"Skill and ingenuity are not the same as empathy and caring."

Indeed, they are not. Take the case of societies which say they are "humane" and "compassionate", who say they practice "animal-welfare" in order to get donations from animal-lovers, but who kill using cruel methods that create terrible pain and fear in the many animals they kill. And that after keeping them in facilities that cause disease, fear, kennel craziness, and depression to the point that they create "distress" in many of the animals. In many North American jurisdictions, the law says causing or permitting distress in an animal is a crime, yet many of the enforcers of the law are the worst offenders, sometimes worse than the people they seize animal from.

"The hangman’s knot, the guillotine, the electric chair, the gas chamber, and the lethal injection were all designed to make deliberately inflicted death less painful to the victim. But I’ve never heard the inventors or the users of these technologies hailed as great humanitarians. I’ve never heard them praised for their great empathy toward the lives they’ve ended."

Mr Sinclair may not be familiar with so-called animal welfare business practices where praise for the killers of helpless beings is one of the tried-and-true p.r. practices of members of the pet-disposal industry which masquerades as animal-welfarist. Some of the methods of killing pet animals can not reasonably be called humane by anyone, much less by any of the millions of animal-lovers who comprise the animal-welfare community. Yet the industry that uses brutal methods and which kills animals to make space and for other specious reasons claims that all this killing and the methods used are an acceptable form of "animal welfare".