PETA's campaign should be included in school curricula. If we can open children's hearts and minds to animals' needs, teach them to treat a dog or a chicken as if they feel fear and love and pain - as they do - then they will grow up to understand that we are all worthy of respect.
Each of us in our own way can try to spread compassion into people's hearts. Western civilizations these days place great importance on filling the human brain with knowledge, but no one seems to care about filling the human heart with compassion. This is what the real role of religion is.
My hope and wish is that one day, formal education will pay attention to what I call 'education of the heart'.
We must understand love; we must be able to teach it, to create it, to predict it, or else the world is lost to hostility and to suspicion.
There should be a course in the first grade on love.
That cruelty which children are permitted to show to birds and other animals will most probably exert itself on their fellow creatures when at years of maturity.
I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
The sort of seeing cruelty and callousness of that sort from young people is heartbreaking.
