multifaceted discussion [...]

The documentary film Blackfish, directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, has sparked widespread controversy and debate about the treatment of orcas in captivity. The film, which features interviews and footage from former [...]

The Bahamas are a ground of about 700 islands and 2,400 uninhabited islets and cays lying 50 mi off the east coast of Florida. Only about 30 of the islands are inhabited; the most important is New Providence (80 sq. mi; 207 sq. [...]

Statement of the problem: Animal testing has been around for centuries, starting with ancient Greek physicians who used animals for testing of medicines and anatomy of animals. It was only during the 12th century when physicians [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

Why we need to show animals kindness and respect

It can be easy to go through life without giving many subjects much thought. It is sometimes more convenient for people to go about their day simply thinking about themselves. But for those who are looking to become a little more conscious with their thinking and knowledge, there is plenty of important information out there that can be absorbed.

For instance, many people feel passionately when it comes to taking care of the environment and so will educate themselves as much as possible in regards to this topic. Others may throw themselves into the world of  marine conservation  and will strive to do their part when it comes to safeguarding the ocean. For many, they will feel that it is their mission when it comes to  protecting animals  as well as their  natural habitats .

How animals and humans are able to co-exist in this modern world

Once upon a time, humans had to live by the rule “kill or be killed” when it came to certain wildlife. In modern times, however, this is rarely the case and humans now have a duty of care when it comes to the animal kingdom. This is especially the case as many species are no longer wild due to farming and the animal entertainment industry.

Without certain species, there can be a break down in the food web and other species may then become endangered as well. This, in turn, can have an impact on the environment which in the long run can have serious consequences when it comes to human life too. As this is the case, it is important that animals and humans are able to co-exist in this modern world. This can be achieved by protecting certain areas as well as treating animals with kindness and respect. A great way for people to learn more about this and to contribute is to consider volunteering in Australia with opportunities such as the  Australian Forest Wildlife project offered Oceans 2 Earth Volunteering.

Animals have a right to life too

For those who find themselves diving into this subject, they may come to realisation that all animals have a right to life too. Even if the sole purpose of an animal is to provide food for a human, they still deserve to have a full life where they have freedom to participate in their natural activities. Furthermore, they have the right to a humane death.

This is so important as animals have feelings too and just like humans will experience pain. As humans are at the top of the food chain, we are gifted the duty of taking care of animals whose outcomes are left in our hands. Because of this, we should educate ourselves as much as possible and treat animals with kindness and respect. After all, we all live under the same sky.

Written by Shalee Rae, writer for Oceans 2 Earth Volunteers

• 10 Top Facts You Might Not Know About Sun Bears
• Here’s Why You Should Volunteer While Visiting Australia on a Working Holiday Visa
• Top 3 Differences Between African and Asian Elephants
• 3 Tips For Finding Affordable Flights For Summer Travel
• 10 Top Facts You Might Not Know About Orangutans
• What Is A Debt-For-Nature Swap and How Does This Help the Environment?

You may also like

What is a debt-for-nature swap and how does..., 10 top facts you might not know about..., 3 tips for finding affordable flights for summer....

Subscribe for news, articles and tips

© 2024 All Right Reserved Oceans 2 Earth Foundation – Oceans 2 Earth Volunteers Ltd.

Developing empathy towards animals

Key points:

• Toddlers and pre-kindergarten children often inadvertently behave in ways that are not kind to animals, but early education about kindness to animals can help them develop empathy, self-control, and a better understanding of themselves.
• Spending time with animals can improve children’s physical and psychological well-being.
• Ideas for teaching children kindness towards animals include introducing them to different types of animals through books and bird feeders, showing them how to pet animals safely, and explaining to them why teasing animals or behaving aggressively towards them is not okay.
• Brightly provides a list of books that can be helpful for teaching toddlers about how to treat animals kindly.

Without having cruel intentions, most toddlers and pre-kindergarten children are simply too young to realize that pulling or squeezing an animal’s ears, hair, or just using them to explore and get funny reactions is actually not so funny for the cat, dog, bird, or bug in question. But this doesn’t mean that they can’t learn about kindness towards all kind of creatures at an early age. Quite the contrary!

Teaching your child how to coexist safely and lovingly with nature and animals can help them develop self-control, learn about boundaries, develop empathy, and know more about their own self and preferences. It also means that your toddler will be less likely to have bad experiences when interacting with an animal that can defend itself.

