Quotes About Animals

Our economic order is tightly woven around the exploitation of animals, and while it may seem easy to dismiss concern about animals as the soft-headed mental masturbation of people who really don't understand oppression and the depths of actual human misery, I hope to get you to think differently about suffering and pain, to convince you that animals matter, and to argue that anyone serious about ending domination and hierarchy needs to think critically about bringing animals into consideration.

Plants don't think. Animals are guided by the power of instinct over which they themselves have no control. Animals have a certain kind of brain that makes it impossible to learn anything except very simple things. No generation of animals ever learns anything from any previous generation. We act like animals when we fail to use this magnificent piece of equipment.

Treat other animals as friends and they become friends. Treat other animals as family and they become family. Give other animals your love and they will love you in return.

I do not see any reason why animals should be slaughtered to serve as human diet when there are so many substitutes. After all, man can live without meat. It is only some carnivorous animals that have to subsist on flesh. Killing animals for sport, for pleasure, for adventures, and for hides and furs is a phenomenon which is at once disgusting and distressing. There is no justification in indulging in such acts of brutality . . . Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to a man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not to die, so do other creatures.

There are a few animals that have won themselves a bad reputation even though they have little or no effect on man. They have won their rating through man's interpretation of their attitude towards lower animals. These animals have been seen feeding in what appears to be a savage manner. But this behavior may perhaps be comparable to a man tearing the flesh off a chicken leg with his teeth.

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.

It has been an obsession of human beings to create a hierarchy that places the human species on top and lumps all the "other animals" together beneath us. The resulting "speciesism" allows us to look upon animals as less deserving of all manner of rights and considerations than humans. To support this lower status, humans have argued that animals act instinctually; don't have souls; don't feel physical pain like we do; and lack self-consciousness, cognitive intelligence, emotional feelings, morality, and ethics.

Once people spend time with farm animals in a loving way ... a pig or cow or a little chicken or a turkey, they might find they relate with them the same way they relate with dogs and cats. People don't really think of them that way because they're on the plate. Why should they be food when other animals are pets? I would never eat my doggies.

It is strange to hear people talk of Humanitarianism, who are members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to children and animals, and who claim to be God-loving men and women, but who, nevertheless, encourage by their patronage the killing of animals merely to gratify the cravings of appetite.

Those who consume animals not only harm those animals and endanger themselves, but they also threaten the well-being of other humans who currently or will later inhabit the planet. ... It is time for humans to remove their heads from the sand and recognize the risk to themselves that can arise from their maltreatment of other species.

Intellectually, human beings and animals may be different, but it's pretty obvious that animals have a rich emotional life and that they feel joy and pain. It's easy to forget the connection between a hamburger and the cow it came from. But I forced myself to acknowledge the fact that every time I ate a hamburger, a cow had ceased to breathe

There is increasing social concern about our use of nonhumans for experiments, food, clothing and entertainment. This concern about animals reflects both our own moral development as a civilization and our recognition that the differences between humans and animals are, for the most part, differences of degree and not of kind.

Having animals in the city is entirely different from having animals out in the country. For one thing, it's more social. When you live on lots of acres without neighbors within a stone's throw, your dog-walks are usually solitary rambles over hill and dale.

Genesis 9 is where the animals went wild, and God gave them wildness. After the flood, that's when he made animals wild. Up until that time, everybody was vegetarian.

You know, we all oppose animal cruelty. But sometimes we forget that animals on farms suffer and feel pain like all other animals. They, too, deserve to be protected from harm and cruelty.

Fear changes everything. We're animals, and when we get afraid we act like animals. I'm not exempt from that.

To be well used, creatures and places must be used sympathetically, just as they must be known sympathetically to be well known...The "animal scientist" to whom it is of no concern whether or not animals suffer will almost inevitably aid and abet the destruction of the decent old ideal of animal husbandry and, as a consequence, increase the suffering of animals. I hope that my country may be delivered from the remote, cold abstractions of university science.

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.

The only difference between kids and jungle animals is pants. Kids wear them. Jungle animals don't.

Amusement touched the corner of his lips. "Animals love me." "Oh, I'm sure they do," Scarlet said, beaming with fake encouragement. She shut the door before muttering, "What farm animals don't love a wolf?

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

Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don't), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and laws, wear keepsakes, apologize years after an offense, whisper, fear themselves, interpret dreams, hide their genitalia, shave, bury time capsules, and can choose not to eat something for reasons of conscience. The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.

Consider the biggest animals on the planet: elephants, and buffaloes, and giraffes. These are vegetarian animals. They grow to thousands of pounds of muscle and bone without ever eating cheeseburgers and pepperoni pizzas.

We are all animals of this planet. We are all creatures. And nonhuman animals experience pain sensations just like we do. They too are strong, intelligent, industrious, mobile, and evolutional. They too are capable of growth and adaptation. Like us, firsthand foremost, they are earthlings. And like us, they are surviving. Like us they also seek their own comfort rather than discomfort. And like us they express degrees of emotion. In short like us, they are alive.

Ecology more important than saving animals from slavery??? Humans suffer the raping of the earth but animals suffer DOUBLY: the raping of the earth PLUS their own raping by humans. They are innocent/they are not the ones who raped the earth/they enrich it for us all from the tiniest microscopic beings to the largest ones.

