©2008-2009 Roedy Green, Canadian Mind Products
For millions of years, on average, one species became extinct every century.…We are now heaving more than a thousand different species of animals and plants off the planet every year.
~ Douglas Adams (born: 1952-03-11 died: 2001-05-11 at age: 49), author of Last Chance to See
It’s a moral question about whether we have the right to exterminate species.
~ Sir David Attenborough (born: 1926-05-08 age: 83)
The question is not, ‘Can they reason?’ nor, ‘Can they talk?’ but rather, ‘Can they suffer?‘
~ Jeremy Bentham (born: 1748-02-05 died: 1832-06-06 at age: 84)
I despise and abhor the pleas on behalf of that infamous practice, vivisection… I would rather submit to the worst of deaths, so far as pain goes, than have a single dog or cat tortured to death on the pretense of sparing me a twinge or two.
~ Robert Browning (born: 1812-05-07 died: 1889-12-12 at age: 77)
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
~ Samuel Butler (born: 1835-12-04 died: 1902-06-18 at age: 66)
The art of angling, the cruelest, the coldest, and the stupidest of pretended sports.
~ Lord George Gordon Byron (born: 1788-01-22 died: 1824-04-19 at age: 36)
Takeover consists in diverting some fraction of the earth’s life-supporting capacity from supporting other kinds of life to supporting our kind. Our pre-Sapiens ancestors, with their simple stone tools and fire, took over our for human use, organic materials that would otherwise have been consumed by insects, carnivores or bacteria. From about 10,000 years ago, our earliest horticulturalist ancestors began take over land upon which to grow crops for human consumption. That land would otherwise have supported trees, shrubs or wild grasses and all the animals dependent thereon — but fewer humans. As the expanding generations replaced each other, Homo sapiens took over more and more of the surface of this planet, essentially at the expense of its other inhabitants.
~ William Catton Jr. (born: 1926-01-15 age: 83), Overshoot 1980
From the point of view of the other species on earth, we humans are as welcome as Viking invaders or pancreas cancer.
Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he’s been given. But up to now he hasn’t been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild lifes become extinct, the climate’s ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.
~ Anton Chekhov (born: 1860-01-29 died: 1904-07-15 at age: 44)
You are either an activist or an inactivist.
~ The Cove 2009 A documentary about Japan’s secret atrocities against dolphins.
Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.
~ Charles Darwin (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1882-04-19 at age: 73)
There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties… The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.
~ Charles Darwin (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1882-04-19 at age: 73)
I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it’s such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her.
~ Ellen DeGeneres (born: 1958-01-26 age: 51)
Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.
~ Thomas Alva Edison (born: 1847-02-11 died: 1931-10-18 at age: 84)
If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)
Humanity is the cancer of nature.
~ Dave Foreman (born: 1947 age: 62) founder of Earth First
Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow-creatures is amusing in itself.
~ James Anthony Froude (born: 1818-04-23 died: 1894-10-20 at age: 76) 1886.This is not quite true. Orcas will sometimes play with a seal tossing it about like a football. Wolves will sometimes kill more than they can consume. Cats will sometimes play with a mouse letting it escape then catching it again.
To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. The more helpless the creature, the more that it is entitled to protection by man from the cruelty of man.
~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)
Deer hunting would be fine sport, if only the deer had guns.
~ William S. Gilbert (born: 1836-11-18 died: 1911-05-29 at age: 74) of Gilbert and Sullivan
Killing animals for sport, for pleasure, for adventure, and for hides and furs is a phenomena which is at once disgusting and distressing. There is no justification in indulging is such acts of brutality.
~ Tenzin Gyatso (born: 1935-07-06 age: 74) the fourteenth Dalai Lama
I am not basically a conservationist. When the last great whale is slaughtered, as it surely will be, the whales’ suffering will be over. This is not the whales’ loss, but man’s. I am not concerned about the wiping out of a species — this is man’s folly — I have only one concern, the suffering which we deliberately inflict upon animals whilst they live.
~ Clive Hollands (born: 1929 age: 80)
Men! The only animal in the world to fear.
~ David Herbert Lawrence (born: 1885-09-11 died: 1930-03-02 at age: 44)
An individual animal doesn’t care if its species is facing extinction — it cares if it is feeling pain.
~ Ronnie Lee (born: 1951 age: 58)
Nature provides an infant with a foreskin for protection and pleasure. The tiny foreskin of a baby boy becomes a significant mobile sheath of highly erogenous skin on an adult man. Nowhere else on his body is the skin so mobile and sensate. Infant circumcision removes this, without consent from the patient, and in its place leaves a scar.
