Matthew Scully Quotes & Sayings

When we call something unfair or indecent or unconscionable or evil, when we speak of mercy and pity and compassion, those words have meaning, regardless of our particular faith or moral philosophy. They appeal to common standards we all are expected to understand and accept, standards without which we could not live any common life at all.. — Matthew Scully

It is true, as we are often reminded, that kindness to animals is among the humbler duties of human charity
though for just that reason among the more easily neglected. And it is true that there will always be enough injustice and human suffering in the world to make the wrongs done to animals seem small and secondary. The answer is that justice is not a finite commodity, nor are kindness and love. Where we find wrongs done to animals, it is no excuse to say that more important wrongs are done to human beings, and let us concentrate on those. A wrong is a wrong, and often the little ones, when they are shrugged off as nothing, spread and do the gravest harm to ourselves and others. — Matthew Scully

Tradition with all its happy assumptions and necessary evils, all of its content majorities and stout killers, is not always a reliable guide. — Matthew Scully

To the factory farmer, in contrast to the traditional farmer with his sense of honor and obligation, the animals are 'production units,' and accorded all the sympathy that term suggests. — Matthew Scully

When we shrink from the sight of something, when we shroud it in euphemism, that is usually a sign of inner conflict, of unsettled hearts, a sign that something has gone wrong in our moral reasoning. — Matthew Scully

In the summer or fall of 1974, I read some books about factory farming, and decided that I wanted no part of it. — Matthew Scully

Animals have this way of constantly confronting us with ultimate questions - about truth and falsehood, guilt and innocence, God and sanctity and the soul - forcing us to define ourselves and our relationship to the world. — Matthew Scully

The smell of factory farms ... many notice these places only when the odours reach their homes, affecting their own quality of life. We create these animals for our profit and pleasure, playing with their genes, violating their dignity as living creatures, forcing them to lie and live in their own urine and excrement, turning pens into penitentiaries and frustrating their every desire except what is needed to keep them breathing and breeding. And then we complain about the smell. — Matthew Scully

Some readers will say that animals awaken fantasy, if not heresy, in those who attach moral significance to them. Yet often I think it is the more violent among us who are living out the fantasy, some delusion in which everything in nature is nothing and all is permitted. — Matthew Scully

I know a 'crime against nature' when I see one. It is usually a sign of crimes against nature that we cannot bear to see them at all, that we recoil and hide our eyes, and no one has ever cringed at the sight of a soybean factory. I also know phony arguments when I hear them
unbridled appetite passing itself off as altruism, and human arrogance in the guise of solemn 'duty.' We must, as C.S. Lewis advises, 'reject with detestation that covert propoganda for cruelty which tries to drive mercy out of the world by calling it names such as 'Humanitarianism' and 'Sentimentality. — Matthew Scully

Factory farming came about from a moral race to the bottom, with corporations vying against each other to produce more and bigger animals with less care at lower cost. — Matthew Scully

Factory farming, like comparable evils throughout history, depends for its existence upon concealment. It depends on people either not noticing or willfully averting their gaze. — Matthew Scully

Let's just call things what they are. When a man's love of finery clouds his moral judgment, that is vanity. When he lets a demanding palate make his moral choices, that is gluttony. When he ascribes the divine will to his own whims, that is pride. And when he gets angry at being reminded of animal suffering that his own daily choices might help avoid, that is moral cowardice. — Matthew Scully

Go into the largest livestock operation, search out the darkest and tiniest stall or pen, single out the filthiest, most forlorn little lamb or pig or calf, and that is one of God's creatures you're looking at, morally indistinguishable from your beloved Fluffy or Frisky. — Matthew Scully

Though reason must guide us in laying down standards and laws regarding animals, and in examining the arguments of those who reject such standards, it is usually best in any moral inquiry to start with the original motivation, which in the case of animals we may without embarrassment call love. Human beings love animals as only the higher love the lower, the knowing love the innocent, and the strong love the vulnerable. When we wince at the suffering of animals, that feeling speaks well of us even when we ignore it, and those who dismiss love for our fellow creatures as mere sentimentality overlook a good and important part of our humanity. — Matthew Scully

Intellectuals are a pretty unique species all by themselves, given to advocating things out of sheer brazenness that they could not themselves stomach if they were ushered in to witness the scene. — Matthew Scully

The only thing worse than cruelty is delegated cruelty. — Matthew Scully

Veal, by definition, is the product of a sick, anemic, deliberately malnourished calf, a newborn dragged away from his mother in the first hours of life. Veal calves are dealt the harshest of punishments for the least essential of meats. — Matthew Scully

Best, I'd advise, to give up all animal products obtained by cruel methods. There are some fine companies nowadays offering leather substitutes. — Matthew Scully

Perhaps that is part of the animals' role among us, to awaken humility, to turn our minds back to the mystery of things, and open our hearts to that most impractical of hopes in which all creation speaks as one. — Matthew Scully

My earliest recollection is of coming upon some rabbit tracks in the backyard snow. I must have been three or so, but I had never seen a rabbit and can still recall the feeling of being completely captivated by the tracks: Someone had been here. And he left these prints. And he was alive. And he lived somewhere nearby, maybe even watching me at this very moment.
Four decades later, I do not need to be reminded that rabbits are often a nuisance to farmers and gardeners. My point is that when you look at a rabbit and can see only a pest, or vermin, or a meal, or a commodity, or a laboratory subject, you aren't seeing the rabbit anymore. You are seeing only yourself and the schemes and appetites we bring to the world
seeing, come to think of it, like an animal instead of as a moral being with moral vision. — Matthew Scully

