I consider nothing low but ignorance, vice, and meanness, characteristics generally found where the animal propensities predominate over the higher sentiments.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
There is little evidence that other animals judge the appropriateness of actions that do not directly affect themselves.
There is increasing social concern about our use of nonhumans for experiments, food, clothing and entertainment. This concern about animals reflects both our own moral development as a civilization and our recognition that the differences between humans and animals are, for the most part, differences of degree and not of kind.
When, instead of merely associating some act with some situation in the animal way, we think the situation out, we have a set of particular feelings of its elements.
What is it that distinguishes you and me from the lower animals - from the beasts? More, I say, than anything else, human sympathy - human sympathy.
The case for exploiting animals for food, clothing and entertainment often relies on our superior intelligence, language and self-awareness: the rights of the superior being trump those of the inferior.
The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
The thing about animals is that they don't judge you. They accept you the way you are.
The un-conscious distortion of the facts is almost harmless compared to the unconscious neglect of an animal's mental life until it verges on the unusual and marvelous.
Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.
My father so appropriately put it that we are certainly the only animal that makes conscious choices that are bad for our survival as a species.