What 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 carry only violence and fear into the animal world, as if it needed any more of either. Their lives entail enough frights and tribulations with 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 - Dominion, the Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy,