More so, it is known that spending time with animals and pets is good for both for the physical and psychological well-being of children, and is a great first step towards raising a nature-loving child.

Here are some ideas on how to help your child to be kind towards animals:

• Books can be a good tool to show your kid different kinds of animals, so that they get comfortable around aquatic animals and winged, furry, or scaled ones too.
• Have a bird-feeder on your porch, window, or backyard.
• Show them how to kindly and safely touch a well-domesticated animal. You can start with modeling how to pet a cat or a dog using a stuffed animal. You can also play pretend and have you or your toddler be a puppy, and emphasize about gentleness and slow movements.
• Explain that animals have feelings and that they can be hurt by pulling and trampling, just as that behavior would hurt them.
• Discourage teasing an animal. Explain how it’s not nice to bother an animal that’s eating or napping, or to take away from them a loved toy. Animals dislike being treated rudely just as much as people do.
• Teach caution around unfamiliar animals. You can tell your child not to go near an animal (other than your house pet if you have one) without an adult around.

Related Articles

4 Spring Activities for Preschoolers

Spring activities for preschoolers can play a significant role in the overall development of children. Through playful exploration of nature,…

Essential Newborn Care

The birth of a baby is a moment of great emotion and joy for parents and, at the same time,…

Signs of Colic in Babies

Colic is a common disorder in babies, characterized by intense, prolonged crying for no apparent reason. This can be very…

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Download now!

• Work & Careers
• Life & Arts
• Currently reading: We love animals — so why do we treat them so badly?
• Amia Srinivasan: the politics of safety
• How the race for renewable energy is reshaping global politics
• What I discovered on my quest to meet China’s most influential female chef
• Kim Stanley Robinson: a climate plan for a world in flames
• How FC Barcelona blew a fortune — and got worse
• The vanishing billionaire: how Jack Ma fell foul of Xi Jinping

We love animals — so why do we treat them so badly?

• We love animals — so why do we treat them so badly? on x (opens in a new window)
• We love animals — so why do we treat them so badly? on facebook (opens in a new window)
• We love animals — so why do we treat them so badly? on linkedin (opens in a new window)
• We love animals — so why do we treat them so badly? on whatsapp (opens in a new window)

Henry Mance

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox.

Before the pandemic, it was the best time ever to be a human. We lived longer, fought less and had more opportunities than our ancestors. This is the world that we hope to return to soon.

But what about other animals? For them, these years are quite possibly the worst time to be alive. If you are a non-human mammal in the 21st century, you have a greater chance than your ancestors of living on a factory farm. If you are a bird, you are probably a chicken — generally an overbred, confined one whose bones struggle to support your weight. Indeed, if you were randomly incarnated, you would be at least 20 times more likely to be a chicken than a dog.

Meanwhile, pick a wild animal at random — a lion, a puffin, a cigarette beetle — and they probably have a greater chance than ever of being squeezed off the planet by humans’ relentless expansion. On our current trajectory, in a couple of centuries the largest land animals will be cows.

This divergence in fortunes would be understandable if we humans didn’t care about other animals — if we, like René Descartes, saw them as automatons that cannot feel pain or joy. But we are not Descartes, and we do care. We watch cat videos and Attenborough documentaries. We lavish money on pets and safaris. We find animals beautiful, seductive and amusing. We know that they have emotions and suffer pain.

Even stony-hearted humans refer to themselves as animal lovers. “I love animals, don’t get me wrong,” smiled football manager José Mourinho earlier this season, after comparing his star strikers to animals. “I love animals, and I don’t like the way factory farms treat animals,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson insisted, as he debated with a vegan.

Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Boris Johnson and Joe Biden all brandished dogs when they took office; the pets would be re-elected more easily than they would. The singer Lorde declared that her dog Pearl had “led me towards the ideas” in her music. Lady Gaga recently offered $500,000 for the return of her own two stolen French bulldogs (they were recovered). In dating profiles, people advertise their pets, even if they don’t actually have any (a fakery alluded to in the viral short story “ Cat Person ”).

Is there a way that we can coexist with other animals, without delusions and without guilt? Is this planet big enough for all of us?

