Quotes About Animals

Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.

. . . money . . . is really the difference between men and animals, most of the things men feel, animals feel, and vice versa, but animals do not know about money.

We have all this Paleolithic art that suggests that our ancestors really venerated animals and that they depended on wild animals to survive - as opposed to domesticated animals that we depend on. Would it radically change things if we had more rhinos in our midst? I kind of suspect it would.

I have been scientifically studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so-called,) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

I love animals. With animals you never know what you're getting. Everybody says don't mess with animals and little kids in movies but those are the funniest things because you can't be in control. I like to lose control as a director.

The word "veganism" denotes a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude - as far as is possible and practical - all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.

My point is, I don't see the need to eat animals. I love animals; besides the horrible stuff that's put in meat, I actually love cuddling with animals and petting them and stuff.

Being kind to animals is not enough. Avoiding cruelty is not enough. Housing animals in more comfortable, larger cages is not enough. Whether we exploit animals to eat, to wear, to entertain us, or to learn, the truth of animal rights requires empty cages, not larger cages.

On love, not harming others, and respecting all beings. Even animals have these elements in their behavioral patterns. We should start by observing how animals act. They are honest and appreciate it when we are honest with them. If you present something nice to an animal in one hand while hiding a rope in the other, the creature will know your intention. Yet animals have no religion, no constitution. Basic nature has endowed them with the faculty of discernment. It is the same for humans.

The Bible nowhere says that animals are just made for human use. It does not say that the whole earth is just ours to do with as we like. Neither does it say that God's sole interest is with the human species. We cannot allow such an important and influential book to become the preserve of those who want to exploit animals. The Bible needs to be read, studied, and reclaimed for the animals.

Animals don't lie. Animals don't criticize. If animals have moody days, they handle them better than humans do.

Humans - who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals - have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain.

Letting cats and dogs have litters is tantamount to shooting shelter animals in the head since it kills their chances of adoption. Please do the right thing and spay or neuter your animals.

If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans. I hope to make people realize how totally helpless animals are, how dependent on us, trusting as a child must that we will be kind and take care of their needs ...[they] are an obligation put on us, a responsibility we have no right to neglect, nor to violate by cruelty.

I've always loved animals. I've never lived without them. As long as I can remember, I was bringing home strays. When I was five, I brought home a stray kitten I named Tiger. This was my first rescued animal. It wasn't until I became an actor, and then injured my spine, that I discovered that these animals were actually very therapeutic and helped me to cope with my chronic pain.

I'm very sceptical about the prospects for 'big' environmental causes - 'saving the planet', halving the world's population, ending the exploitation of animals, and so on - but a person can ask him- or herself how he or she personally may exercise compassion or humility towards animals, vegetal life and so on.

Veganism can resurrect Eden and create heaven on Earth. We can have a place where humans view animals in awe, and animals view humans with a curious aloofness.

We're highly social animals - I'm told by scientists that what makes us different from other animals is an acute social awareness, which is what has made us so successful.

The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.

From the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at the time. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought.

I realized that all animals, not just dogs and cats and horses, were sentient beings; therefore, I just couldn't say I love animals and then eat them.

Religion humanizes this universe, makes us feel important and loved. We are not animals governed by uncontrollable drives, animals that die for no apparent reason, but creatures made in the image of supreme being

At The Humane Society of the United States, we know how difficult it is to prevent cruelty to animals in movies because so many of the animal welfare problems occur behind the scenes in training, housing, and transportation, long before the animals get on the set.

If people knew how badly animals were treated in today's factory farms, if people knew how completely confined and immobilized these creatures are for their entire lives, if people knew how severe and unrelenting is the cruelty these animals are forced to endure, there would be change. If people knew. But too many of us choose to look the other way, to keep the veil in place, to remain unconscious and caught in the cultural trance. That way we are more comfortable. That way is convenient. That way we don' t have to risk too much. This is how we keep ourselves asleep.

PETA has a proven track record of success. Each victory PETA wins for the animals is a stepping stone upon which we build a more compassionate world for all beings - and we will never give up our fight until all animals are treated with respect and kindness.

Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.

By exercising your stomach muscles, you wring out the body, you don't catch colds, you don't get cancer, you don't get hernias. Do animals get hernias? Do animals go on diets?

Some of us seem to be born with a drive to try to make the world kinder. In my twenties, living in New York City, I worked in a soup kitchen every Sunday for many years, just trying to do my part. Then I read Animal Liberation and learned about factory farming and the killing of animals for oven cleaner and realized nobody needed my help as badly as the animals did.

