A carnivorous animal is not an ideal animal, and never can be. The life of a carnivorous animal is a perpetual onslaught. Every meal is a murder. Eat… - J. Howard Moore

The universe, so far as we can make out, is neither all wise nor all foolish. It is both good and bad. It maintains some of the most careful economies side by side with the most reckless. The defects of the universe are just as apparent to him who is not cowardly or incompetent as are its excellencies. It is the rogue and the ignoramus who argue in justification of existing barbarisms that these barbarisms are beautiful because they represent the procedures of "nature." As a matter of fact, all ways are nature's ways, the unconscious and clumsy as truly as the intelligent and exquisite. The philosophers of laissez faire, who would have human beings disuse what little intelligence has, during the past twenty millions of years, been developed on the earth, and would have them derive their ethics from the regions of biological somnambulism, are the philosophers to be heeded when humanity goes mad. It is childish to assume that we upper intelligences can not improve on the unconscious conditions about us. It is the very thing that is being done every hour of time. The whole effort of industry is nothing else than an effort to improve the attitudes of the material universe. And it is just as sagacious to suppose that living beings are incompetent to improve their relations to the inanimate universe as to suppose they may not reform and enhance their relations to each other.

The Universal Kinship means the kinship of all the inhabitants of the planet Earth. Whether they came into existence among the waters or among desert sands, in a hole in the earth, in the hollow of a tree, or in a palace; whether they build nests or empires; whether they swim, fly, crawl, or ambulate; and whether they realise it or not, they are all related, physically, mentally, morally—this is the thesis of this book. But since man is the most gifted and influential of animals, and since his relationship with other animals is more important and more reluctantly recognised than any other, the chief purpose of these pages is to prove and interpret the kinship, of the human species with the other species of animals.

Look at human industry! See the pounds of flesh daily torn by men everywhere from the skeletons of each other in the awful riot of <nowiki>''</nowiki>business." Just look at it! The inequity, the unconsciousness, the hard-heartedness, the ruffianism, and the infernalism of the industrial relations and conditions of men! Watch an unfortunate approach a rich man's mansion and ask in the most graceful manner for a necessary of life. Observe the egoism the baron shows as he sends the sufferer away unfed. See the lord in his marble palace, upholstered with all the comforts of civilization and stuffed with the dainties of the zones, and around him the men and women who made his wealth feeding on garbage, suffocating in shanties, and working like wretches from morning till night. See the multi-millionaire, scraping the palms of his slaves till the blood starts for the last farthing their struggles have produced, not because he is hungry and would buy, but because he is a ruffian and can. No attention whatever is paid to the fact that some have all they can utilize in the satisfaction of their desires and multiples more, while others just as good-looking and more worthy have nothing. No attention is paid to the fact that this little pill of a world is to man the only accessible portion of the universe; that he is cut off from other balls by leagues of impassable space.