Put simply, love for animals is one of our society’s core values. Rational thinking is another. The way we treat animals doesn’t fit with either of these values; it is guided by tradition and inertia. No one would vote for the looming mass extinction of wild animals, certainly not the animals themselves. Goodness knows how we will explain it to the next generation. But it is happening on our watch.

For me, the change came when my daughters were born. When you have children, you find yourself surrounded by animals — soft toys, storybooks, Disney films. I promise that I’m not the kind of pedant who points out that Peppa Pig would be part of a litter, and that, if the tiger really did come to tea, he would eat the little girl first.

I was struck, however, by doubt. Surely my daughters were entitled to infer, from all these depictions of animals, that we adults had sussed out how to live alongside other species? Surely I wouldn’t give them Sophie the Giraffe toys if the numbers of actual wild giraffes were plummeting? Surely I wouldn’t read them countless stories about wolves and weasels if I had never seen any? My daughters asked questions for which I felt ill-equipped, such as: “Are foxes happy or sad?” and “Why are there so many animals in the zoo?”

So, for the past two years, I have tried to unpick the contradiction between how much we love animals and how little space we make for them on our planet. I worked in an abattoir and on farms. I went hunting, fishing and birdwatching. I interviewed scientists, pet owners and conservationists.

I have tried to come up with an ethic that my daughters and I can follow. Is there a way that we can coexist with other animals, without delusions and without guilt? Is this planet big enough for all of us?

My belief is that appreciating animals should not simply be lip service; it should change the way we live.

The first thing you learn about slaughterhouses is that it’s easy to find work in one. There are jobs for which you need a CV, a reference or even a permanent address. There are jobs for which each listing brings a deluge of applications. “Abattoir ancillary worker” does not seem to be one of them. I call up the number on an online job ad, and am told to come down whenever is convenient.

The ad said “training provided”. Training turns out to consist of white overalls, white rubber boots and a hairnet. A man called Steve gives me those, opens the door to a one-storey metal building. I find myself standing beside a line of headless sheep. This is all within four minutes of showing up. At a London office block, it would have taken longer to get past reception.

Working in an abattoir is a shock . . . It’s also a reminder: the biggest way that we interact with animals today is by eating them

The sheep are hanging from a motorised track, and every metre or so, a man is removing a different part of their insides or outsides. In a windowless space, the animals go from things you would see in a field to things you would see on a supermarket shelf. Red is splattered everywhere. Almost as soon as I arrive, the man next to me loses control of his knife and cuts off the skin from his knuckle, as if opening a boiled egg. He stares at the scarlet-and-white circle, the size of a small coin, which has now appeared on his finger. “Oooh, that’s a nasty one,” chips in a man one down, laughing.

I am placed in front of a machine called the puller. By the time the sheep arrive here, their necks have been slit, their heads and trotters cut off, and the skin on their front legs cut from their flesh. The puller has two clamps that grab the loose skin on the front legs, and then drag it down, taking the wool coat halfway off the body. “Don’t get your fingers caught,” says a colleague, unaware that I have already made it my life’s mission.

Working in an abattoir is a shock. I won’t go into details here, but it’s perhaps the only job where it’s an advantage to have lost your sense of taste and smell. It’s also a reminder: the biggest way that we interact with animals today is by eating them.

In our lifetimes, we might have a handful of cherished pets. By my calculations, if meat consumption remains at its current level, a British baby born today will — over the course of their life — eat the equivalent of five whole cows, 20 whole sheep, 25 whole pigs and 1,785 chickens.

When countries get rich, they eat more meat. Even fish-eating Japan has doubled its meat consumption per person during the past 40 years. The UK kills 11m pigs a year, Japan 16m, Germany 53m, and the US a whopping 130m.

This meat-eating relies on cognitive dissonance. If you give someone a beef snack and ask them whether cows suffer pain, they are less likely to say yes than if you give them some nuts. If you overstate the intelligence of tapirs, wild animals that look somewhat similar to pigs, people say that tapirs deserve more moral concern; if you do the same with pigs, they don’t. We discount their suffering because we want to eat them.

We have rules of thumb, but these mislead us. We assume that white meat is less cruel than red meat. In fact chickens, bred to quadruple in size in their first week and be killed at six weeks old, live worse lives than most beef cows. Around the world, pigs — curious, sociable animals — are often kept indoors and in metal enclosures so small that they can’t turn round. Pigs perform similarly or better than dogs on some cognitive tests, and we would be outraged if a dog were treated like a farmed pig.

