quotations about animals
Hey, you're pretty smart. You got through school, you probably tied your own shoes this morning -- you're doing great champ. As humans, we tend to think that we're the smartest things around. We do things like drive cars, invent computers and make frappuccinos, whereas the animals are still running around outside, all naked and stuff and occasionally getting predated on. However, imagining that we're at the top of the intellectual food chain shows a great deal of ignorance, which is sort of the problem in the first place. Animals have got a lot to deal with out there in the wild, so you can be damn sure they've got to have their wits about them. We're not even just talking about teaching gorillas sign language or horses to count, some of these guys can use complex maths and even design public infrastructure.
STEVIE SHEPHARD
"9 Animals That Are Probably Smarter Than You", What Culture, February 23, 2016
Animals are like humans, only more openly carnal and sexual, more openly and therefore more disarmingly absurd.
YI-FU TUAN
Dominance and Affection
We find amongst animals, as amongst men, power of feeling pleasure, power of feeling pain; we see them moved by love and by hate; we see them feeling terror and attraction; we recognize in them powers of sensation closely akin to our own, and while we transcend them immensely in intellect, yet, in mere passional characteristics our natures and the animals' are closely allied. We know that when they feel terror, that terror means suffering. We know that when a wound is inflicted, that wound means pain to them. We know that threats bring to them suffering; they have a feeling of shrinking, of fear, of absence of friendly relations, and at once we begin to see that in our relations to the animal kingdom a duty arises which all thoughtful and compassionate minds should recognize -- the duty that because we are stronger in mind than the animals, we are or ought to be their guardians and helpers, not their tyrants and oppressors, and we have no right to cause them suffering and terror merely for the gratification of the palate, merely for an added luxury to our own lives.
ANNIE BESANT
speech given at Manchester UK, October 18, 1897
I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden
Since the dawn of Western civilization, anthropocentrism -- the notion that the world and its inhabitants exist exclusively for human beings -- has infiltrated nearly every corner of the globe. The conceptual separation of humans from "nature" is at the core of this belief system, as is the notion that other-than-human animals are unthinking, unfeeling automatons. The colonial legacies that imposed these beliefs upon the world's many cultures continue to cause great suffering for humans and other-than-human animals alike and give rise to things like factory farms, cruel experiments, and entertainment facilities like SeaWorld.
LAURA BRIDGEMAN
"Dolphins Are Persons Too, Why it's Time We Recognize Legal Rights of Animals", One Green Planet, February 17, 2016
Even as we try to think objectively about what animals are like, we are burdened with the need to justify our moral relations with them. We kill animals for food; we use them as experimental subjects in laboratories; we exploit them as sources of raw materials such as leather and wool; we keep them as work animals--the list goes on and on. These practices are to our advantage, and we intend to continue them. Thus, when we think about what the animals are like, we are motivated to conceive of them in ways that are compatible with treating them in these ways. If animals are conceived as intelligent, sensitive beings, these ways of treating them might seem monstrous. So humans have reason to resist thinking of them as intelligent or sensitive.
DAVID INGLIS, JOHN BONE & RHODA WILKIE
Nature
Now, of the various parts or faculties of the soul--whichever may be the proper term by which to designate them--the only ones with which we need now concern ourselves are those which belong to all such living things as possess not only life but animality. For, though an animal must necessarily be a living thing, living things are by no means of necessity animals; for plants live, and yet are without sensation, which is the distinctive characteristic of an animal. And the part in which is lodged that faculty of the soul in virtue of which a thing lives must also be the part in which is lodged that faculty in virtue of which we call it an animal.
ARISTOTLE
On Youth & Old Age, Life & Death
Contempt for animal life leads to contempt for human life.
EDWARD ABBEY
One Life at a Time, Please
Misleading marketing campaigns show animals roaming around the fields, but the reality is that they never breathe fresh air or see the sunlight. Animals are treated like biological machines where they are crammed into cages so small that they cannot stand up or stretch their limbs for their whole lives.
