[I]f animals may be rendered liable to judicial punishment for injuries done to man, one would naturally infer that they should also enjoy legal prot… - Edward Payson Evans

Perhaps, with the introduction of more rational views of cosmogony and anthropology, and broader and more generous principles of psychology into our elementary text-books, through the union of a sounder physics with a larger metaphysics, our children's children may finally learn that there are inalienable animal as well as human rights, and that, in respect to the ties of moral obligation and the claims to kind and just treatment which they imply, not only "all nations of men," as Paul affirmed on Mar's Hill, but, as the Indian sage declared, "all living creatures are of one blood."

To the Hebrew decalogue and the Christian beatitudes must be added the first of Buddha's ten commandments:
Kill not for Pity's sake, nor dare to slay
The meanest creature on its upward way.

In the higher organisms the higher faculties predominate, and in the lower organisms the lower faculties: but in all of them, from the highest to the lowest, the action is the resultant of impulses of sensation, perception, conception, and thought variously combined and inextricably blended.