Compassion Is Ethical Intelligence

How can we condemn a protected species to death when the reasons for doing so have been discredited by valid scientific evidence?
Badger culling is utterly barbaric and pointless.
( Twiggy )

The only difference between a prison and an animal shelter.
If someone doesn’t bail you out in just a few days, you are executed.
Even though you are innocent.

Choosing not to eat animals is not about food.
It’s about love and respect for life itself.
( Wilfred Soon )

Could you really look an animal in the eyes and say:
“My appetite for your dead flesh is worth your suffering”..?

I think the most interesting observation was made to me by a senior politician who said, “Fine John, we accept your science, but we have to offer the farmers a carrot. And the only carrot we can possibly give them is culling badgers.”
( Professor John Bourne, Chair of the Independent Scientific Group )

You eat meat but are against murder.
You only eat animals that have committed suicide?
Or when they die from disease or old age?

I don’t eat meat because meat brings out negative qualities such as fear, anger, anxiety, aggressiveness, etc.
Vegetables peacefully offer themselves to the earth when ripe, thus allowing a sublime and peaceful thought-consciousness.
( Carlos Santana )

Greed, ignorance, corruption, and morally-deficient people and spineless governments are responsible for the suffering of not only the animals we share this earth with, but also the millions of humans, mostly children, who die every year from hunger, dirty water, curable diseases and unnecessary wars.

I got up early one morning to get some chicken, rice and salad.
I looked at my chicken and something hit me. I saw death.
So, I scraped it off my plate, ate my rice and salad and went back to bed.
Later, I woke up crying and I didn’t know why.
And then it hit me. It was humility.
And with humility, responsibility kicked in. Now I see that my road is to let people know it is okay to be strong, compassionate and vegan.
( Kenneth G. Williams )

I pray someday that everyone will care about all animals.
Not just the cute and cuddly ones.

Animal rights is a part of my everyday life.
When you live by example, you create a certain level of awareness.
( Joaquin Phoenix )

Saying “Eating animals is yummy” as a justification for killing them is pretty much the same argument as saying rape is okay since it feels good to the rapist.
Civilised people require more than sensory pleasure to justify behaviours.

Compassion is ethical intelligence.
It is the capacity to make connections and the consequent urge to act to relieve the suffering of others.
( Will Tuttle )

Wild animals are thinking, feeling beings who feel pain just like cats, dogs and humans.
Just because they aren’t pets doesn’t mean that it’s ok to kill or eat them.
Because fish have a brain, a central nervous system, and pain receptors, they can feel pain just like cats, dogs and humans.
Just because they can’t scream doesn’t mean they aren’t in pain.

To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe.
You know then what you had always been told — that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.
( Beryl Markham )

Being vegan isn’t extreme.
Supporting an industry that slaughters millions of sentient beings is.

Thall shalt not kill.
The four most important, yet most ignored words in all religious teachings.
There’s not an asterisk next to that commandment saying unless you walk on all fours, have fur, feathers, horns, beaks or gills.
( Gary Yourofsky )

Let us walk softly on the earth with all living beings great and small.
Remembering as we go that this world was created for all, not just some.

Animals ARE different from humans.
They don’t kill for sport, fun or entertainment.
( Eileen Hutchison, 1926 – 2008 )

Dogs are killed for food and most people protest.
Pigs are killed for food and most people are silent.

It’s not only the idiots that murder animals who keep trophies from their victims.
Serial killers do as well.
( Florence Emily Hookins, 1896 – 1962 )

Some people are so naive they genuinely have no idea what eating meat involves.
But ignorance can no longer be an excuse.
The horror is out there.

As you develop your awareness in nature, you begin to see how we influence all life and how all life influences us.
A key and critical feature for us to know.
( Tony Ten Fingers )

Animals are the real victims on this earth.
Their only crime is that they exist.

We must join forces everywhere to stop the slaughter of elephants and rhinos.
They feel pain, they know suffering.
We must stop people from buying ivory.
( Jane Goodall )

The day my heart spoke louder than my stomach, my mind felt more at peace and my life changed forever.

Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to the animals, for they are without sin, while you, with all your greatness, you defile the earth wherever you appear and leave an ignoble trail behind you.
And that is true, alas, for almost every one of us.
( Fyodor Dostoyevsky )

Veganism is not about likes and dislikes, it’s about the rights of all animals not to be used, abused or exploited.

Animals and humans suffer and die alike.
Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel, and brutal taking of life.
We don’t have to be part of it.
( Dick Gregory )

Wildlife habitats all over the world are being destroyed to make way for growing crops to feed ‘farm’ animals who will be brutally killed to feed meat-eating humans.

When you realise the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.
( Dian Fossey )

To be honest, if animals could talk, I would have no need for people.

If you truly love Nature, you will find beauty everywhere.
( Van Gogh )

We enslave them, abuse them, inflict unimaginable pain and suffering, and then brutally murder them.
Just because we like the taste of their cooked flesh.
Really, is that the only justifiable reason?

I would rather be amongst forest animals and the sounds of nature, than amongst city traffic and the noise of man.
( Anthony Douglas Williams )

When you build roads through the homes and habitats of wild animals, there will always be consequences.

I beg you to notice the unbearable dimension of sorrow that David Cameron is attempting to inflict upon British wildlife.
David wanted to repeal the Hunting Act, which would mean the brutal killing of foxes, hares, deer, badgers, otters, just about anything that moves.
( Morrissey )

Hunting .. An ego boost for a small mind, the feeling of power and dominance.
Many studies point to being sexually inadequate.
A perverted desire to kill helpless creatures and pose with their corpse.
Smug-faced, pathetic little men, cowards, of course, craving attention.

Some day the Earth will weep, she will beg for her life, she will cry with tears of blood.
You will make a choice, if you will help her or let her die, and when she dies, you too will die.
( John Hollow Horn )

If showing children what happens in a slaughterhouse is too horrific for them to watch, then maybe we are doing to animals is wrong?

What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.
( Paul Hawken )

In moments of darkness we search our memory for words that give us comfort.
Animals can’t do this.

I think it is far more important to save one square mile of wilderness, anywhere, by any means, than to produce another book on the subject.
( Edward Abbey )

Animals are not our food.
Our food grows in the soil.
Please let the animals live.

We have a responsibility toward the other life-forms of our planet whose continued existence is threatened by the thoughtless behaviour of our own human species.
Environmental responsibility.
For if there is no God, then, obviously, it is up to us to put things right.
( Jane Goodall )

The truth is, the natural world is changing.
And we are totally dependent on that world.
It provides our food, water and air.
It is the most precious thing we have and we need to defend it.
( David Attenborough )

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.
A civilisation which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilisation itself.
( Edward Abbey )

The question is whether any civilisation can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilised.
( Rachel Carson )

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.
When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
( Aldo Leopold )

Take nothing but pictures.
Kill nothing but time.
Leave nothing but footprints.
( John Kay )

I have been 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 humiliating to me.
( Mark Twain )

It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living, by its purely physical effect on the human temperament, would be the most beneficial influence to mankind.
( Albert Einstein )

Desk-bound men with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by computers, decide the fate of both animals and humans.
( Robert William Hutchison, 1922 – 2006 )

Have no use for, or trust for, those who are unkind to animals.
 ( Etzio @etziowow )

The world is full of good people.
We can easily spot them by the way they treat both animals and their fellow humans.
( Eileen Hutchison, 1926 – 2008 )

I have no fear of losing my life.
If I have to save a koala or a crocodile or a kangaroo or a snake, mate, I will save it.
( Steve Irwin, 1962 – 2006 )

Before you start preaching your religion to me, tell me how you treat animals and people, all animals and all people.
( Len Firswood )

If your religion or your tradition or your culture include harming animals.
Then they are WRONG.
They are SHIT! 
( Rose Winfold ) 

Crocodiles are easy.
They try to kill and eat you.
People are harder.
Sometimes they pretend to be your friend first.
( Steve Irwin, 1962 – 2006 )

Vegetarian food leaves a deep impression on our nature.
If the whole world adopts vegetarianism, it can change the destiny of humankind.
( Albert Einstein )