It's nice to make connections between various aspects of your life. Here I am just now, editing my Plotinus (3rd century Greek philosopher) manuscript, and I come across a passage wonderfully apropos to our efforts to stop the killing of coyotes in our neighborhood. This bit is about Plotinus' attitude toward meat-eating, but I think he would be equally (if not more) aghast at the idea of killing an animal just because it is doing what comes naturally to it, and isn't harming any human. The quote in italics at the end is from Plotinus' Enneads, the collection of his writings.
Excerpt from “All is Alive” chapter of “Return to the One”:
“Plotinus refused to countenance the oft-heard rationale for meat-eating: ‘Animals are not like us.’ He considered this to be a shoddy bit of philosophizing. If humans are entitled to pursue happiness, one of the inalienable rights enshrined in the United States constitution, then why should other living things be denied their own right to seek well-being, insofar as it is possible? Humans differ from animals and plants in what we are capable of doing and experiencing, but all life is able to do and experience something. So one should be cautious about denying the good life to any form of life.”
Suppose we assume the good life and well-being to be one and the same.…For whether one considers the good life as consisting in satisfactory experience or accomplishing one’s proper work, in either case it will belong to the other living things as well as us.…Why will it not seem absurd of him to deny that other living things live well just because he does not think them important?…If pleasure is the end and the good life is determined by pleasure, it is absurd of anyone to deny the good life to other living things. [I-4-1]
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