Animals Were Given The Right To Be Here Long Before Humans Arrived

The indifference, callousness, and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering towards animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of human spirit.
( Ashley Montagu )

We generally accept that it’s natural for carnivorous wild animals to kill other animals in order to live.
But people don’t often think (or even know) about the extraordinary and unnatural suffering that humans inflict on the animals that we freely harvest for food, with the help of modern high technology and the animal food sciences.
( Marc Bekoff )

If you eat animals, you don’t love animals.
You love to eat them.
( Andrew Kirschner )

This isn’t animal experimentation, where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering.
This is what we feel like eating.
Tell me something: Why is taste, the crudest of our sense, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other sense?
If you stop and think about it, it’s crazy.
Why doesn’t a horny person has as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it?
( Jonathan Safran Foer )

Our treatment of animals, in every department, is deeply and systematically immoral.
Becoming a vegetarian is only the most minimal ethical response to the magnitude of the evil.
( Colin McGinn )

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 civilised.
( Henry David Thoreau )

When advocating for animals, we need to win hearts and minds, not arguments and debates.
( John Oberg )

If you really care about animals, then stop trying to figure out how to exploit them ‘compassionately’.
Just stop exploiting them.
( Gary L Francione )

Without close and reciprocal relationships with other animal beings, we’re alienated from the rich, diverse, and magnificent world in which we live.
( Marc Bekoff )

I think it’s immoral to harm them.
And that seems to me to provide a very strong moral reason to be vegetarian.
It seems to me that our treatment of animals is morally appalling, and that we ought to radically revise the way we live, precisely because they feel pain, they can be hurt, and we’re constantly hurting these creatures.
( Shelly Kagan )

I don’t understand the mentality of this, who sees a magnificent creature in its natural habitat and thinks to themselves they want to kill it?
The culture of ‘hunting’ is sick and twisted.
I don’t understand why this sociopathic practise is legal.
( John Smith )

Our interactions with animals tell us a good deal about how we perceive ourselves, who we are as animals.
Our interactions with animals run deep, and in very pragmatic ways, these interactions affect both ourselves and the animals involved.
Simply put, when we harm other animals we hurt ourselves, and when we protect and nurture other animals, we heal ourselves. 
( Marc Bekoff )

Who knows what the long-term effects of saving rescue dogs are and the healing lessons and love they bring to Earth?
Each one of us has the capacity to influence hundreds, even thousands of people or animals through the way we live our lives.
( Jadi Kindred )

I remember looking at the fear in her eyes.
How could someone be so cruel?
I thought as the hens cried.
When will people realise that other animals have just as much the right as we do.
( Zoe Rosenberg )

The human body has no more need for cows’ milk than it does for dogs’ milk, horses’ milk, or giraffes’ milk.
( Dr Michael Klaper )

Emotions are the gifts of our ancestors.
We have them and so do other animals.
We must never forget this. 
( Marc Bekoff )

We have doomed the wolf not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be – the mythologised epitome of a savage ruthless killer – which is, in reality, no more than a reflected image of ourself.
( Farley Mowat )

Beyond the economics of production efficiency, animal welfare laws that require ‘humane’ treatment are really not about animals.
They’re about humans and making humans feel better about using animals.
We can comfort ourselves with the idea that we are acting in a ‘humane’ way.
( Gary Francione )

The purpose of cows’ milk is to turn a 65 pound calf into a 400 pound cow as rapidly as possible.
Cows’ milk is baby cows’ growth fluid.
Everything in that white liquid – the hormones, the lipids, the proteins, the sodium, the growth factors, the IGF, every one of those is meant to blow that cow up to a great big cow or it wouldn’t be there.
( Dr Michael Klaper )

Why is it that blood, rather than peace, sells?
( Marc Bekoff )

Our treatment of animals and our attitude toward them are crucial not only to any pretensions we have to ethical behaviour but the humankind’s intellectual and moral evolution.
Which is how the human animal is meant to evolve, isn’t it?
( Joy Williams )

Don’t get a job in an abattoir.
Don’t be a butcher.
The idea that people have to do these jobs for a livelihood is ridiculous.
They can get other jobs.
Shoplift, man.
Better to be a prostitute than cut an animal’s head off for a living.
( Chrissie Hynde )

The single most important step an individual can take to reduce global warming is to adopt a meat and dairy-free diet.
( The United Nations )

When we say to someone, “Oh you’re behaving like an animal,” it’s actually a compliment rather than an insult.
We need to work for a science of peace and build a culture of empathy, and emphasize the positive, pro-social side of the character of other animals and ourselves.
It’s truly who we and other animals are.
( Marc Bekoff )

Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions?
Am I fantasising it all?
I must be mad.
Yet every day I see the evidences.
The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me.
Corpses.
Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money.
( J.M. Coetzee )

It’s amazing how many cruel, unnecessary and ignorant things are accepted because of so-called ‘tradition’.
I’m not sure why this barbaric ‘tradition’ continues, they look so stupid dressed up like that.
( John Smith on ‘hunting’ wildlife animals in the UK )

Especially when it comes to animals used for food, humanity’s reasoning power and concern about fairness plummets.
( Karen Davis )

There was a time when man could communicate with all animals, but we have since forgotten their language.
( Anthony Douglas Williams )

I return one last time to the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts.
Each day a fresh holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our moral being is untouched.
We do not feel tainted.
We can do anything, it seems, and come away clean.
( J.M. Coetzee )

For some time the monotheistic religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism & Humanism) have been busy persuading us that humans are superior than anything else in the Universe and nothing else matters.
The industrialism is an embodiment of this faith.
Soon we will learn we have been wrong.
( Ann Must )

Some folks insist that believing in animal rights is like a religion.
But religion asks followers to believe in things nobody can see, while animal rights advocates ask followers to see things nobody can believe. 
( Craig Burton )

Perhaps the most insightful way to illustrate the intensification of animal-intensive agricultural production over the course of the 20th (and into the 21st) century is with a simple statistic: the poultry industry today slaughters more birds in one day than the entire industry did in the year of 1930.
( James Pearce )

It’s incredible that there can exist a culture on this earth that sees this as an acceptable thing to do and incredible to think the world allows it to happen.
( John Smith on ‘hunting’ )