The elephants we have seen taunted and tormented and slaughtered by the likes of Safari Club do not have time to wait while the world's ethicists work out some centuries-long paradigm shift in moral thought. — Matthew Scully

I have no doubt that President George W. Bush - a man, in my experience, of extremely kind and generous instincts, and back in Austin even a rescuer of stray animals - would be appalled by the conditions of a typical American factory farm or packing plant. — Matthew Scully

I know many people far more upright and conscientous than I am who disagree, who think nothing of it. I know that vegetarianism runs against mankind's most casual assumptions about the world and our place within it. And I know that factory farming is an economic inevitability, not likely to end anytime soon.
But I don't answer to inevitabilities, and neither do you. I don't answer to the economy. I don't answer to tradition and I don't answer to Everyone. For me, it comes down to a question of whether I am a man or just a consumer. Whether to reason or just to rationalize. Whether to heed my conscience or my every craving, to assert my free will or just my will. Whether to side with the powerful and comfortable or with the weak, afflicted, and forgotten. — Matthew Scully

Sometimes tradition and habit are just that, comfortable excuses to leave things be, even when they are unjust and unworthy. Sometimes
not often, but sometimes
the cranks and radicals turn out to be right. Sometimes Everyone is wrong. — Matthew Scully

We live in an age when you can prowl the streets of major cities and find human beings offering themselves in store windows, or just reach for the yellow pages and have them delivered. It is the same mindset at work, spreading in our world, and after a while this attitude can find nothing very special about anything or anybody, let alone whales. — Matthew Scully

If we are defined by reason and morality, then reason and morality must define our choices, even when animals are concerned. When people say, for example, that they like their veal or hot dogs too much to ever give them up, and yeah it's sad about the farms but that's just the way it is, reason hears in that the voice of gluttony. We can say that what makes a human being human is precisely the ability to understand that the suffering of an animal is more important than the taste of a treat. — Matthew Scully

Such terrifying powers we possess, but what a sorry lot of gods some men are. And the worst of it is not the cruelty but the arrogance, the sheer hubris of those who bring only violence and fear into the animal world, as if it needed any more of either. Their lives entail enough frights and tribulations without the modern fire-makers, now armed with perfected, inescapable weapons, traipsing along for more fun and thrills at their expense even as so many of them die away. It is our fellow creatures' lot in the universe, the place assigned them in creation, to be completely at our mercy, the fiercest wolf or tiger defenseless against the most cowardly man. And to me it has always seemed not only ungenerous and shabby but a kind of supreme snobbery to deal cavalierly with them, as if their little share of the earth's happiness and grief were inconsequential, meaningless, beneath a man's attention, trumped by any and all designs he might have on them, however base, irrational, or wicked. — Matthew Scully

When you start with a necessary evil, and then over time the necessity passes away, what's left? — Matthew Scully

Reforms will come as all great reforms have always come in ridding us of evils against both man and animal
not as we change our moral principles but as we discern and accept the implications of principles already held. — Matthew Scully

As sentimentality towards animals can be overindulged, so, too, can grim realism, seeing only the things we want in animals and not the animals themselves. — Matthew Scully

I did attend Catholic schools up to the ninth grade, and I admire much in the Catholic Church. — Matthew Scully

In any case I just cannot imagine attaching so much importance to any food or treat that I would grow irate or bitter at the mention of the suffering of animals. A pig to me will always seem more important than a pork rind. There is the risk here of confusing realism with cynicism, moral stoicism with moral sloth, of letting oneself become jaded and lazy and self-satisfied
what used to be called an 'appetitive' person. — Matthew Scully

An environmentalist can oppose factory farming because it's reckless stewardship. A conservative can oppose factory farming because it is destructive to small farmers and to the decent ethic of husbandry those farmers live by. A religious person can oppose factory farming because it is degrading to both man and animal - an offense to God. — Matthew Scully

An author describing the methods of intensive farming, or the excesses of sport hunting, or even the harsher uses of animals in science writes with confidence that most readers will share his sense of concern and indignation. Sounding the call to action
convincing people that change is not only necessary, but actually possible
is more problematic. In protecting animals from cruelty, it is always just one step from the mainstream to the fringe. To condemn the wrong is obvious, to suggest its abolition radical. — Matthew Scully

Regarding factory-farmed animals We owe them a merciful death, and we owe them a merciful life. And when human beings cannot do something humanely, without degrading both the creatures and ourselves, then we should not do it at all. — Matthew Scully

Factory farming isn't just killing: It is negation, a complete denial of the animal as a living being with his or her own needs and nature. It is not the worst evil we can do, but it is the worst evil we can do to them. — Matthew Scully

Religious people ... hold a kind and merciful view of life, the faith of the broken, the hounded, the hopeless. Yet too often, they will not extend that spirit to our fellow creatures. — Matthew Scully

Conservatives like to think of animal protection as a trendy leftist cause, which makes it easier to brush off. And I hope that more of us will open our hearts to animals. — Matthew Scully

The truth is that at the White House and in Congress, you are as likely to find sympathy for animal issues among Republicans as among Democrats. — Matthew Scully

Animals are more than ever a test of our character, of mankind's capacity for empathy and for decent, honorable conduct and faithful stewardship. We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality, but in a sense because they don't; because they all stand unequal and powerless before us. — Matthew Scully

The factory farm is ... an obvious moral evil so sickening and horrendous ... All this so we can have our accustomed veal or lamb or fried chicken or pork chop or hot dog. — Matthew Scully

'Cost-saver' in industrial livestock agriculture may usually be taken to mean 'moral shortcut.' — Matthew Scully