Another blind spot is dairy. Vegetarians generally see dairy as a guilt-free choice, because it doesn’t seem to involve death. But dairy involves cows being impregnated, immediately separated from their calves and then milked for our consumption. We break the bond between mother and calf, because we like the taste. In my research, I met those trying to make dairy more humane, but it is an uphill struggle.

Then there are fish, which we kill by the trillion every year. Scientific studies now strongly suggest that they feel pain. But welfare laws largely do not limit how fish are caught at sea: often fish are dragged for hours in trawler nets, or left to asphyxiate out of the water. The next time you buy a whole fish, ask the fishmonger how the fish died.

Our animal ethic has been built on stopping cruelty. This dates back to the 19th century, when right-thinking men and women were appalled at the abuse heaped on horses in cities. These days it manifests itself in occasional moral panics, often over hunting and pet abuse. In 2010, a British woman received death threats after being caught on CCTV putting a cat in a wheelie bin. (The woman apologised; according to her mother, she actually “loved cats”.)

Yet opposing cruelty only takes us so far. Eating meat, fish and dairy doesn’t seem cruel, because it seems normal and necessary. It is not necessary. The American Dietetic Association says that appropriately planned vegetarian and vegan diets are “healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases”.

Americans consistently tell pollsters they’re eating less meat, but consistently eat more of it Lewis Bollard, activist

You sometimes hear that grazing cows or sheep is necessary for the environment in places such as the UK. First, this would not justify chicken, fish and pig farms, which represent most livestock. Second, new research shows that the carbon benefits of grazing have been overstated, and that much more carbon would be stored by turning the land over to forests or grasslands.

Don’t believe, either, that vegetarians are deforesting the Amazon: three-quarters of soyabean production goes into animal feed; less than 5 per cent goes into tofu and soy milk. It’s simply more efficient to eat the beans directly than to raise animals. The expansion of agriculture is the biggest single force pushing wild animals to extinction. But we don’t feel responsible for the orang-utans stranded by bulldozers. We could free much of the world’s surface and oceans for wild animals if we shifted to a plant-based diet.

So far our attempts to remedy this have fallen far short. We have put distance — both physical and mental — between ourselves and the animals whose lives we affect. Nearly half of Americans say they support a ban on factory farming, and 40 per cent support a ban on slaughterhouses, but only 5 per cent are vegetarian. “Americans consistently tell pollsters they’re eating less meat, but consistently eat more of it,” points out the activist Lewis Bollard. (One possible explanation is that, in poll questions, “meat” is assumed to refer only to red meat.)

The easiest time to change our children’s diets away from meat would be when they are young, developing their sense of taste — but parents often have other things on their minds, and schools still offer animal produce as the default options. Let’s not try to explain away the way we treat animals. Let’s not acclimatise kids to meat and dairy and madcap consumerism. It’s their world we’re sabotaging. It’s their arrival that can push us to change.

Food is the most important way we can change our relationship with animals, but our thinking lets us down elsewhere too. It doesn’t feel cruel to animals to emit carbon, by heating our draughty homes and flying on holiday, even though climate change is what will probably lead to the virtual disappearance of coral reefs and their abundant life this century.

Zoos are filled with good intentions, of conservationists and visitors. Just as we assume livestock is happy on farms, we think wild animals are happy enough in zoos. But keeping large animals in enclosed spaces is a relic of the menagerie era. Elephants in particular do not seem to do well on concrete floors, in artificial herds and in temperate climates. From an animal’s point of view, zoos may be more problematic than hunting, where animals live free until they are killed quickly.

So we need a new approach. We need to look beyond the intentions of farmers, hunters, zookeepers and others, and focus on the consequences of their actions. Hunting can, if managed well, protect wild spaces and keep ecosystems in balance. Livestock farming generally can’t. To do right by other animals means to see the world through their eyes.

Western science has accepted over recent decades that non-human animals have emotions and feelings. Many indigenous societies have known that for centuries. They have seen continuity between humans and other sentient beings; they have written animals into their societies.

“Sometimes I wonder if echidnas ever suffer from the same delusion that many humans have, that their species is the intelligent centre of the universe,” Tyson Yunkaporta, an academic and member of Queensland’s Apalech clan, writes in his book Sand Talk .

