Kindness to Animals

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Leaflet No. 26. To Catholics—and others. The following article is reprinted (by kind permission of the Editor) from an Irish Catholic magazine, The Father Mathew Record. We believe it will be widely welcomed as a definite condemnation, from a Roman Catholic source, of painful experiments on animals. In thus pronouncing against the inquiries of the laboratories, The Father Mathew Record stands in the great tradition of those two eminent anti-vivisectionists, Cardinal Newman and Cardinal Manning. Kindness to Animals IF we are materialists there is no reason why we should be kind to animals; there is no reason why we should do anything that does not bring a tangible profit. As materialists we might exercise the virtue of kindness with a certain amount of calculation, anticipating that we might benefit by the reciprocity such action would call forth from those around us. We might be kind to our friends, to our acquaintances, to our employees or employers, knowing that kindness of such a sort will smooth the wheels of our own lives. But kindness to animals is an altruistic virtue, and a truly Christian virtue. Man has been given dominion over the animals. I had nearly said as God has dominion over man. But God's dominion is infinite and all-comprehending; whereas man's dominion over even the very least of God's sentient creatures is finite and filled with ignorance. The animal has been given into man's power for his legitimate use and benefit. And herein lies a field of virtue, for in that dominion only has man the opportunity, in however infinitesimal a way, of acting in imitation of the Divine goodness. That is the thought of St. Thomas of Aquin, of the Angelic Doctor, the greatest thinker of the Church. "Now," he says, "in God is goodness and the outpouring of that goodness into other things. Therefore, the creature approaches more perfectly to God's likeness if it is not only good, but can also act for the goodness of other things." With that in mind, how can we, as Catholics, look on the animal as something owned absolutely, something completely in our power? In the same context St. Thomas comments on that verse of Genesis which expresses the joy of the Creator in His creation: "God saw all the things that He had made, and they were very good." Not man alone, the highest, the most complex of His creatures, the only one endowed with a free and rational will so that by its exercise he might honour his Maker, but "all the things that He had made." "Hence," St. Thomas says, "we are clearly given to understand that the corporeal and visible creatures were made because it is good for them to be." They were made, not for man's use alone, nor wholly to suffer his dominion; but also so that the infinite variety of created things might reflect God's infinite power and infinite knowledge. "For this reason, therefore, there is distinction in created things that they may receive God's likeness more perfectly by multiplicity than by unity." For us Christians t…