as a refutation against the idea that the "pleasure in the world outweighs the pain". Animal rights Lewis Gompertz, an early animal rights advocate, and one of the first contemporary authors to address the problem of wild animal suffering, in the fifth chapter of his 1824 book Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes, engaged in a dialogue, in which he asserted that animals devouring each other can be judged as wrong by the rules that we use to govern human lives and stated that "should I witness the attempt in any animal of destroying another, I would endeavour to frustrate it; though this might probably be wrong." He went on to argue that the extinction of carnivorous species would not be bad, claiming that the species of one animal is not more important than an equal number of another and that it would be possible for some carnivorous animals, like wolves, to instead sustain themselves on vegetables. The American zoologist and animal rights philosopher J. Howard Moore, in The New Ethics (1907), labelled carnivorous species as "criminal" races whose "existence is a continual menace to the peace and well-being of the world" because the "fullness of their lives is dependent upon the emptiness and destruction of others". In the pamphlet Why I Am a Vegetarian, published in 1895, Moore described the Carnivora as "relentless brutes", whose existence is a travesty for ethics, justice and mercy. In Better-World Philosophy (1899), Moore argued that carnivorousness was the result of excessive egoism, a product of natural selection, stating "Life riots on life—tooth and talon, beak and paw". He went on to claim that the irredeemable nature of carnivorous species meant that they could not be reconciled with each other in his ideal arrangement of the universe, which he called a "Confederation of the Consciousnesses". In 1903, the Scottish philosopher David G. Ritchie in response to Henry S. Salt's 1892 book Animals' Rights, claimed that giving animals rights would imply that we must "protect the weak among them against the strong" and to achieve this, carnivorous animals should be put to death or slowly starved by "permanent captivity and vegetarian diet". He considered this proposal absurd, stating that the "declaration of the rights of every creeping thing [is] to remain a mere hypocritical formula to gratify pug-loving sentimentalists". Contemporary views Animal ethics In 1973, Australian philosopher Peter Singer argued that