~ James Loewen (born: 1954-03-26 age: 55) National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource
The idea that we would operate and amputate healthy tissue from a baby, from an unconsenting minor, to supposedly prevent some hypothetical disease, that goes against the Hippocratic oath.
~ James Loewen (born: 1954-03-26 age: 55) National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource
Out of 135 criminals, including robbers and rapists, 118 admitted that when they were children they burned, hanged and stabbed domestic animals.
~ Ogonyok Magazine 1979. Consider George W. Bush and his childhood tortures of frogs.
Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: ‘Because the animals are like us.’ Ask the experimenters why it is morally OK to experiment on animals, and the answer is: ‘Because the animals are not like us.’ Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction.
~ Professor Charles R. Magel (born: 1920 age: 89)
Cruelty has cursed the human family for countless ages. It is almost impossible for one to be cruel to animals and kind to humans. If children are permitted to be cruel to their pets and other animals, they easily learn to get the same pleasure from the misery of fellow-humans. Such tendencies can easily lead to crime.
~ Frederic A. McGrand (born: 1895-07-05 died: 1988-09-03 at age: 93)
The reasons for legal intervention in favour of children apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of mankind — the lower animals.
~ John Stuart Mill (born: 1806-05-20 died: 1873-05-08 at age: 66)
When it comes to having a central nervous system, and the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.
~ Ingrid Newkirk (born: 1949-06-11 age: 60)
Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished for ever. Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46) Animal Farm
Because of the urban sprawl crisis in the United States, wild animals are forced to live in closer proximity with humans. With few alternatives available, they have no choice but to enter our homes, parks, and even downtown areas in search of food and shelter. When they do, homeowners, communities, municipalities, and state agencies often hire nuisance wildlife control operators or U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services to use cruel, archaic methods, such as injurious traps and poisons, to resolve perceived conflicts with these animals. Ducks and geese are secretly shot, gassed, and even bludgeoned to death with baseball bats. Beavers are caught and drowned in body-gripping traps or are sealed up alive in their own homes. Animals of all kinds are simply left to die from injuries or starvation.
~ PETA People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
In a perfect world, animals would be free to live their lives to the fullest: raising their young, enjoying their native environments, and following their natural instincts. However, domesticated dogs and cats cannot survive ‘free’ in our concrete jungles, so we must take as good care of them as possible. People with the time, money, love, and patience to make a lifetime commitment to an animal can make an enormous difference by adopting from shelters or rescuing animals from a perilous life on the street. But it is also important to stop manufacturing ‘pets’, thereby perpetuating a class of animals forced to rely on humans to survive.
~ PETA People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Companion Animals: Pets or Prisoners?
Land ’O Lakes mistreats cows. Cows were electro-shocked, kicked, and left to die slowly and painfully for days without veterinary care.
~ PETA People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
Many household products and cosmetics companies still pump their products into animals’ stomachs, rub them onto their skin, squirt them into their eyes, or force animals to inhale them as aerosol sprays. Charities such as the March of Dimes use donations from private citizens to fund experiments on animals, and the FDA requires all drugs to be tested on animals. However, animals differ from humans significantly, making animal drug tests unreliable and dangerous. New research methods, such as computer models, cell cultures, and human studies are more accurate, less expensive, and much more humane.
~ PETA People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
I urge you to ask yourself just how honorable it is to preside over the abuse and suffering of animals.
~ Richard Pryor (born: 1940-12-01 died: 2005-12-10 at age: 65)
Hunting is not a sport. In a sport, both sides should know they’re in the game.
~ Paul Rodriguez (born: 1955-01-19 age: 54)
A diet of pure grain is no more suitable for a cow or a chicken than it is for a human. Meat producers tout it as if it were preferable to their natural diets.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
A single cat’s descendants would number 950,000 in ten years if they did not die from euthanasia or homelessness. If you don’t spay your cat, your are necessarily condemning her descendants to an early death.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
Canadian sealers enjoy hacking baby seals to death with a hook because they want to punish the seals for stealing their fish. They forget that long before the seal hunt, cod were so abundant you could ‘walk across their backs’. Seals selectively eat the weak and diseased fish thus improving the stocks.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
Earthworms like to congregate in balls in coffee grounds.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)Does this mean that coffee is a more healthful food than generally presumed, or that earthworms too like to get buzzed?