After I saw how badly animals were treated to en up in our plates, how bad it was for our health and for the environment, I decided to stop this nonsense and educate others. After all, animals can’t talk and they need people that have notoriety like me to be their voices.

I see myself as the God who will protect all of the animals that have no other way of voicing themselves. I am God, I see that, and I accept who I have become with open arms. All along I had no idea that those who will come to protect the animals and restore the balance won't be a God on a cloud, but us, this being, the being that I am!

While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are attracted strongly to Nature. In their reaction to Naturemen appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world Kosmos, Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.

The humanity and the humility, which are very different than the biological species homo sapiens. Humanity versus homo sapiens - very different things. We are biological creatures, we are animals, no doubt, but when you talk about "humando," you're talking about that particular kind of animals who are aware of their impending extinction, who have the capacity to be sensitive to catastrophe and disaster and calamity and profound crisis.

I am a woman that defends animals, right, left, and in the centre. Animals aren't political.

Inside me, I think that an animal goes through a lot of pain in the whole cycle of death in the slaughterhouse; just living to be killed. That whole situation is really messed up for animals, growing up in those little cooped-up pens. I just don't think its worth eating that animal. I think animals should be free. There's so much other food out there that doesn't have to involve you in that cycle of pain and death.

I slowly began making a few photos with animals over the years, and I liked how people reacted to them. When I would have the animals on set, I'd notice the way the models would interact with them and there was so much true emotion that you rarely see between two human beings.

But if you love animals for all the right reasons- and that's just love and affection- then you're going to go after animals who need you.

I was so sad from losing two of my dogs and my mother. I had this vision of all these animals sitting behind bars. They had no control and were scared. That's why I got into fostering and adopting animals out.

Evidence of this [transformation of animals into fossils] is that parts of aquatic animals and perhaps of naval gear are found in rock in hollows on mountains, which water no doubt deposited there enveloped in sticky mud, and which were prevented by coldness and dryness of the stone from petrifying completely. Very striking evidence of this kind is found in the stones of Paris, in which one very often meets round shells the shape of the moon.

There are so many great animals in our local shelters that people don't really know about. Annually, two to four million animals are euthanized, and we can bring that number down significantly by going to our local shelter and adopting and also by spaying and neutering your pets.

The time will come when public opinion will no longer tolerate amusements based on the mistreatment and killing of animals. The time will come, but when? When will we reach the point that hunting, the pleasure in killing animals for sport, will be regarded as a mental aberration?

It is a frequently cited fact that English has two sets of words for farm animals and their corresponding meats. The living animals are expressed with words of Germanic origin-calf (German 'Kalb'), swine (G. 'Schwein'), and ox (G. 'Ochse')-because the servants who guarded them were the conquered Anglo-Saxons. The names of the meats are of Romance origin-veal (French 'veau'), pork (F. 'porc') and beef (F. 'boeuf')-because those who enjoyed them were the conquering Norman masters.

Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That's my whole philosophy in a sentence.

My best source of grounding are animals and nature. Animals live more in the moment and don't worry so much! And nature is proof of a greater power than myself. Both put things in perspective, or at least gently move us forward.

For centuries poets, some poets, have tried to give a voice to the animals, and readers, some readers, have felt empathy and sorrow. If animals did have voices, and they could speak with the tongues of angels-at the very least with the tongues of angels-they would be unable to save themselves from us. What good would language do? Their mysterious otherness has not saved them, nor have their beautiful songs and coats and skins and shells and eyes.

If animals are no longer quite outside the moral sphere, they are still in a special section near the outer rim. Their interests are allowed to count only when they do not clash with human interests. If there is a clash - even a clash between a lifetime of suffering for a nonhuman animal and the gastronomic preference of a human being - the interests of the nonhuman are disregarded. The moral attitudes of the past are too deeply embedded in our thought and our practices to be upset by a mere change in our knowledge of ourselves and of other animals.

Plants, again, inasmuch as they are without locomotion, present no great variety in their heterogeneous pacts. For, when the functions are but few, few also are the organs required to effect them. ... Animals, however, that not only live but perceive, present a great multiformity of pacts, and this diversity is greater in some animals than in others, being most varied in those to whose share has fallen not mere life but life of high degree. Now such an animal is man.

Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways.

I love animals and I love to see movies with animals that are done respectfully, you know?