Animal Welfare 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

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

“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

“When you start with a necessary evil, and then over time the necessity passes away, what's left?”
― Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy

“Forests and meat animals compete for the same land. The prodigious appetite of the affluent nations for meat means that agribusiness can pay more than those who want to preserve or restore the forest. We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet – for the sake of hamburgers”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation

“One saw a bird dying, shot by a man. It was flying with rhythmic beat and beautifully, with such freedom and lack of fear. And the gun shattered it; it fell to the earth and all the life had gone out of it. A dog fetched it, and the man collected other dead birds. He was chattering with his friend and seemed so utterly indifferent. All that he was concerned with was bringing down so many birds, and it was over as far as he was concerned. They are killing all over the world. Those marvellous, great animals of the sea, the whales, are killed by the million, and the tiger and so many other animals are now becoming endangered species. Man is the only animal that is to be dreaded.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti to Himself: His Last Journal

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

“The animals of the planet are in desperate peril... Without free animal life I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen.”
― Alice Walker

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

“A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.”
― William Blake

“I'm sorry, my child, I just find it hard to whip up an interest in the subject. It's admirable, what you do, what she does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“Some animal rights activists are demanding vegetarianism, even veganism now, or nothing. But since only 4 or 5 percent of Americans claim to be vegetarians, 'nothing' is the far more likely outcome. I ask these activists to weigh the horrors of Bladen County's industrial farms and the Tar Heel slaughterhouse against the consequences of doing nothing to alleviate the hour-to-hour sufferings of its victims. Is not a life lived off the factory farm and a death humanely inflicted superior to the terrible lives we know they lead and the horrible deaths we know they suffer in Bladen County today?”
― Steven Wise, An American Trilogy: Death, Slavery, and Dominion on the Banks of the Cape Fear River

“There can be no question that parrots have more intellect than any other kind of bird, and it is this that makes them such favourite pets and brings upon them so many sorrows. ...Men will buy them ... and carry them off to all quarters of the native town, intending, I doubt not, to treat them kindly; but "the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel", and confinement in a solitary cell, the discipline with which we reform hardened criminals, is misery enough to a bird with an active mind, without the superadded horrors of ... life in a tin case, hung from a nail in the wall of a dark shop... Why does the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals never look into the woes of parrots?
...
However happy you make her captivity, imagination will carry her at times to the green field and blue sky, and she fancies herself somewhere near the sun, heading a long file of exultant companions in swift career through the whistling air. Then she opens her mouth and rings out a wild salute to all parrots in the far world below her.”
― E.H. Aitken

“What sensitive, sane soul can stand in the presence of such insanity and do nothing? Yet to expose the slaughter of seals in Canada is to deliver oneself into the hands of a bureaucratic inquisition. To witness the killing of a seal is a crime. To film or photograph the slaughter is a felony. To oppose the massacre is to subject oneself to jail time, beatings, heavy fines, and officially sanctioned harassment. - Paul Watson”
― Paul Watson

“He [Ray] was working in a tool-and-die factory in Brooklyn, but before that had drifted around, had been employed at the Studebaker plant in South Bend and also at an Omaha slaughterhouse on the kill floor. Once I asked him what that was like. "You ever heard of Auschwitz?”
― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

“Every praising mouth is filled with ‘we love you’ yet the words are followed by one arm raised with a goad or a whip and another with a knife.”
Page 169”
― Samuel Baca-Henry, Lament of Hathor

“A priestess of Hetheru said:

‘That which is held in abomination to me is the block of slaughter of the god. [198] That which is abominable, that which is abominable I will not eat. An abominable thing is filth, I will not eat thereof. That which is an abomination unto my Ka shall not enter my body. I will live upon that whereon live the gods and the Spirit-souls. I shall live, and I shall be master of their cakes. I am master of them, and I shall eat them under the trees of the dweller in the house of Hetheru, my Lady, the Mistress of Iken.’ [199]”

[198] Directly quotes from the Book of the Dead Papyrus of Nu, The Chapter of Not Letting the Heart of Nu, Whose Word Is Truth, Be Carried Away From Him in Khert-Neter.
[199] Directly quoted from the Book of the Dead Papyrus of Ani, The Chapter of Making the Transformation Into Ptah

