Martin Luther, upon seeing a dog, whose tail had been mangled by a wagon wheel said: “Take comfort, small friend, in the Resurrection, you too shall have a little golden tail.” Martin Luther, Letter to J. Goritz, 1544
“I beg you to show kindness to animals. The very least you can do is to put out food and water for them. Animals are like us, they love, suffer, feel happiness and pain. Do not subject them to the same treatment which you would abhor receiving at their hands.”
John Chrysostom
“The dog is the most faithful of animals
and would be much esteemed
were it not so common.
Our Lord God has made His greatest gifts
the commonest.” Martin Luther
“A cat is a most perfect work of God.”
Philip Neri
“[Through] the practice of cruelty toward animals
is fostered also inhumanity toward our neighbor.”
Martin Chemnitz, Loci II:706
“There is need for virtue
which allows neither hatred nor envy to lodge in the soul, neither fraud nor any such thing as malice, which does not allow foolish habits of speech, but orders all things rightly, which does not permit slanderous or foul tongue, which knows not to bear a grudge or to do evil,
which honors the virtuous and makes common cause with those who live rightly,
which wishes to keep the body in health. Such a virtue is the loving of dogs, which, though they suffer blows, do not bear a grudge.”
Basil the Great
Locus Communis 