Animal Cruelty Quotes

“If you want to test cosmetics, why do it on some poor animal who hasn't done anything? They should use prisoners who have been convicted of murder or rape instead. So, rather than seeing if perfume irritates a bunny rabbit's eyes, they should throw it in Charles Manson's eyes and ask him if it hurts.”
― Ellen DeGeneres, My Point... And I Do Have One

“You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I became a vegetarian after realizing that animals feel afraid, cold, hungry and unhappy like we do. I feel very deeply about vegetarianism and the animal kingdom. It was my dog Boycott who led me to question the right of humans to eat other sentient beings.”
― Cesar Chavez

“We need, in a special way, to work twice as hard to help people understand that the animals are fellow creatures, that we must protect them and love them as we love ourselves.”
― Cesar Chavez

“We know we cannot be kind to animals until we stop exploiting them -- exploiting animals in the name of science, exploiting animals in the name of sport, exploiting animals in the name of fashion, and yes, exploiting animals in the name of food.”
― Cesar Chavez

“Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.”
― Milan Kundera

“It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“Kindness and compassion towards all living things is a mark of a civilized society. Conversely, cruelty, whether it is directed against human beings or against animals, is not the exclusive province of any one culture or community of people. ”
― Cesar Chavez

“Only when we have become nonviolent towards all life will we have learned to live well with others.”
― Cesar Chavez

“We cut the throat of a calf and hang it up by the heels to bleed to death so that our veal cutlet may be white; we nail geese to a board and cram them with food because we like the taste of liver disease; we tear birds to pieces to decorate our women's hats; we mutilate domestic animals for no reason at all except to follow an instinctively cruel fashion; and we connive at the most abominable tortures in the hope of discovering some magical cure for our own diseases by them.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
A dove house fill’d with doves and pigeons
Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.
A Dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A Horse misus’d upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fiber from the Brain does tear.”
― William Blake

“She had the human look of a domesticated animal.”
― Agustina Bazterrica, Tender Is the Flesh

“Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are the tormented souls.

- On Religion”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion

“If you don't like pictures of animal cruelty being posted on social media, you need to help stop the cruelty, not the pictures. You should be bothered that its happening, not that you saw it.”
― Marie Sarantakis

“The lamb misused breeds public strife
And yet forgives the butcher's knife.”
― William Blake

“I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.”
― J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals

“I remember one bobcat they had in here - now bobcats are an endangered species in this neck of the woods - they'd caught it somewhere and they must have put that cat through a dozen rounds of burn experiments before they finally determined that it was utterly useless to them. Like an empty beer can. And then you know what they did to it? Claudius was late for a lunch date so rather thanput the destroyed but still breathing animal to sleep, he picked it up by its hind legs and simply smashed its head against a wall repeatedly until it was dead. How can I forget it: I was the one told to clean up the mess. The head dented in. The eyes slowly closing. The once proud claws hanging down, stunned and lifeless, the utter senselessness of it all, and the hate, a hatred that was consummated in me which is as dangerous a hormone, or chemical, or portion of the brain, as any neutron bomb. Except that I didnt know how to explode. I was like a computer without a keyboard, a bird without wings. Roaring inside. I wanted to kill that man. To do unto others what they had done unto me. I was that bobcat, you better believe it.”
― Michael Tobias, Rage and Reason

“This isn't animal experimentation, where you an 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, Eating Animals

“When people say that animal rescuers are crazy, what they really mean is that animal rescuers share a number of fundamental beliefs that makes them easy to marginalize. Among those is the belief that Rene Descartes was a jackass.”
― Steven Kotler, A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life

“If we can't be cordial to these creatures' fleece, I think that we deserve to freeze.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can.”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“...almost every pearl on sale today was born of the planned sexual violation of a small creature, and that considerable suffering hangs on those necklace strings.”
― Victoria Finlay, Jewels: A Secret History

“If you really care about animals, then stop trying to figure out how to exploit them 'compassionately'. Just stop exploiting them.”
― Gary L. Francione

“Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95 percent of) chickens become infected with E. coli (an indicator of fecal contamination) and between 39 and 75 percent of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8 percent of birds become infected with salmonella (down from several years ago, when at least one in four birds was infected, which still occurs on some farms). Seventy to 90 percent are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter. Chlorine baths are commonly used to remove slime, odor, and bacteria.

Of course, consumers might notice that their chickens don't taste quite right - how good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? - but the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with "broths" and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste. (A recent study by Consumer Reports found that chicken and turkey products, many labeled as natural, "ballooned with 10 to 30 percent of their weight as broth, flavoring, or water.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“You would never do anything like that, would you?" my wife asked him. "You would never hurt animals."

Our son shook his head, looking offended by the question. He might have been lying, but my knowledge of his belief system, composed of equal parts off-kilter Far Side animal-centrism and a dark Captain Nemoesque contempt for humanity, inclined me to think he was telling the truth. Gigantic fish pulling the limbs from cruel little boys, that might be something you could get him to sign on for.”
― Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs

“You were torturing a cat," she says. "With a freaking prod."
"A prod I built myself in metal shop," he says. "But of course you never mention that.”
― George Saunders, Pastoralia

“Some animals would be offended if they were treated like some people.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The process of flaying alive, and even of dismembering animals before the breath has left their bodies, was discovered by Colonel Coulson to be far from uncommon in private slaughter-houses. A horrible case of cruelty to a bullock was investigated by the magistrates at Newcastle-on-Tyne, an inspector of the R.S.P.C.A. having caught a slaughterman in the act of skinning the animal before it was dead. The man did not deny this charge, but merely said that it was done to save time, and jauntily offered to pay any fine imposed.”
― Ernest Bell, Christmas Cruelties

“The only kind of people who would be knocking down big animals now would be poachers or cattle rustlers, and either could be desperate and dangerous if caught in the act.”
― C.J. Box, Open Season

“I believe I am not interested to know whether Vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't. To know that the results are profitable to the race would not remove my hostility to it. The pains which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity towards it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further.

I have tried to understand why it should be considered a kind of credit and a handsome thing to belong to a human race that has vivisectors in it.”
― Mark Twain