Pages 210-211”
― Samuel Baca-Henry, Lament of Hathor

“Of humans, she had stood beside the wombed to try to protect during childbirth. In the form of the Seven Hetherus, human fates were determined as newborns. Later, Hetheru helped the deceased move to the Duat-land of the afterlife. And she greeted them with bread. Seven more cows and their male consort, who some say is Usir,[45] Lord of the Cows, assist the deceased according to the Book of the Dead. The cow called She of Chemmis[46] nurses the deceased with her milk. [47] Thus Hetheru and her brethren aid humans seven times with their births and seven times with their rebirths; and also for the gods.

Now Hertheru was silent. She slept. Her great lungs heaved.

I kept vigil over her through the night, gently stroking the Mother of mothers like my babe, as she had comforted and nuzzled so many.”

[45] a.k.a. Osiris
[46] Present-day Akhmim, Egypt
[47] Pinch, 178

Page 80”
― Samuel Baca-Henry, Lament of Hathor

“We need to stop talking about "factory farming." The problem is violence against animals. People will continue eating industrialized meat as long as they believe the myth that there is a "humane" alternative: "humane killing" discourse serves to legitimate the whole meat system.”
― John Sanbonmatsu

“The utilitarian-inflected discourse on animal "suffering" is the wrong point of emphasis. We need to talk instead about the fundamental causes of that suffering: human domination, exploitation, and mass killing of nonhuman animals. The problem isn't "suffering"; it's us.”
― John Sanbonmatsu

“Every significant philosopher of the last 2500 years has claimed that only humans are free, only humans have an ontological capacity for freedom. That is a lie. The condition for the possibility of freedom is merely the condition for the possibility of unfreedom.”
― John Sanbonmatsu

“The reason that we treat other animals as our slaves and as commodities isn't because they have this ontologically-rooted inferiority, it's that we see them as inferiors 'because' we find it useful to exploit them, and to harm them.”
― John Sanbonmatsu

“Let's all agree to stop using words like "pups," "kits," "chicks," "calves," etc., when referring to the young of other species. They are children. To use any other term is to reinforce the ideology of "otherness" that allows us to go on killing nonhuman animals with impunity.”
― John Sanbonmatsu

“All human culture is narcissistic: being based in the violent negation and exclusion of all other forms of animal life, it collapses into toxic self-love. It thus inevitably destroys its own object, too, i.e. itself, because genuine love requires an Other.”
― John Sanbonmatsu

“What does it mean to be human, when we've organized our whole identity, our whole economy, around harming our fellow creatures?”
― John Sanbonmatsu

“One thought followed another, out of relaxation and into exasperation: the idiocy of animal activists, the bad influence of Disney cartoons, and the gullibility of the Bambi-loving American public. "Walt Disney did us in," he grumbled. "Before all those movies, people looked at animals differently." He snorted with disgust, mulling over that trend of animated movies populated by big-eyed deer and big-bad hunters that terrify defenseless animals. Bambi, Thumper, Flower the Skunk, Gerone sees them all as trouble, part of the reason that we live in a country filled with people who seem only to see animals as cuddly.
He put down his wine glass, watching the clear liquid slosh against the edges. Before this century, he points out, most Americans lived on farms. They butchered hogs themselves, took chicken eggs, milked cows, ate the animals that surrounded them. They shot wild animals to protect their herds, to add to their food supplies. Now, the country's population has concentrated in cities. Hunting is largely a recreational sport; farmers are in decline. People are sur- rounded instead by pets, sleepy cats, playful dogs, pet rats and guinea pigs. "There are kids out there who think meat is born cellophane wrapped," complained Gerone. How can they identify with the idea that animals—the ones they play and feed and sleep with-—should be available as tools, for research?”
― Deborah Blum, The Monkey Wars

“The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated”
― Mahatma Ghandi

“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

“When it's my time to go,
I will not go to the bright place above,
Nor the dark place below.

The Rainbow Bridge is calling.

I'll go to be with fur and claw,
With hoof and tail and feathers.
And sometimes, wings.

They are the ones who love.”
― Vera Nazarian