Animal Rights
- The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may
acquire those rights which never could have been witholden from them but
by the hand of tyranny. [...] A full-grown horse or dog, is beyond
comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than
an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose the case
were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
- Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1823), Ch. 17: Of the Limits of the Penal Branch of Jurisprudence
- Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man
in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge
and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.
We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of
having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the
animal shall not be measured by man. They move finished and complete,
gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained,
living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are
not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net
of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the
earth.
- I believe that animals have rights which, although different from
our own, are just as inalienable. I believe animals have the right not
to have pain, fear or physical deprivation inflicted upon them by us. . .
. They have the right not to be brutalized in any way as food
resources, for entertainment or any other purpose.”
- Naturalist Roger Caras, ABC-TV News, U.S.A. (Newsweek, December 26, 1988). Quoted in Awake! magazine, published by Jehovah's Witnesses, July 8 1990.
- It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living by its purely
physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially
influence the lot of mankind.
- You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughter-house is
concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity,
expensive races, — race living at the expense of race.
- The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
- We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated
our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if
they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in
human form.
- Animals do not survive by rational thought (nor by sign languages
allegedly taught to them by psychologists). They survive through inborn
reflexes and sensory-perceptual association. They cannot reason. They
cannot learn a code of ethics. A lion is not immoral for eating a zebra
(or even for attacking a man). Predation is their natural and only means
of survival; they do not have the capacity to learn any other.
- Edwin A. Locke, author of The Prime Movers: Traits of the Great Wealth Creators (2000)
- The custom of tormenting and killing of beasts will, by degrees, harden their minds even towards men.
- John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
- What right do we have to claim, as some might, that human beings are
the only inhabitants of our planet blessed with an actual ability to be
"aware"? [...] The impression of a "conscious presence" is indeed very
strong with me when I look at a dog or a cat or, especially, when an ape
or monkey at the zoo looks at me. I do not ask that they are
"self-aware" in any strong sense (though I would guess that an element
of self-awareness can be present). All I ask is that they sometimes
simply feel!
- In consequence of the sensibility with which they are endowed, they
ought to partake of natural right; so that mankind is subjected to a
kind of obligation even toward the brutes. It appears, in fact, that if I
am bound to do no injury to my fellow-creatures, this is less because
they are rational than because they are sentient beings: and this
quality, being common both to men and beasts, ought to entitle the
latter at least to the privilege of not being wantonly ill-treated by
the former.
- As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish,
he always had the same thought: in their behaviour toward creatures, all
men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species
as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the
principle that might is right.
- The animals themselves are incapable of demanding their own
liberation, or of protesting against their condition with votes,
demonstrations, or bombs. Human beings have the power to continue to
oppress other species forever, or until we make this planet unsuitable
for living beings. Will our tyranny continue, proving that we really are
the selfish tyrants that the most cynical of poets and philosophers
have always said we are? Or will we rise to the challenge and prove our
capacity for genuine altruism by ending our ruthless exploitation of the
species in our power, not because we are forced to do so by rebels or
terrorists, but because we recognize that our position is morally
indefensible? The way in which we answer this question depends on the
way in which each one of us, individually, answers it.
- Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (1975), p. 185
- A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food;
therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely
for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.
- Leo Tolstoy, Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence (1886)
- Hold then the same view of the dog which has lost his master, which
has sought him in all the thoroughfares with cries of sorrow, which
comes into the house troubled and restless, goes downstairs, goes
upstairs; goes from room to room, finds at last in his study the master
he loves, and betokens his gladness by soft whimpers, frisks, and
caresses.
There are barbarians who seize this dog, who so greatly surpasses man
in fidelity and friendship, and nail him down to a table and dissect
him alive, to show you the Mesaraic veins! You discover in him all the
same organs of feeling as in yourself. Answer me, Mechanist, has Nature
arranged all the springs of feeling in this animal to the end that he
might not feel? Has he nerves that he may be incapable of suffering? Do
not suppose that impertinent contradiction in Nature.
- Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique portatif (1764), "Beasts"
Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Animal_rights
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