They possess the same feelings; and, what exposes them to like sufferings from another quarter, they possess the same instincts with our own species. The lioness robbed of her whelps causes the wilderness to ring aloud with the proclamation of her wrongs; or the bird whose little household has been stolen fills and saddens all the grove with melodies of deepest pathos. All this is palpable even to the general and unlearned eye; and when the physiologist lays open the recesses of their system, by means of that scalpel under whose operation they just shrink and are convulsed as any living subject of our own species, there stands forth to view the same sentient apparatus, and furnished with the same conductors for the transmission of feeling from every minutest pore upon the surface.
它們有著和人類一樣的情感,對待他人的悲痛遭遇它們也會憐憫、也會同情,因為它們有著和人類一樣的本能:丟失幼崽的母獅會在荒野中大聲宣告自己的過錯;被偷走鳥窩的鳥兒也會在森林中回蕩自己深切痛苦的旋律,而這一切即使對于那些一般無知之人來說也能夠情有所感。當生理學家對它們進行解剖時,它們就像人類和其它物種一樣,在手術(shù)刀的疼痛之下它們也會收縮、抽搐。它們的身體里有著和我們一樣的感知器官,它們也有同樣的導體會通過皮膚表面的細小毛孔來傳遞感覺。
Theirs is unmixed and unmitigated pain, the agonies of martyrdom without the alleviation of the hopes and the sentiments whereof men are capable. When they lay them down to die, their only fellowship is with suffering; for in the prison-house of their beset and bounded faculties, no relief can be afforded by communion with other interests or other things. The attention does not lighten their distress, as it does that of man, by carrying off his spirit from that existing pungency and pressure which might else be overwhelming. There is but room in their mysterious economy for one inmate; and that is, the absorbing sense of their own single and concentrated anguish. And so on that bed of torment whereon the wounded animal lingers and expires, there is an unexplored depth and intensity of suffering which the poor dumb animal itself cannot tell, and against which it can offer no remonstrance—an untold and unknown amount of wretchedness of which no articulate voice gives utterance.
它們的痛苦是純粹的、無法減輕的,沒有希望,只有死亡的極大痛苦,這種哀傷也是人類所具備的。當它們在人類的暴行下緩慢死去的時刻,唯一陪伴它們的只有痛苦。因為在包圍和束縛它們的監(jiān)獄里,這種痛苦是無法通過轉(zhuǎn)移注意力來緩解的,因為和人類一樣,對其它事物的關(guān)注無法令它們的精神從此刻所面臨的劇痛和壓力中解脫,所以并不能令它們稍感輕松。它們那間神秘狹小的房間里只容得下一位同住者,那就是將自身那種純粹而深切的痛苦吸收殆盡的感官。就這樣,受了傷的它們在那張痛苦的床上茍延殘喘、慢慢死去。那痛苦之深、之強烈你無法體會,而可憐的動物們也無法開口向你告知或提出抗議。那是一種它無法清晰發(fā)聲、你無法深刻體會的極大的痛苦和不幸。