The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.

The quotation attacks a specifically “Western” (i.e., post-Christian/Cartesian) habit of treating nonhuman animals as morally negligible, and it links that habit to a broader failure of ethical imagination. In Schopenhauer’s ethics, morality does not arise from abstract rules or rational calculation but from Mitleid—compassion or fellow-feeling—which discloses the shared reality of suffering across individuals. Read in that light, the passage argues that excluding animals from moral consideration is not a minor oversight but a symptom of moral coarseness: if compassion is the root of ethics, then the capacity to feel with suffering creatures—human or animal—is the practical test of genuine morality.