HAPPINESS, According to Matthieu Ricard

In Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill, author/Buddhist Monk, Matthieu Ricard writes of the obligation to relieve suffering.

"At any given moment, tens of thousands of [animals] are being killed by humans, torn to pieces, and canned. Others suffer endless torment at the hands of their owners, bearing heavy burdens, in chains their entire lives; still others are hunted, fished, trapped between teeth of steel, strangled in snares, smothered under nets . . . thrown into boiling water or flayed alive.

Though we may feel overwhelmed by it all, powerless before so much pain, turning away from it is only indifference or cowardice. We must be intimately concerned with it, and do everything we possibly can to relieve the suffering" (p. 61).

Ricard says, as a matter of fact, that it is impossible for us to be truly happy if we ignore the suffering of animals.

Buy it. Read it.