As part of my research, I spent time among the Yurok tribe, amid the glorious redwoods of northern California. The Yurok, whose lands border a river, value salmon and sturgeon. But they are also working to restore populations of the California condor, the large soaring bird that, some tribal members believe, carries their prayers to the heavens.

“Bringing condor back, making him an active part of our lives again, it’s going to heal us as a people in a very big way. It’s going to strengthen our ceremony, our prayers,” Tiana Claussen, a Yurok biologist, told me.

To a hyper-rational western mind, such rituals are fanciful. But they embody a profound truth: our species has always coexisted with other animals, and our survival depends on a respect for them.

In contrast, Christianity has had a more ambiguous relationship with animals. Even Charles Darwin, who did more than anyone to shape our conception of the natural world, did not formulate a way for us to live alongside other species. (His own practices were a mix: he abhorred cruelty, enjoyed shooting, reluctantly defended vivisection, and didn’t engage with the 19th-century vegetarian movement.)

The result is that we still often see wild animals — wolves, sharks, even herbivorous beavers — as threats and disruptive presences. We push aside even those animals closest to us: all other great ape species — gorillas, orang-utans, chimpanzees, bonobos — are endangered or critically endangered.

The good news is that our society has a huge opportunity. We do not need to exploit animals. We have plentiful other sources of food; we could make eating meat opt-in, rather than opt-out, at schools and workplaces. We don’t need horses for transport or cargo; we don’t need cows or camels for clothing. We don’t need bears to fight or greyhounds to race for our entertainment. We can dramatically reduce the amount of land we require for agriculture, and reduce the amount of suffering that we cause other animals.

The pandemic is a lesson: caused by a virus that crossed over from wild animals, probably because of how we are breaking up their habitat. There is no reason to think that this will be the worst pandemic we face in our lifetimes. The hope is what endures now is humility towards the natural world.

Bringing condor back, making him an active part of our lives again, it’s going to heal us as a people in a very big way Tiana Claussen, Yurok biologist

For much of our history, humans have been in competition with wild animals. Now we can recognise our shared fate. Climate change is, broadly speaking, very bad for us and very bad for wild animals. The loss of forests, grasslands and coral reefs is bad for all of us. We worry about our world becoming uninhabitable. But for millions of animals, it has already become uninhabitable. Animals are not just reminders of our evolutionary past. They are reminders of our future.

A few years ago, I was on a boat in the Farne Islands, taking photographs of Atlantic puffins. Up close, the puffins are beautiful but ungainly, battling high winds to fly into their nests. On the boat back, a little boy whispered to his parents: “I love the puffins.”

I love the puffins too, I thought. But what had I actually done to make their lives better? Puffins are affected by climate change, overfishing and habitat loss. All of these things are, at least partly, under human control.

One of the stories I read my daughters was a version of Rudyard Kipling’s How the Leopard Got His Spots . It tells how a human helped the leopard hide in shadows by placing handprints on his skin. This is a benign fantasy. Our actual impact on animals is different: we breed livestock into warped shapes, and we wipe out wild animals with our expansion.

The story I will tell my daughters is this: that to love animals is not simply to admire their beauty; it is to shrink our footprint so we can live in harmony with them. We should not just ask what animals can do for us; we should ask what we can do for animals. We should give up most livestock farming. One proposal, which I discuss in my book, is to set aside half our planet as conservation areas. Some would be parks for tourists; others would have as little human presence as possible.

This comes with sacrifices. Yes, as a vegan, you can’t get all the exact tastes of a meat-eater, but you can still eat delicious food (and, with an Impossible or a Beyond burger, you can get very close to the taste of beef). Yes, without old-style zoos, you won’t be able to visit an elephant in your city centre, but you can take similar pleasure from observing foxes, parakeets or tadpoles. Yes, if we are to curb climate change, you may not be able to fly to the Amazon, but you might at least stop it from disappearing.

The prize is to find a form of human progress that works not just for us, but for the other sentient beings that fill our world with beauty. After all, there is no point saying that we love animals if we don’t act on it.