Britain makes it absolutely, blindingly clear that it is liberal social welfare policies. And they have turned a good chunk of their native population into animals. They are absolute animals. They are not humans with free will. They eat, they screw, they drink.

We’re built to deal with death, disease, failure, struggle, heartbreak, problems. It’s what separates us from the animals and why we envy and love animals so much. We’re aware of it all and have to process it. The way we each handle being human is where all the good stories, jokes, art, wisdom, revelations, and bullshit come from.

But it is not at all certain that this superiority of the many over the sound few is possible in the case of every people and every large number. There are some whom it would be impossible: otherwise the theory would apply to wild animals- and yet some men are hardly any better than wild animals.

...In little more than a single century from 1820 to 19450, no less than fifty-nine million human animals were killed in inter-group clashes of one sort or another.... We describe these killings as men behaving "like animals," but if we could find a wild animal that showed signs of acting this way, it would be more precise to describe it as behaving like men.

We ogle plants and animals up close on television, the Internet and in the movies. We may not worship the animals we see, but we still regard them as necessary physical and spiritual companions. Technological nature can't completely satisfy that yearning.

The Humane Society of the United States works with local Humane Societies across the country. We don't control every local Humane Society in this nation. These organizations strive to the greatest degree to provide homes for animals and to encourage adoption, to spay and neuter animals. And if a decision is made to euthanize, it is a failure of society, not the local organizations who are striving to do their best.

It is an indication of the extent to which people are now isolated from the animals they eat that children brought up on storybooks that lead them to think of a farm as a place where animals wander around freely in idyllic conditions might be able to live out their entire lives without ever being forced to revise this rosy image.

I grew up in northern Minnesota on 40 acres of wooded land 20 miles from the nearest town, and so the wilderness was home. It was not an unsafe place. I had that advantage. But there are so many representations of the wilderness being dangerous. You know, depictions of wild animals attacking people. It's like, "No, we kill those animals in far greater numbers than they kill us."

I'm a diehard animal lover - I've always loved animals - but it was just one of those trips that I felt like I was going back to the beginning of where earth started. At the time, where a lot of stuff was brewing anyway, to be in such a beautiful and barren land, and just looking at how life began with all these creatures, I just started to really think about animals and time and just all of it.

Kanematsu Sugiura.....took down lab books and showed me that in fact Laetrile is dramatically effective in stopping the spread of cancer. The animals were genetically programmed to get breast cancer and about 80 - 90% of them normally get spread of the cancer from the breast to the lungs which is a common route in humans, also for how people die of breast cancer, and instead when they gave the animals Laetrile by injection only 10-20% of them got lung metasteses. And these facts were verified by many people, including the pathology department.

Remember that even just watching animals has an impact. Intrusion into their living space can expose them to predation, keep them from feeding or other essential activities, or cause them to leave their young exposed to predation or the elements. No photo or viewing opportunity is worth harassing or stressing wildlife. In appreciating and watching them, we have a responsibility to protect and preserve the animals that share our state.

One of the things that I always think about is the emotional sophistication of animals and how much we're learning about the emotional sophistication of animals. If you're eating a pig, you're essentially eating the equivalent of a four-year-old human being.

People think of animals as if they were vegetables, and that is not right. We have to change the way people think about animals. I encourage the Tibetan people and all people to move toward a vegetarian diet that doesn’t cause suffering.

I love animals. When I was young, I had two St. Bernards, I still have a dog, I have a lot of cats in my company. My wife always says, "You spend a lot of money on animals. More than even me!"

Some people may argue that if the animals are treated humanely prior to being slaughtered, this justifies their confinement and slaughter. Is it ethical to rob beings of their freedom but give them a comfortable prison and provide them with food until they become fat enough to be slaughtered? Any way you look at it, farms are places where animals are kept in preparation to be slaughtered and ultimately eaten as food.

I really need to work. People think that I'm no longer interested in acting and only interested in work-ing with the animals. Obviously I have given that impression, but it is not how I feel. I think I'm a good actor. I think I look OK. I don't understand why I'm not working all the time.

If cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys go into slaughterhouses alive and come out chopped up into hundreds of pieces, how could anyone claim that animals aren't being mistreated, abused, tortured, terrorized and savagely murdered in these places? How in the world could SLAUGHTERING BILLIONS of INNOCENTS be done with love, humanity and concern?

We, who think like animals living in small groups, must structure a global world. We believe in universal human rights and believe racism and war are wrong. On the other hand, it is our nature to be cooperative and loving almost exclusively with the members of the group to which we feel we belong.

Naturally animals are very special to me, especially dogs.

We don't have to go to wild places to find wildlife. A surprisingly wide range of species can be found in our sities and towns, from familiar animals like the raccoon to more exotic ones like the mountain lion.

I believe that the only thing that will dispel the darkness is for the light to come on. And the lights are coming on. Here, there. People are eating more vegetables, living green, taking in and saving animals. All of that is the light coming on.

The dog is the most faithful of animals and would be much esteemed were it not so common. Our Lord God has made His greatest gifts the commonest.

It's an attitude of superiority. We are superior to the rest of life. The Book of Genesis says: 'Increase and multiply and have dominion over the birds of the air and the animals and so forth.' You run it; it's yours; do what you like with it. I don't know how old that text is, but it represents an attitude that probably really got going with the beginning of agriculture. Before that, the hunter-gatherers were gentler people than the agriculture.