“Killing was a relatively simple matter--a blow to the head, a knife to the throat--complicated only by how much one cared about the pain or terrors animals felt in dying.... The animal also died a second death. Severed from the form in which it had lived, severed from the act that had killed it, it vanished from human memory as one of nature's creatures.”

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

“Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow-creatures is amusing in itself.”

“How easy to be a bird or an animal, living from day to day, unaware you're alive, unaware that one day you will die.”

“..but when one human creature dies a whole world of hope and memory and feeling dies with him. To be robbed of the dignity of a natural death is a terrible deprivation.”

“What I think was hardest for me to realize was that he had tried each time to stop himself. He had killed animals, taking lesser lives to keep from killing a child”