Henry Mance is the FT’s chief features writer

‘ How to Love Animals in a Human-Shaped World ’ by Henry Mance is published in the UK by Jonathan Cape on April 29 and in the US by Vintage on July 13

Photographs by Dan Burn-Forti. Data visualisation by Keith Fray

Follow  @FTLifeArts  on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first

Letters in response to this article:

A seafood encounter in need of a page turner/ From Ranjit Thomas, Dumfries, Dumfries and Galloway Scotland, UK

A distinction that Durrell would have enjoyed / From Bill Maryon, Bristol, UK

Pet food industry gives planet much to digest / From Nicole Catani, Cardiff, South Wales, UK

Promoted Content

Explore the series.

Follow the topics in this article

• Life & Arts Add to myFT
• Animal welfare Add to myFT
• Rene Descartes Add to myFT
• The Weekend Essay Add to myFT
• Henry Mance Add to myFT

International Edition

Essay on Passion For Animals

Students are often asked to write an essay on Passion For Animals in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Passion For Animals

Love for animals.

Many people adore animals. This love can be strong, like a passion. When someone has a passion for animals, they care deeply about their well-being. They enjoy spending time with them and often feel happy around them. This feeling can grow into a desire to protect and look after animals.

Helping Animals

People with a passion for animals often help them. They might volunteer at shelters or donate to animal charities. Some even choose careers working with animals, like becoming a vet or a zookeeper. They want to make sure animals are safe and healthy.

Learning from Animals

Animals can teach us a lot. By watching and being with them, we learn about kindness, patience, and loyalty. People passionate about animals often say that animals make them better humans. They believe that animals have lessons to give us, if we just pay attention.

Sharing the Love

Those who love animals usually want to share this feeling. They might encourage friends to adopt pets or treat animals kindly. By sharing their passion, they hope more people will see how wonderful animals are and join in caring for them.

250 Words Essay on Passion For Animals

Many people feel a strong love for animals. This love can be seen in the way they care for pets or show interest in wildlife. Animals bring joy and companionship to our lives, making our days brighter and more fun.

Caring for Pets

When we have pets, we often treat them like family members. We feed them, play with them, and take them to the vet when they’re sick. This shows our deep care for their well-being. Pets, in return, love us unconditionally, making the bond even stronger.

Animals have a lot to teach us. By watching them, we learn about loyalty, bravery, and the simple joys of life. For example, dogs are known for their loyalty and cats for their independence. Observing these traits can teach us valuable life lessons.

Protecting Wildlife

Some people take their passion for animals beyond their own pets. They work to protect wild animals and their homes. This can mean helping to clean up beaches so sea turtles can nest or raising money for wildlife reserves.

A passion for animals is a beautiful thing. It shows our ability to connect with other living beings and care for them deeply. Whether it’s through looking after pets or helping wild animals, this passion makes the world a better place for all creatures.

500 Words Essay on Passion For Animals

What is passion for animals.

When we say someone has a passion for animals, it means they have a strong feeling of love and care for animals. This kind of person enjoys spending time with animals, learning about them, and helping them in any way they can. This passion can be seen in people who have pets at home, those who work with animals, or even those who support animal rights.

Why People Love Animals

People love animals for many reasons. Animals are often friendly, playful, and can make us feel happy when we are sad. They give us company when we are alone and can become a big part of our families. For some, the innocence and beauty of animals is what draws them in. Watching a bird fly or a fish swim can be very calming and fascinating.

People with a passion for animals often want to help them. This can mean many things, like making sure pets have food and a safe place to live. It can also mean helping wild animals by keeping the environment clean and safe for them. Some people work at animal shelters, where they take care of animals that don’t have homes. Others might become vets to help sick animals get better.

Learning About Animals

Another way to show passion for animals is by learning about them. This can be fun and interesting. There are so many different kinds of animals in the world, and each one has its own way of living. By reading books, watching documentaries, or visiting zoos, people can learn a lot. This knowledge can help them understand how to take better care of animals.

Protecting Animals

Sadly, not all animals live happy lives. Some are in danger because their homes are being destroyed, or they are being hunted. People who love animals want to protect them. They might join groups that work to save endangered animals or teach others how to treat animals with kindness.

In conclusion, having a passion for animals is a beautiful thing. It can bring joy to our lives and help make the world a better place for all living creatures. Whether it’s by caring for pets, learning about different species, or working to protect animals, this passion is important. It reminds us that we share our planet with many other living beings, and it’s our job to take care of them.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Passion And Dreams
• Essay on Passion About The Environment
• Essay on How Is Equality Best Achieved

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.