Egg producers advertise their eggs come from veggie fed chickens, as if a diet of pure grain were natural and healthful for a chicken. Chickens left to their own devices eat all manner of shoots, seeds, insects and worms they find while scratching in the dirt.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
Free range eggs taste better and look better. You give up nothing but cruelty.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
If a man treated a puppy the way farmers treat chickens, mobs would burn down his house.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
If I were a cow, I would far sooner be permitted to graze outside in a pasture for all but the last hours of my life than have some santimonious Christian offer a prayer for me after he had butchered me after keeping me confined in a filthy feed lot my entire life.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
Imagine going to a cocktail party with 200 guests, each zooming around at 65 km/hr (40.39 mph), and maintaining a conversation with each of them simultaneously, all talking at once. Dolphins do it all the time. One trick they use to help sort it all out is putting the name of the recipient on the front of each phrase, much the way a computer does when talking on a LAN. The closest a human would come is sitting on a bus texting with many friends at once.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
Imagine if some advanced species decided to interfere with human reproduction, selecting the most grossly fat males as the only suitable mates then later forbidding copulation altogether, managing all reproduction with artificial insemination. Might we humans harbour a little resentment? It would be hypocritical of us to complain since this is what we have done to pigs and cattle.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
Imagine the outrage at a reality TV show where people shot puppies and kittens with arrows and guns, and inserted hooks in their mouths and dragged them behind vehicles. These shows are common, except that the animals selected for maltreatment are deer, moose, ducks and fish.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
In Australia, each year coconuts kill 25 people and sharks 10. Yet you don’t see hunters out exterminating coconuts on the pretext of protecting people.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
In Banff, rangers use sheepdogs to run elk off their golf course. Of course, from the elk point of view, the humans invaded their pasture and built a golf course.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
In the days of slavery, slave-produced cotton was cheaper and out-competed cotton produced by paid labourers. Today, ‘ordinary’ eggs produced by confining chickens with their feet wired to the bottom of tiny cages out-compete free range eggs. Eggs ought to be labeled with a photo of how they were produced, then, if that does not stop the trade in cruel eggs, all but free range eggs should be made illegal for the same reason we abolished slavery.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
Man has pushed elephants off almost their entire original range so that now only a handful of elephants remain. Yet man has the gall to term elephants “crop raiders”, and detusk or shoot them, as if the elephants were the ones stealing.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
Of course animals have extra sensory perception, but it is only extra-sensory relative to humans. To dolphins ultrasound is sensory, to elephants infrasound is sensory, and to dogs the ability to detect emotions in others through enhanced sense of smell is no magic.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
People who would never dream of torturing an animal will casually discard plastic rings like the one that deformed this snapping turtle.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
People who would never dream of torturing an creature will casually discard plastic rings like the one that severed this fish.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
So-called sportsmen have known for years that lead is poisonous, but they still use it for buckshot. Now many lakes are fatal for ducks who land there because the sediments are carpeted in lead.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
So-called sportsmen have known for years that lead is poisonous, but they continue to use it for fishing weights.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
The Makah claim a right to kill whales because their ancestors did. By that reasoning, modern day descendants of the Aztecs have the right to revive child sacrifice; Americans have the right to revive slavery; and Indonesians have the right to revive head-hunting.The notion that sacrificing a whale would somehow help the Makah’s social ills including drug addiction, poverty and alcoholism is as nutty as thinking yanking the heart out of a child and throwing it into a volcano would work too. Whale sacrifice is an ill-considered distraction from doing something truly useful.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
There was a time in recent memory when physicians believed babies could not feel pain. They performed open heart surgery and circumcisions on the them without any anaesthesia.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)I think it is time we presumed, until proven otherwise, that any creature that cries or writhes to avoid a painful stimulus is indeed feeling pain.
To be consistent, if you disapprove of buying and selling humans or human babies, you should also oppose the buying and selling creatures of other species, especially fellow intelligent species like whales, dolphins and elephants.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
What would you think of a man who stole the homes of his relatives and evicted them? What would you think of a man who drove his relatives off the lands they used to feed themselves, leaving them to starve to death? What would you think of a species that threw other species after species into permanent extinction by stealing their habitat? What you would think of a species so conceited that it believed the very creator of he universe gave them title to the entire planet to do with as they pleased without any concern for their cousins on the tree of life?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)Man does this even to species with larger brains than he has, such as elephants, whales and dolphins.
