Animal Ethics Quotes

“The small family living unit lacks space, Earth, other animals, seasons, natural temperatures, and so on. The pet is either sterilized or sexually isolated, extremely limited in his exercise, deprived of almost all other animal contact, and fed with artificial foods. This is the material process which lies behind the truism the pets come to resemble their masters or mistresses. They are creatures of their owners way of life.”
― John Berger, About Looking

“It is nothing short of a miracle to be in the presence of a farm animal who has managed to reach old age. Most of their kin die before they are six months old.”
― Isa Leshko, Allowed to Grow Old: Portraits of Elderly Animals from Farm Sanctuaries

“Animals who are exploited for “organic” foods are raised, maintained, transported, and slaughtered just like their nonorganic” counterparts: They are debeaked, dehorned, detoed, castrated, and/or branded, and they are kept, transported, and slaughtered in the same deplorable conditions.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices

“I have often wondered how empathetic women have the courage to repeatedly expose themselves to trauma—entering animal labs, factory farms, and slaughterhouses to witness and record insidious treatment of nonhuman animals—while maintaining a semblance of emotional and psychological equilibrium. Authors in this anthology provide an answer: empathic people face misery head-on, not only to bring about much-needed change but as a means of coping. In a world where unconscionable violence and pervasive injustices are the norm, they have come to see activism as the lesser of two miseries. These women have found that their only hope for peace of mind is to walk straight into that pervasive misery and work for change”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

“Animals arrive at slaughter exhausted, thirsty, hungry, and terrified. Every year 100,000 factory farmed cattle arrive at slaughter injured, or too dispirited to walk; undercover investigators have repeatedly
documented downed animals who are kicked, beaten, pushed with bulldozers, and dragged from transport trucks with ropes or a chain, though they are fully conscious, in pain, and bellowing pitifully. Cows exploited in the dairy industry, because they are older and their bodies have been exhausted by perpetual pregnancy, birthing, and milking, are among the most pathetic when they arrive at slaughter.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices

“Factory farm animals cannot walk, run, stretch freely, or be part of a family or herd. True, many wild animals die from adverse conditions or are killed by predators; but animals kept in farms do not live for more than a fraction of their normal life span either. [The factory farm] deprives animals of their most basic natural activity, the search for food. The result is a life of utter boredom, with nothing at all to do but lie in a stall and eat.”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation

“I ordered breakfast. I watched someone at the next table working away at his plate of ham with eggs. I had long since come to the conclusion that man's treatment of God's creatures makes mockery of all his ideals and of the whole alleged humanism. In order for this overstuffed individual to enjoy his ham, a living creature had to be raised, dragged to its death, stabbed, tortured, scalded in hot water. The man didn't give a second's thought to the fact the pig was made of the same stuff as he and that it had to pay with suffering and death so that he could taste its flesh. I've thought more than once that when it comes to animals, every man is a Nazi.”
― Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Penitent

“Many animals flourish not in spite of the fact that they are "animals" but because they are "animals"—or even more precisely, perhaps, because they are felt to be members of our families and our communities, regardless of their species. And yet, at the very same moment, billions of animals in factory farms, many of whom are very near to or indeed exceed cats and dogs and other companion animals in the capacities we take to be relevant to standing (the ability to experience pain and suffering, anticipatory dread, emotional bonds and complex social interactions, and so on), have as horrible a life as one could imagine, also because they are "animals."

Clearly, then, the question here is not simply of the "animal" as the abjected other of the "human" tout court, but rather something like a distinction between bios and zoe that obtains within the domain of domesticated animals itself.”
― Cary Wolfe, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame

“While it is one thing to strive for a cause that fundamentally and primarily benefits you—your freedom and equality (or the freedom and equality of those you know and care about), or for your environment (on which you depend for survival)—it is quite another matter to struggle on behalf of a cause that does not benefit you directly. As social justice activists, we must remember how ardently we wish that those in power would help bring change. The oppressed wish that those in power could empathize enough to understand the wrongness of what is happening, and how much they would need and appreciate the active participation of those in power to bring about a measure of justice. With regard to farmed animals, we are the ones who are in power. We are the ones who have the power to change our consumer habits. We are the ones who either put our money down for their lives, or boycott animal products.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices

