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Tom Regan on Cruelty

Animal Ethics

Cruelty is manifested in different ways. The central case of cruelty appears to be the case where, in Locke's apt phrase, one takes "a seeming kind of Pleasure" in causing another to suffer. Let us term this sadistic cruelty. Some cruel people do not feel pleasure in making others suffer.

Cruelty 40
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The Florida FWC illegally killed 34 pythons and one 10-year-old pregnant Boa constrictor

Reddit Animals

" However, various lines of scientific & behavioral research show that reptiles not only feel pain & experience stress the same way mammals & birds do, but that they are also likely capable of a range of emotions including anxiety, distress, excitement, fear, frustration, pain, stress, and suffering.

Pythons 40
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John Passmore (1914-2004) on the History of Animal Cruelty

Animal Ethics

Whereas it once used to be argued, as by Newman , that the least human good compensates for any possible amount of animal suffering, the current doctrine is that it requires a considerable good to compensate for such suffering.

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John Passmore (1914-2004) on the Moral Status of Animals

Animal Ethics

And by this they mean not only that it is wrong to enjoy torturing animals—which few moralists would ever have wished explicitly to deny, however little emphasis they might have placed on cruelty to animals in their moral teaching—but that it is wrong to cause them to suffer unnecessarily. Controversies no doubt remain.

Morals 40
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Moral Vegetarianism, Part 13 of 13

Animal Ethics

It might be suggested that although becoming a vegetarian as a protest against animal suffering or a way of committing oneself to helping the hungry people of the world is not a moral duty, it is still a moral act; it is a supererogatory act. One final point. This view is not implausible, but it needs to be qualified in certain ways.

Morals 40
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H. B. Acton (1908-1974) on Animal Rights

Animal Ethics

This is the question whether the wrongness of cruelty to animals depends in part upon the animals' suffering, or whether it does not depend upon that at all, but only upon the bad effects upon human beings of cruelty to animals, and upon the badness of the human states of mind that such cruelty involves.

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John Passmore (1914-2004) on Bentham's Treatment of Animals

Animal Ethics

" but "Can they suffer?" " So whereas Plutarch and Porphyry thought it necessary to begin their case against treating animals merely as chattels by arguing that animals have a share in reason, for Bentham it is irrelevant whether or not they are rational and to what degree.

2004 40