hese are two quotes/excerpts taken from The Duty of Mercy and the Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals by Humphrey Primatt, a “British doctor of divinity who died sometime around 1778. His book was first published in 1776 – slaves were still being hauled across the Atlantic Ocean; American women wouldn’t have the right to vote for nearly 150 years” (AnimalBlawg).
“It has pleased God the father of all men, to cover some men with white skins, and other with black skins; but as there is neither merit nor demerit in complexion, the white man, notwithstanding the barbarity of custom and prejudice, can have no right, by virtue of his colour, to enslave and tyrannise over a black man. . . . Now, if amongst men, the differences of . . . their complexion, stature, and accident of fortune, do not give any one man a right to abuse or insult any other man on account of these differences, for the same reason, a man can have no natural right to abuse and torment a beast, merely because a beast has not the mental powers of a man. For, such as the man is, he is but as God made him; and the very same is true of the beast. Neither of them can lay claim to any intrinsic merit, for being such as they are; for, before they were created, it was impossible that either of them could deserve; and, at their creation, their shapes, perfections, or defects were invariably fixed, and their bounds set which they cannot pass. And being such, neither more nor less than God made them, there is no more demerit in a beast being a beast, than there is merit in a man being a man; that is, there is neither merit nor demerit in either of them…
“You confess that a brute is an animal without reason; and reason says, that to put any creature to unmerited or unnecessary pain is unjust and unreasonable: therefore, a man that is cruel is a brute in the shape of a man. But what! say you, shall a man endued with an immortal soul be compared unto a beast that perisheth? I answer, be this as it may happen. If a man acts like a brute, the comparison is just, however disagreeable. But, waving the comparison, if thou art cruel, thy boast of immortality is the most egregious folly. Thou art like a prisoner making his boast of the brightness and exquisite workmanship of his fetters. Or, thou art like an unjust and haughty steward of a great estate, counting his lord’s money, and bragging of it as if it were his own; and flattering himself with the future favour of his master, though all the tenants groan under the weight of his oppression, and can and are ready to bear witness to his pride and perfidy, at their lord’s return, when a thousand articles will be exhibited against the upstart syncophant, of waste, mismanagement, negligence, abuse, tyranny, and injustice. Yet this is thine own case, this thine own folly, if thy soul is polluted with malice and cruelty. Thou mayst glory in thy pretensions to immortality now; but wilt thou glory in it hereafter, when the dreadful time shall come that thou wilt wish thyself upon a level with the beast whom thou hast despised and abused; when thine immortality will be thy greatest burden? Strange, therefore, to hear cruel men boast of that very circumstance which will make them truly wretched.