PAT HARMON
"The Secret Atrocities of Factory Farming", The Bridgeport News, March 22, 2016
Rumors and reports of man's relation with animals are the world's oldest news stories, headlined in the stars of the zodiac, posted on the walls of prehistoric caves, inscribed in the languages of Egyptian myth, Greek philosophy, Hindu religion, Christian art, our own DNA. Belonging within the circle of mankind's intimate acquaintance ... constant albeit speechless companions, they supplied energies fit to be harnessed or roasted.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Man and Beast", Lapham's Quarterly: Animals
It wasn't that long ago that children, wives, blacks ... were all considered property. But as societies began to comprehend these groups had feelings (can't say they just began to comprehend they were human as many viewed blacks not as "men" but as animals), they began to understand that they had rights; rights white men had had all along. Now we're in the 21st Century and we are seeing progress on how animals should be viewed and treated. They are not property, they are not things. They feel every emotion that humans feel -- with the exception of hate, greed, lust and idolatry. Somehow those special emotions only developed within the "superior" species.
JBDEAN
user comment, "Are Animals 'Things'?", Harvard Magazine, March/April 2016
First a baby dolphin died after being hauled from the sea for selfies by a mob in Argentina. Then we watched as a man in Florida dragged a shark onto the beach so that he could take some holiday snaps before returning it to the water. And just a couple of days later, a peacock in a Chinese zoo was literally scared to death when it was handled by a group of tourists intent on getting a picture with it. None of these people appear to have thought about the terror that the animals were experiencing and, sadly, that's typical of many people's interactions with wild animals -- they're so focused on themselves that the hell experienced by the animal doesn't cross their minds. To them, they're just a prop.
MIMI BEKHECHI
"We need to stop killing and torturing animals for the sake of a good selfie", The Independent, March 1, 2016
As the role of animals in society and the economy has evolved, and more recently, as scientific research has revealed more about animals' cognitive abilities and social development, public sensibility has changed dramatically, often leaving outmoded law behind. As a result, lawyers worldwide have begun searching for innovative ways to make animals more visible to the law: strengthening and enacting new anti-cruelty statutes, improving basic protections, and, in some more radical cases, challenging animals' property status itself in an effort to grant them fundamental rights.
CARA FEINBERG
"Are Animals 'Things'?", Harvard Magazine, March/April 2016
Animals are, like all living things, self-building, self-maintaining, and self-protecting embodiments of their genetic designs, and they are therefore in human eyes objects of their own operations.
A. VAN GINKEL
General Principles of Human Power
Humans have "dominion" over animals. But that "dominion" (radah in Hebrew) does not mean despotism, rather we are set over creation to care for what God has made and to treasure God's own treasures.
ANDREW LINZEY
Creatures of the Same God: Explorations in Animal Theology
Animals when in company walk in a proper and sensible manner, in single file, instead of sprawling all across the road and being of no use or support to each other in case of sudden trouble or danger.
KENNETH GRAHAME
The Wind in the Willows
Every day there are legally sanctioned atrocities of torture, abuse and death occurring in the private sector. It is of such a magnitude that it eclipses the number of lives lost in all of the world wars, the holocaust, 911 and subsequent terrorist attacks combined. The perpetrators of these abuses are factory farms, also known as intensive industrial farm operations. They are large-scale agri-businesses that supply 98% of all the food produced in the United States. The victims are nine billion animals killed each year for food in the U.S. That number reaches 70 billion globally, or six million animals per hour. Some might say that it is unfair to compare human lives with nonhuman animals, but the overwhelming scientific evidence of their sentience and their ability to feel pain as much as we do, puts us in the same category.
PAT HARMON
"The Secret Atrocities of Factory Farming", The Bridgeport News, March 11, 2016
Animals are born, are sentient and are mortal. In these things they resemble man. In their superficial anatomy -- less in their deep anatomy -- in their habits, in their time, in their physical capacities, they differ from man. They are both like and unlike.
JOHN BERGER
About Looking
We kill millions of animals a day for food. If they have the right to bodily liberty, it's basically a holocaust.
APATHYNIHILISM
user comment, "Are Animals 'Things'?", Harvard Magazine, March/April 2016