When humans talk of inter-species communication they usually mean the art of bullying animals to perform tricks. True communication should also include the ability read an animal’s messages about its desires the same as you would inquire about the needs of a human friend.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
When I was high school, the biology teacher, Mr. Jackson cut the bottom shell off a live turtle and attached its heart to a lever that charted the twitchings on a graph. I told everyone he was a sadist. Mr. Mackenzie, the principal, called me down to his office and gently chastised me for slandering a teacher. Mr. Jackson reassured me The turtle feels no pain.’ I countered How you know? He replied It’s spinal nerves are cut. I said Well, it sure looks as if it is in pain. It is struggling frantically to right itself. He responded That is just a reflex.’ He offered Using the turtle will save many lives. This turtle will last all day. Had I used frogs, I would have had to kill one for each class I accused Your experiment has no point. Everyone already knows that hearts beat He said You are planning a career in biology. You will have to get used to this I said If that’s what it means to be a biologist I want no part of it. Since I am writing this years later, I can compose a better retort: If you are so sure this will not hurt, how about I poke a scalpel into the back of your neck and cut your spinal nerves. Then you can reassure me, based on evidence, that the procedure is painless. From my personal experience, nerves hurt like the blazes when you cut them. Turtle nerves and human nerves are almost identical.That was the last day of my biology career and my first day of animal rights advocacy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
When I was in high school, my teachers arranged a number of field trips to the local University Of BC. On one of the trips, we visited a zoologist who had a filthy aquarium full of African frogs. One of them was dead and floating on the surface. It was clear from the researcher’s responses to my questions that he was completely indifferent to the welfare of the frogs, and that he was proud of this indifference. I was baffled. I felt intense affection for small fish, amphibians and reptiles. How could he be so curious about his frogs and yet not care about them?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
Why is it Americans consider killing creatures and watching them writhe in death agony the most exciting and wholesome possible activity for a father and son to share?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and ‘animals’ is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.
~ Carl Sagan (born: 1934-11-09 died: 1996-12-20 at age: 62)
The extinction of an animal is an insult to God.
~ Jewish saying
The assumption that animals are without rights, and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer (born: 1788-02-22 died: 1860-09-21 at age: 72)
The earth does not belong to us.
We belong to the earth.
~ Chief Seattle (born: 1786 died: 1866-06-07 at age: 80) 1834
Animals are my friends… and I don’t eat my friends.
~ George Bernard Shaw (born: 1856-07-26 died: 1950-11-02 at age: 94)
Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research.
~ George Bernard Shaw (born: 1856-07-26 died: 1950-11-02 at age: 94)
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
~ George Bernard Shaw (born: 1856-07-26 died: 1950-11-02 at age: 94)
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.
~ Isaac Bashevis Singer (born: 1904-11-21 died: 1991-07-24 at age: 86)
There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.
~ Isaac Bashevis Singer (born: 1904-11-21 died: 1991-07-24 at age: 86)
All the arguments to prove man’s superiority can not shatter this hard fact: In suffering, the animals are our equals.
~ Peter Singer (born: 1946-07-06 age: 63)
If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.
~ St Francis of Assisi (born: 1181 died: 1226-10-03 at age: 45)
The basis of all animal rights should be the Golden Rule: we should treat them as we would wish them to treat us, were any other species in our dominant position.
~ Christine Stevens founder of the Animal Welfare Institute
We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of fear and pain.
~ Robert Louis Stevenson (born: 1850-11-13 died: 1894-12-03 at age: 44)
The fact of the matter is that today, stuff-selling mega-corporations have a huge influence on our daily lives. And because of the competitive nature of our global economy, these corporations are generally only concerned with one thing — the bottom line. That is, maximising profit, regardless of the social or environmental costs.
~ Dr. David Suzuki (born: 1936-03-24 age: 73)
What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit to their cruelty.
~ Leo Tolstoy (born: 1828-09-09 died: 1910-11-07 at age: 82)
According to the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, fish have feelings too. Whenever my sons go fishing they always tell me, ‘Dad it doesn’t hurt a fish to get hooked.’ Well I watch and I see and I believe it’s painful for the fish.
~ Donald Trump (born: 1946-06-14 age: 63)
It is just like man’s vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.
~ Mark Twain (born: 1835-11-30 died: 1910-04-21 at age: 74)
The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.
~ Alice Walker (born: 1944-02-09 age: 65)
Atlantic puffins starve to death so that Danish chickens can feast on their fish.
~ Captain Paul Watson (born: 1950-12-02 age: 58)
North American cats eat more fish than all the world’s seals put together, yet we lay the blame on the seals for the declining fish stocks.
~ Captain Paul Watson (born: 1950-12-02 age: 58)
Pigs eat more tuna that all the planet’s sharks combined.
~ Captain Paul Watson (born: 1950-12-02 age: 58)
Unlike aboriginal hunters, commercial seal hunters leave the carcasses on the ice to rot.
~ Captain Paul Watson (born: 1950-12-02 age: 58)
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