Because the heart beats under a covering of hair, of fur, feathers, or wings, it is, for that reason, to be of no account?

Richter’s rhetorical question challenges the moral habit of discounting nonhuman life simply because it is outwardly different. By listing “hair, fur, feathers, or wings,” he emphasizes that the same essential fact—a beating heart, a capacity for life and feeling—exists beneath varied coverings. The line functions as an early, humane protest against species-based indifference: it asks the reader to recognize kinship across bodily forms and to treat sentient creatures as morally considerable. Its force comes from reducing the usual justifications for cruelty to a superficial criterion (appearance), thereby exposing the arbitrariness of denying compassion to animals.