Poor Thomson! How melancholy & helpless. I believe in the perfect parallelism & correlation of the physical & psychical. The anomalous mentality, lik… - J. Howard Moore

I came to the conclusion out there on the Kansas prairies that the animals were not treated right by human beings. I thought we had not even a right to kill them for food and came to the University of Chicago to study the matter. At that time I had never heard of vegetarianism.

The inhabitants of the earth are all alike in one particular—they are all striving to experience pleasure and to avoid pain. Early in the evolution of living beings, these two opposite forms of experience were hit upon as the determinants of conduct; and the plan worked so well that it has been continued ever since. It is an excellent scheme in a world where simple survival is the main thing. It promotes earnestness. But it is inconvenient, to say the least. And it ought to be changed if there could ever be found a way to do it.

If I were making a world and could arrange it as I wanted to, only humanitarians would be allowed to practice vivisection. Only those would be allowed to practice it who would be as economical in inflicting pain on others as they would be in inflicting it on themselves. Vivisection in the hands of those without sympathy, in the hands of those who are still in the mists of anthropocentrism, will always be abused, will always be, what it is to-day, largely a pastime and a hobby.