Matthew Scully quotes

Religious people ... hold a kind and merciful view of life, the faith of the broken, the hounded, the hopeless. Yet too often, they will not extend that spirit to our fellow creatures. (Matthew Scully)
An environmentalist can oppose factory farming because it's reckless stewardship. A conservative can oppose factory farming because it is destructive to small farmers and to the decent ethic of husbandry those farmers live by. A religious person can oppose factory farming because it is degrading to both man and animal - an offense to God.
Matthew Scully
In the summer or fall of 1974, I read some books about factory farming, and decided that I wanted no part of it.
Matthew Scully
I did attend Catholic schools up to the ninth grade, and I admire much in the Catholic Church.
Matthew Scully
Sometimes tradition and habit are just that, comfortable excuses to leave things be, even when they are unjust and unworthy. Sometimes--not often, but sometimes--the cranks and radicals turn out to be right. Sometimes Everyone is wrong.
Matthew Scully
Standing outside a factory farm, the first question that comes to mind is not a moral but a practical one: Where is everybody? Where are the owners, the farmers, the livestock managers, the extra hands, anybody? I have been driving around the North Carolina countryside on a Thursday afternoon in January 2001, pulling in at random to six hog farms, and have yet to find a single farmer or any other living soul. ... There are so many factory farms around here that they are easy to miss. I doubt that the average visitor just passing through even knows what they are ...
Matthew Scully
It began with one pig at a British slaughterhouse. Somewhere along the production line it was observed that the animal had blisters in his mouth and was salivating. The worst suspicions were confirmed, and within days borders had been sealed and a course of action determined. Soon all of England and the world watched as hundreds, and then hundreds of thousands, of pigs, cows, and sheep and their newborn lambs were taken outdoors, shot, thrown into burning pyres, and bulldozed into muddy graves. Reports described terrified cattle being chased by sharpshooters, clambering over one another to escape. Some were still stirring and blinking a day after being shot.
Matthew Scully
Animals are so easily overlooked, their interests so easily brushed aside. Whenever we humans enter their world, from our farms to the local animal shelter to the African savanna, we enter as lords of the earth bearing strange powers of terror and mercy alike. Dominion, as we call this power in the Western tradition, today requires our concentrated moral consideration ...
Matthew Scully
Foot-and-mouth disease is a form of flu, treatable by proper veterinary care, preventable by vaccination, lethal neither to humans nor to animals. These animals, millions of them not even infected, were all killed only because their market value had been diminished and because trade policies required it-because, in short, under the circumstances it was the quick and convenient thing to do. By the one measure we now apply to these creatures, they had all become worthless. For them, the difference between what happened and what awaited them anyway was one of timing. And for us the difference was visibility. This time, we had to watch.
Matthew Scully
Best, I'd advise, to give up all animal products obtained by cruel methods. There are some fine companies nowadays offering leather substitutes.
Matthew Scully
How we treat our fellow creatures is only one more way in which each one of us, every day, writes our own epitaph-bearing into the world a message of light and life or just more darkness and death, adding to the world's joy or to its despair. (Matthew Scully)
When you start with a necessary evil, and then over time the necessity passes away, what's left?
Matthew Scully
To the factory farmer, in contrast to the traditional farmer with his sense of honor and obligation, the animals are production units, and accorded all the sympathy that term suggests.
Matthew Scully