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Animal rights: in the words of DaVinci
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My readers may recall the story "Leonardo DaVinci: History's First Animal Rights Activist" from a few months ago in which I shared a few of DaVinci's Animal Rights-related thoughts.
Recently, I did some research on the complete notebooks of Leonardo DaVinci wherein I found some equally interesting quotations as well as DaVinci's thoughts on some very outdated practices. For instance, horse owners would apparently cut the nostrils of their horses to allow more air to enter, supposedly making them better suited for racing. DaVinci argued the space through which air travels in the nostrils is equal to the space of the airway itself.
DaVinci even recognizes the plights of bees who are, despite their lack of size and human-like characteristics, factory-farmed sentient beings.
OF BEES
And many others will be robbed of their store of provisions and their food, and by an insensate folk will be cruelly immersed and drowned. O justice of God! Why dost thou not awake to behold thy creatures thus abused?
He also has numerous passages on the plight of common animals used for meat. A few are mentioned here:
OF SHEEP. COWS, GOATS AND THE LIKE
From countless numbers will be stolen their little children, and the throats of these shall be cut, and they shall be quartered most barbariously.
While it is up to individual interpretation as to what DaVinci means by this quotation, it may be said that the product of milk contributes not only to the suffering of the dairy cow but the production of veal. Like human lactation, a cow must be impregnated before milk production. In order to harvest the milk, the baby is taken from it's mother, deprived of the milk and raised for veal meat.
OF THE BEASTS FROM WHOM CHEESE IS MADE
The milk will be taken from the tiny children
This is an eerily familiar passage of significance to the modern plight of human panexploitation.
OF THE CRUELTY OF MAN
...a great number of trees in the immense forests of the world shall be laid level with the ground; and when they have crammed themselves with food it shall gratify their desire to deal out death, affliction, labours, terrors and banishment to every living thing....There shall be nothing remaining on the earth or under the earth or in the waters that shall not be pursued and molested or destroyed, and that which is in one country taken away to another; and their own bodies shall be made the tomb and the means of transit of all the living bodies which they have slain.
Man and the animals are merely a passage and channel for food, a tomb for other animals, a haven for the dead, giving life by the death of others, a coffer full of corruption. (c.a. 76 v.a.)
Lastly, DaVinci has found the need to respond to the "plants have feelings too" argument which still goes on today. Here is his response in elegant, logical terms:
Though nature has given sensibility to pain to such living organisms as have the power of movement,--in order thereby to preserve the members which in this movement are liable to diminish and be destroyed,--the living organisms which have no power of movement do not have to encounter opposing objects, and plants consequently do not need to have a sensibility to pain, and so it comes about that if you break them they do not feel anguish in their members as do the animals. (h 60 [12] r.)
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