Kindness to animals, as columnist Jeffrey Hart writes, arises from "the imperative duty as rooted in the concept of the fully human. Does it not diminish the human to abuse an animal?" Who wants to see in the mirror the man who tortured an animal?" Most of us know just what he means. And for us that is usually enough -- the mirror test, simple decency, a functioning conscience...
In the case of Smithfield, then, and the entire way of life it stands for, the question is simple and blunt: Looking into that mirror, what do you see? Where is the charity in it, where is the humanity? How does it square with the kind of society you wish to live in and the kind of person you hope to be? If you are a religious person, where in that scene is the God who loves these creatures and asks us to do the same?
For my part, even if it were demonstrated to me that these poor beasts have no rights at all while I have every right to subject them to such privation and torment, and to delegate that authority to the gentlemen of Smithfield, it is a right I do not want, a power I gladly surrender. That is the whole idea of mercy, after all, that it is entirely discretionary, entirely underserved. "It droppeth as the gentle rain from Heaven." There is no such thing as a right to mercy, not for the animals and not even for us....
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.
