"You can tell a lot about a society by the way it treats it animals" Is this the right quote and who said it ?

The greatness of a society and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
~Mahatma Gandhi.

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Serenity of mind, good-heartedness, purity of nature, self-control—this is called mental austerity. ~Gitopanishad.

To doon1946 - "A great many thank you's".

This is a topic very close to my heart. The search engine isn't working right now, so I cannot find where we've covered this. These thoughts and concepts did not originate with Gandhi, but he was an excellent proponent of them.
Check out this webpage
The World History of Animal Rights and Vegetarianism in Quotes
http://all-creation.franciscan-anglican.com/quotes.htm
"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
~ Mohandas Gandhi, The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism
http://www.all-creatures.org/quotes/gandhi_mohandas.html
Read this:
Speech delivered by Gandhi at a Social Meeting organised by the London Vegetarian Society, 20 November 1931
http://www.southerncrossreview.org/22/gandhi2.html
http://www.ivu.org/news/evu/other/gandhi2.html
Diet and Diet Reform by Mohandas Gandhi
http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-c/gandhi01.htm

'I hold today the same opinion as I held then. To my mind the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body. I hold that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man.'
~ Gandhi, An Autobiography, the Story of My Experiments

"Animals are innocent casualties of the world view that asserts that some lives are more valuable than others, that the powerful are entitled to exploit the powerless, and that the weak must be sacrificed for the greater good."
~ Steven Simmons
http://www.jewishveg.com/schwartz/interview.htm
http://www.eternaltreblinka.com/overview.html

http://www.powerfulbook.com/links.html

While in Brobdingnag, Gulliver is treated as a curiosity. This is symbolic of how we treat unusual people and animals. Swift uses this device to place Gulliver in an unfair situation, using the idea of being put on show for people to look at, and performing for these people. This can be paralleled with Swift's society in that Gulliver is essentially a performing circus animal to the inhabitants of Brobdingnag. Swift uses this image to symbolise his own society's use of circuses and performing animals, including zoos, which cage their animals for everyone to see for a price. Again, Swift is ironically drawing a comparison with the lower classes of Britain's 18th Century caste system.
~ from “How 'Gulliver's Travels' Comments on Society” at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A659360

You can tell all you need to about a society from how it treats animals and beaches.
~ Frank DeFord
Societies that do not eat people are fascinated by those that do.
~ Ronald Wright

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough…yet he is lord of all animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them a bare minimum that will prevent them from starving.
~ Animal Farm (George Orwell)
from a study guide to the text of Animal Theology (Andrew Linzey)
http://re-xs.ucsm.ac.uk/theanimalproject/Linzey.htm
http://www.all-creatures.org/articles/ar-gospel.html
http://www.fountain.btinternet.co.uk/sda/sda_animals.html

There are so many animals that do suffer maltreatment nowadays. However there is a law that do protect animal rights. Government do implement this one to help animals on this problem.

Cats 101