Library of Animal Rights History » Animal Welfare-Animal Rights Activists-Advocates-Quotes Against Cruelty to Animals

Frances Power Cobbe

1822-1904

1863-Nov | Frances Power Cobbe, "The Rights of Man and the Claims of Beasts,"Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country [London:1830-1869] 68 (1863 Nov): 586-602; Online at Animal Rights History, 2003.

The Rights of Man and the Claims of Beasts

If there be one moral offence which more than another seems directly an offence against God, it is this wanton infliction of pain upon his creatures. He, the Good One, has made them to be happy, but leaves us our awful gift of freedom to use or to misuse towards them. In a word, He places them absolutely in our charge. If we break this trust, and torture them, what is our posture towards Him? Surely as sins of the flesh sink man below humanity, so sins of cruelty throw him into the very converse and antagonism of Deity; he becomes not a mere brute, but a fiend.

ca 1868-1875 | Frances Power Cobbe, London's Hecatombs [Reprint from The Echo "a well-known little evening journal"] in Re-Echoes (London & Edinburgh, 1876); Online at Google Books.

London's Hecatombs

Were we to follow them down the long thoroughfares, we should see them growing more tired and terrified, panting from thirst and fear, till at last, with a final sharp turn, they are driven into the purlieus of the slaughter-house. The smell of blood, with which the place is reeking, drives them half mad with terror, while they wait their own doom. Presently, with more or less skill and care (or roughness and indifference, as the case may be) the peculiar mode of execution to which each is destined is put in practice; the stunning blow (most merciful of all), the severed arteries, and—heretofore—the hideous hanging up to bleed slowly to death. Then the harmless life, held by the sad tenure of such a penalty, closes for the poor brute, but not so the consequences of mankind.

1884-Apr 19 | Frances Power Cobbe, letter to the editor, "The Clergy and Vivisection," Spectator Magazine 57 (1884 Apr 19): 517.

1884-May 03 | Frances Power Cobbe, letter to the editor, "The Clergy and Vivisection," Spectator Magazine 57 (1884 May 03): 582.

The Clergy and Vivisection

If, when the conscience of the nation was first roused on the subject of negro slavery, they had indolently accepted the assurance of the slaveholders that the institution was 'useful'…and had soothed their flocks by referring complacently to couleur-de-rose reports drawn up from memoranda furnished exclusively by slave-drivers, then their position would have been precisely parallel to that which…[many of the clergy] now occupy.

1888 | Frances Power Cobbe, Illustrations of Vivisection, or, Experiments on Living Animals, From the Works of Physiologists…As Reproduced in "Bernard's Martyrs" and Light in Dark Places (Philadelphia: American Anti-Vivisection Society, 1888); Online at Google Books.

Illustrations of Vivisection, or, Experiments on Living Animals

Do not refuse to look at these pictures. If you cannot bear to look at them, what must the suffering be to the animals who undergo the cruelties they represent?

1888 | Frances Power Cobbe, The Scientific Spirit of the Age and Other Pleas and Discussions (Boston, 1888; [Also a London Edition of 1888]); Online at Google Books.

The Scientific Spirit of the Age and Other Pleas and Discussions

The Scientific Spirit of the Age

In denouncing vivisection, Frances Power Cobbe is "exonerated from treating the subject by being privileged to cite the opinions of two of the most eminent and experienced members of the scholastic profession."

Progressive Judaism

And beyond their human brethren and sisters, Christians have found…that the humbler race of living creatures have also claims upon us,—moral claims founded on the broad basis of the right of simple sentiency to be spared needless pain; religious claims founded on the touching relation which we, the often forgiven children of God, bear to "the unoffending creatures which he loves."

The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse

For my own part, I have never ceased to wonder how Christian divines have been able to picture Heaven and leave it wholly unpeopled by animals. Even for their own sakes (not to speak of justice to the oft ill-treated brutes), would they not have desired to give their humble companions some little corner in their boundless sky? A place with perpetual music going on and not a single animal to caress,—even those which Mahomet promised his followers,—his own camel, Balaam's ass, and Tobit's dog,—would, I think, be a very incomplete and unpleasant paradise indeed!

1889 | Frances Power Cobbe and Bryan Benjamin, Vivisection in America I—How It Is Taught. II—How It Is Practiced, [1st ed. Londdon, 1889] 4th ed. (London, 1890); Online at Google Books.

Vivisection in America, I—How It Is Taught. II—How it is Practiced

Men and Women of America! Suffer us who are laboring to stop vivisection in our own country, to plead with you for its suppression in your younger land, where as yet the new vice of scientific cruelty cannot be deeply rooted…But whether the practice be useful or useless, we ask you to reflect whether it be morally lawful—(not to speak of humane, or generous, or manly)—to seek to relieve our own pains at the cost of such unutterable anguish as has been already inflicted on unoffending creatures in the name of Science? You now know, to a certain extent, what it is that the advocates of vivisection really mean when they ask you to endow "Research." Will you—bearing their experiments in mind—pay them to repeat such cruelties?