Respect Other Beings

"When I was fourteen, a girlfriend asked me point-blank: “Really? You go fishing!?”Her tone of voice and the look she gave me—stunned and disapproving at the same time—were eloquent enough. “You go fishing?”Suddenly I saw that whole scene in a different light: a fish pulled from its vital element by an iron hook stuck through its mouth, then suffocating in the air the way we drown in water. In order to lure the fish to the hook, did I not also skewer a worm as living bait, thus sacrificing one life to destroy another? How could I have let my mind block out this reality of suffering for such a long time? Sickened to the heart by these thoughts, I gave up fishing on the spot.

No doubt, when compared to the drastic events that wreck the lives of so many human beings in the world, my preoccupation with those little fish might seem ludicrous. But for me this was a turning point. At the age of twenty I had the great good fortune of meeting Tibetan spiritual masters, who from that time on have inspired every moment of my existence. The central point of their teachings has been the royal way of love and universal compassion. Although for a long time I had not been able to put myself in others’places, training with the masters, little by little I learned altruistic love, doing the best I could to open myself—to open my mind and heart—to the plights of others. I trained myself in compassion, and I reflected on the human condition and the condition of animals as well. Without a doubt, I still have a long way to go, and I will continue to do my best to make progress in my understanding of the teachings I have received.

It is far from my intention, as you will have gathered, to rebuke people who in one way or another cause animals to suffer. They often do it without thinking, as I myself used to do. It truly is difficult to make the connection between the latest consumer items, including food and medicines that sometimes save our lives, and the suffering that is usually involved in their fabrication. Cultural traditions also play a major role in our perceptions of animals, our companions on this planet. Some societies have developed collective patterns of thought that encourage the view that animals exist to serve humans, but the outlook of other traditions has long been that every being, human or nonhuman, must be respected...

In spite of the sense of wonder the animal kingdom inspires in us, we are responsible for an ongoing massacre of animals on a scale unequaled in the history of humankind. Every year, sixty billion land animals and a thousand billion marine animals are killed for our consumption. Moreover, this mass killing and its corollary—the excessive consumption of meat in the wealthy countries—is madness on a global scale. It perpetuates hunger in the world, increases the world’s ecological imbalances, and is even harmful to human health.

We continue to live in ignorance concerning the harm we inflict on animals—very few of us have ever visited an industrial breeding site or a slaughterhouse. We maintain a kind of moral schizophrenia that has us lavishly pampering our pets and at the same time planting our forks in the pigs that have been sent to the slaughter by the millions, even though they are in no way less conscious, less sensitive to pain, or less intelligent than our cats and dogs.

Starting with the era of the ancestors we share with other animal species, little by little, by a long series of steps and minimal changes, we arrived at the stage of Homo sapiens. In the course of this slow evolution, there was no “magical moment” that would justify our conferring on ourselves a special nature that makes us fundamentally different from the many species of hominids that preceded us. Nothing occurred in the evolutionary process that would justify our claim to a right of total supremacy over the animals.

The most striking quality that humans and animals have in common is the capacity to experience suffering. Why do we still blind ourselves, now at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to the immeasurable suffering that we inflict on animals, knowing that a great part of the pain that we cause them is neither necessary nor unavoidable? Certainly we should know that there is no moral justification for inflicting needless pain and death on any being."

-- Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk who had a promising career in cellular genetics before leaving France thirty-five years ago to study Buddhism in the Himalayas. He is an author, translator, and has been a participant in scientific research on the effects that meditation has on the brain. Ricard’s work is held high regard in intellectual circles in Europe, and two books he co-authored, The Monk and the Philosopher and The Quantum and the Lotus, are best-sellers in France. He lives in Tibet and Nepal.