“Oppressions are linked. We cannot free human beings without freeing cows, sows, and hens along with women and men who are systematically oppressed by those in power. Rather than seek to fight our way up the patriarchal ladder, those working for social justice need to dismantle hierarchies, and cease to exploit all those who are less powerful—even if we must give up a few culinary favorites in the process. (Those who have taken up a plantbased diet for any measure of time never want for fabulous foods. From my experience, people who discover the vast array of wonderful plant-based foods that are readily available in most of our communities never look back.) Each of us decides, over the course of our daily lives, whether we will ignore the suffering of nonhuman animals who are caught in laboratories, veal crates, circuses, and slaughterhouses, or choose to invest in compassionate, healthy alternatives . . . . We choose where our money goes, and in the process, we choose whether to boycott cruelty and support change, or melt ambiguously back into the masses.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices

“We are morally required to stop systematically exploiting others, whether chimpanzees or pygmy lemurs, chickens or chinchillas. Nonhuman animals are also persons who fare better or worse depending on the way we treat them, we must begin to give them the respect and dignity that persons deserve”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Primate People: Saving Nonhuman Primates through Education, Advocacy, and Sanctuary

“Nonhuman primates have been crowded out of diminishing forests, hunted for food or “medicine,” kidnapped for the lucrative pet/tourist trade, and bred for science. As a result, every primate species on the planet—aside from human beings—is either endangered or threatened.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Primate People: Saving Nonhuman Primates through Education, Advocacy, and Sanctuary

“Might does not make right; self-interest—even desperate self-interest—does not justify exploiting others.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Primate People: Saving Nonhuman Primates through Education, Advocacy, and Sanctuary

“International trade in primates flourishes because we exploit primates for science.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Primate People: Saving Nonhuman Primates through Education, Advocacy, and Sanctuary

“Increasingly we come to understand that any difference between human and nonhuman primates does not necessarily show humans in a complimentary light.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Primate People: Saving Nonhuman Primates through Education, Advocacy, and Sanctuary

“If we are going to save endangered primates, we must first recognize that they are individuals much like human beings, who prefer to be free to live their lives independent of exploitation.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Primate People: Saving Nonhuman Primates through Education, Advocacy, and Sanctuary

“Our efforts to protect primates will be much more effective if we dismantle the artificial line that we have created between ourselves and other animals.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Primate People: Saving Nonhuman Primates through Education, Advocacy, and Sanctuary

“That animals can’t be moral agents doesn’t seem to be relevant to their status as moral patients.”
― Alastair Norcross, Puppies, Pigs, and People: Eating Meat and Marginal Cases

“And to split hairs, to claim that there is no comparison, that Treblinka was so to speak a metaphysical enterprise dedicated to nothing but death and annihilation while the meat industry is ultimately devoted to life (once its vicitms are dead, after all, it does not burn them to ash or bury them but on the contrary cuts them up and refrigerates and packs them so that they can be consumed in the comfort of our homes) is as little consoloation to those victims as it would have been - pardon the tastelesness of the following - to ask the dead of Treblinka to excuse their killers because their body fat was needed to make soap and their hair to stuff mattresses with.”
― J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals

“Perpetrator bias is likewise important […]. At the level of humanity’s systematic exploitation and abuse of non-human animals, we find no single perpetrator we can point toward, rather many partly complicit agents – the farmer, the slaughterhouse worker, the customer. This division of maleficence blinds us to the atrocities committed by this institution as a whole.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“[...]as tradições especistas resultam em uma gigantesca quantidade de sofrimento e de mortes, muitíssimo maior do que em todas as tradições que já vitimaram humanos em conjunto.”
― Luciano Carlos Cunha, Uma breve introdução à ética animal: desde as questões clássicas até o que vem sendo discutido atualmente

“[...] o reforço oculto do especismo está presente em qualquer discurso que subentenda que os danos para os animais não são razões suficientes para rejeitarmos as práticas especistas. A percepção do público geral é: "se mesmo os ativistas pensam que o sofrimento e as mortes dos animais não são suficientes para que a exploração deva ser abolida, então provavelmente não há nada de errado com prejudicar os animais".”
― Luciano Carlos Cunha, Uma breve introdução à ética animal: desde as questões clássicas até o que vem sendo discutido atualmente

“Uma visão predominante no movimento de defesa animal é a de que deveríamos deixar de prejudicar os animais não humanos com nossas práticas, mas que, em relação aos danos que sofrem em decorrência de processos naturais (como fome, sede, doenças, desastres naturais, etc.), deveríamos "deixar a natureza seguir o seu curso", e não interferir em suas vidas. Em contrapartida, os movimentos que lutam em defesa de humanos não defendem que o respeito pelos humanos deveria ser algo limitado somente a deixar de prejudicá-los com nossas práticas.”
― Luciano Carlos Cunha, Uma breve introdução à ética animal: desde as questões clássicas até o que vem sendo discutido atualmente