ALBERT SCHWEITZER ON ANIMAL RIGHTS

[Guest guest]

When we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed

upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase, " Reverence For Life'. The

iron door had yielded: the path in the thicket had become visible. Now I had

found my way to the idea in which world –and –life –affirmation and ethics

are contained side by side.

 

To the man who is truly ethical all life is sacred, including that which

from the human point of view seems lower in scale. He makes distinctions

only as each case comes before him, and under the pressure of necessity; as,

for example, when it falls to him to decide which of two lives he must

sacrifice in order to preserve the other.

 

I rejoice over the new remedies for sleeping sickness, which enable me to

preserve life, whereas I had previously to watch a painful disease. But

every time I have under the microscope the germs which cause disease, I

cannot but reflect that I have to sacrifice this life in order to save other

life.

 

I buy from natives a young fish-eagle, which they have caught on a sand

bank, in order to rescue it from their cruel hands. But now I have to decide

whether I will let it starve, or kill every day a number of small fishes, in

order to keep it alive. I decide on the latter course, but every day I feel

it hard that this life must be sacrificed for the other on my

responsibility.

 

One existence survives at the expense of another of which it yet knows

nothing. But evolution has enabled man to know of the existence of other

wills-to-live. So the conflict can have a sort of resolution, reaching down

to the smallest life. If I rescue an insect from a pool of water, then life

has given itself for life, and the self-contradiction of the will-to-live

has been removed.

 

 

 

FROM 'MY LIFE AND THOUGHT' by Albert Schweitzer quoted by William Paton in

MAN AND MOUSE: Animals In Medical Research(New Edition),1993, Oxford

University Press