Chapter 23 - Heart Training Through the Animal World

It is an established fact that the training of the intellect alone is not sufficient. Nothing in this world can be truer than that the education of the head, without the training of the heart, simply increases one's power for evil, while the education of the heart, along with the head, increases one's power for good, and this, indeed, is the true education.

Clearly we must begin with the child. The lessons learned in childhood are the last to be forgotten. Let them be taught that the lower animals are God's creatures, as they themselves are, put here by a common Heavenly Father, each for its own special purpose, and that they have the same right to life and protection . Let them be taught that principle recognised by all noble-hearted men, that it is only a depraved, debased, and cowardly nature that will injure an inferior, defenceless creature, simply because it is in its power to do so, and that there is no better, no grander test of true bravery and nobility of character than one's treatment of the lower animals.

I cannot refrain in this connection from quoting a sentence or two from Archdeacon Farrar which have recently come to my notice:

"Not once or twice only, at the seaside, have I come across a sad and disgraceful sight -- a sight which haunts me still -- a number of harmless sea-birds lying defaced and dead upon the sand, their white plumage red with blood, as they had been tossed there, dead or half-dead, their torture and massacre having furnished a day's amusement to heartless and senseless men. Amusement! I say execrable amusement! All killing for mere killing's sake is execrable amusement. Can you imagine the stupid callousness, the utter insensibility to mercy and beauty, of the man who, seeing those bright, beautiful creatures as their white, immaculate wings flash in the sunshine over the blue waves, can go out in a boat with his boys to teach them to become brutes in character by finding amusement -- I say, again, dis-humanising amusement -- by wantonly murdering these fair birds of God, or cruelly wounding them, and letting them fly away to wait and die in lonely places?"

And another paragraph which was sent me by a kind friend to our fellow-creatures a few days ago : "The celebrated Russian novelist, Turgenieff, tells a most touching incident from his own life, which awakened in him sentiments that have coloured all his writings with a deep and tender feeling.

"When Turgenieff was a boy of ten his father took him out one day bird-shooting. As they tramped across the brown stubble, a golden pheasant rose with a low whirr from the ground at his feet, and, with the joy of a sportsman throbbing through his veins, he raised his gun and fired, wild with excitement when the creature fell fluttering at his side. Life was ebbing fast, but the instinct of the mother was stronger than death itself, and with a feeble flutter of her wings the mother bird reached the nest where her young brood were huddled, unconscious of danger. Then, with such a look of pleading and reproach that his heart stood still at the ruin he had wrought, -- and never to his dying day did he forget the feeling of cruelty and guilt that came to him in that moment, -- the little brown head toppled over, and only the dead body of the mother shielded her nestlings.

"'Father, father,' he cried,'what have I done?' as he turned his horror-stricken face to his father. But not to his father's eye had this little tragedy been enacted, and he said: 'Well done, my son; that was well done for your first shot. You will soon be a fine sportsman.'

"'Never, father; never again shall I destroy any living creature. If that is sport I will have none of it. Life is more beautiful to me than death, and since I cannot give life, I will not take it.' "

And so, instead of putting into the hands of the child a gun or any other weapon that may be instrumental in crippling, torturing, or taking the life of even a single animal, I would give him the field-glass and the camera, and send him out to be a friend to the animals, to observe and study their charactetistics, their habits, to learn from them those wonderful lessons that can be learned, and thus have his whole nature expand in admiration and love and care for them, and become thereby the truly manly and princely type of man, rather than the careless, callous, brutal type.

(from: Every Living Creature)