If you value your life and the struggle for survival, you must value all life around you. "Be a good [person], be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can."1 Animals are remarkably sentient creatures;their social behaviors “like humans, have their tragedies and mayhap (perhaps) their romances.” 2 The more time one spends pondering animals, observing their behavior, uncovering their human likeness, the sooner it becomes evident “how cowardly it [is] to hurt the weak and the helpless.”3 Hunting, purely for sport, is especially despicable. Even “the wild boar has been known to face and defeat the tiger, and though his first impulse is to fly before British sportsmen, he often makes a gallant stand before the unequal odds of horses, razor-sharp spears, and legions of yelling rustics brought against him.”4 If you look for courage or bravery in the animal kingdom, you will find it. If you wish to discover love between parent and offspring, you will find it; sadness, happiness, boredom, fright, and excitement are all exhibited by animals. Killing sentient animals when unnecessary for survival is meritless and unworthy of our evolutionary position.
1) Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 12
2) John Lockwood Kipling, Beast and Man in India, 71
3) Anna Sewell, Black Beauty, 52
4) John Lockwood Kipling, Beast and Man in India, 180
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