Albert Schweitzer followed in the footsteps of his Alsatian family recognized for its love of music, religion, and education. In 1913, he went to Africa as a medical missionary and founded a hospital in Lambaréné with his wife. They worked there four years before being sent to an internment camp for prisoners of war. After their release a year later, they returned to Europe where he preached, gave concerts, wrote books, and continued his medical education. They returned to Africa in 1924, and with their own money and donations, expanded the hospital to 70 buildings and cared for up to 500 patients at a time.
In 1952, Schweitzer won the Nobel Peace Prize He used the $33,000 prize money, to start the leprosarium at Lambaréné. He died in 1965.
On the Ethics of Animal Welfare
Although Schweitzer’s work focused on caring for the sick, he had much to say about cruelty toward animals and was an animal advocate in his own right. He spoke about our attitudes and actions toward animals in Nobel Peace Prize Address, “The Problem of Peace in the World Today”
As a youth, he was pressured to sling rocks at birds like the other boys but did not give in. Speaking of the experience, he said,
From that day onward I took courage to emancipate myself from the fear of men, and whenever my inner convictions were at stake I let other people’s opinions weigh less with me than they had done previously. I tried also to unlearn my former dread of being laughed at by my school-fellows. This early influence upon me of the commandment not to kill or to torture other creatures is the great experience of my youth. By the side of that all others are insignificant.
There slowly grew up in me an unshakable conviction that we have no right to inflict suffering and death on another living creature unless there is some unavoidable necessity for it, and that we ought all of us to feel what a horrible thing it is to cause suffering and death out of mere thoughtlessness.
Young Schweitzer composed and recited this short prayer:
O, heavenly Father, protect and bless all things that have breath;
guard them from all evil, and let them sleep in peace. (translated by C. T. Campion, from Memoirs of Childhood and Youth)
Schweitzer believed that true religion is based on respect for life and that “The quiet conscience is an invention of the devil.” True ethics apply to everything that has life; a man helps all life and refrains from causing injury to any living being. Itt is our duty to look for opportunities to help them to “make up for the great miseries men inflict on them.” Out of conscience and reverence for life, he mostly ate only fruits and vegetables, especially later in life.
Today it is considered as exaggeration to proclaim constant respect for every form of life as being the serious demand of a rational ethic. But the time is coming when people will be amazed that the human race existed so long before it recognized that thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with real ethics. Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility to everything that has life.
A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as well as that of his fellow man, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.
Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives.”
The human spirit is not dead. It lives on in secret…..It has come to believe that compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.
The time will come when public opinion will no longer tolerate amusements based on the mistreatment and killing of animals. The time will come, but when? When will we reach the point that hunting, the pleasure in killing animals for sport, will be regarded as a mental aberration?”
Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come wherein humanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come. The quiet conscience is an invention of the devil. Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace. It is man’s sympathy with all creatures that first makes him truly a man.”
Affirmation of life is the spiritual act by which man ceases to live unreflectively and begins to devote himself to his life with reverence in order to raise it to its true value. To affirm life is to deepen, to make more inward, and to exalt the will to live. At the same time the man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give to every will-to-live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that other life in his own. He accepts as being good: to preserve life, to promote life, to raise to its highest value life which is capable of development; and as being evil: to destroy life, to injure life, to repress life which is capable of development. This is the absolute, fundamental principle of the moral, and it is a necessity of thought”.
~ from Out of My Life and Thought
We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we treat the animals. Animals suffer as much as we do. True humanity, does not allow us to impose such sufferings on them. It is our duty to make the whole world recognize it. Until we extend our circle of compassion to all living things, humanity will not find peace.
The following prayer is also attributed to Schweitzer although it has not been found in his writings.
References:
- Albert Schweitzer: Biographical, (Accessed 2019) https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1952/schweitzer/biographical/
- Animal Rights Quotes (Accessed 2019) https://www.doonething.org/quotes/animal-quotes-4.htm
- Dr. Albert Schweitzer (Accessed 2019) https://ivu.org/history/europe20a/schweitzer.html