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Animal Rights History Timeline » [1785-1837] Romantic Age » Rev. James Beresford

James Beresford

A Discourse on Cruelty to the Brute Creation

[1809] Reverend James Beresford, A Discourse on Cruelty to the Brute Creation (London, 1809).

Eclectic Review, review of "A Discourse on Cruelty to the Brute Creation, by the Rev. James Beresford, M.A. Fellow of Merton College, Oxford," Eclectic Review 12 (1810-Aug) 756-757; Google Books: Online Library of Free eBooks.

Such are the claims of these creatures on our consideration and regard. Can we then be so unfeelingly heedless of these claims, as to impair, instead of supporting that strength, with which they supply our weakness? Can we be capable of wantonly wounding those bodies, which are meekly bent to receive our burden, because they sometimes sink under the task, which we have ourselves disabled them from performing? Can we consent to abridge them of that food, which is the only reward of their labours, and for which they more than repay us by those new efforts which it enables them to make for our advantage? Can we insult that patient obedience, to which it is owing that they submit, without resistance, to our lashes? When we have one of those hapless animals before our eyes, dropping with weariness, exhausted by the drudgery of procuring us the necessaries, or the conveniences of life, can we, at such a moment, with ease instead of compassion in our looks, be capable of heaping up all his sufferings, by adding paint to toil and thus still further hastening the end of that life, which from its first to its last hour, has been employed in promoting the health, wealth, or pleasure, of its master? (quoted in Eclectic Review 12 (1810-Aug) 756-757.

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Eclectic Review: Notwithstanding that very little space in this sensible discourse is occupied with introductory or foreign matter, its peculiar subject is not permitted to fill more than eight pages of a very open printing; an unaccountable and culpable parsimony of sentences, in a person who, in pleading the claims which some parts of the brute creation have to our kindness on the ground of valuable services they render us, could rite such a paragraph as the following, and whose subject comprise very many topics deserving of such paragraphs.—Eclectic Review 12 (1810-Aug) 756-757.