quotations about animals
People must have renounced, it seems to me, all natural intelligence to dare to advance that animals are but animated machines. ... Such people can never have observed with attention the character of animals, not to have distinguished among them the different voices of need, of suffering, of joy, of pain, of love, of anger, and of all their affections. It would be very strange that they should express so well what they could not feel.
VOLTAIRE
Traite de la Tolerance a l' Occasion de la Morte de Jean Calas, 1763
Our many domestic animals have played an important role in the civilization of man. Without them--especially the dog, the horse, the cow, and the sheep--man's development onward and upward would have been slow and uncertain. Those countries in which the problem of domestication did not enter remained ever near to barbarism.
C. W. BURKETT
preface, Our Domestic Animals
Animals are less sensitive than human beings because the, living only in the present, lack the reflection on the past and future that plays so great a role in the subjective lives of people; yet where physical pain is involved, we ought to take the greatest care not to cause needless anguish to animals.
DAVID FRASER
Understanding Animal Welfare
When animals are no longer colonized and appropriated by us, we can reach out to our evolutionary cousins. Perhaps then the ancient hope for a deeper emotional connection across the species barrier, for closeness and participation in a realm of feelings now beyond our imagination, will be realized.
JEFFREY MOUSSAIEFF MASSON & SUSAN MCCARTHY
When Elephants Weep
Society grants animals rights not because animals are like us or because animals would demand them, but because we humans feel empathy with animals. We attribute to them that they can suffer and that they deserve as living creatures not to suffer.
ARMIN KRISHNAN
Killer Robots
Now by these ... means one can also know the difference between men and beasts. For it is rather remarkable that there are no men so dull and so stupid (excluding not even the insane), that they are incapable of arranging various words together and of composing from them a discourse by means of which they might make their thoughts understood, and that, on the other hand, there is no other animal at all, however perfect and pedigreed it may be, that does the like. This does not happen because they lack the organs, for one sees that magpies and parrots can utter words just as we can, and yet they cannot speak as we do, that is to say, by testifying to the fact that they are thinking about what they are saying; on the other hand, men born deaf and dumb, who are deprived of the organs that aid others in speaking just as much as, or more than the beasts are wont to invent for themselves various signs by means of which they make themselves understood to those who, being with them on a regular basis, have the time to learn their language. And this attests not merely to the fact that beasts have less reason than men but that they have none at all.
RENE DESCARTES
Discourse on the Method for Conducting One's Reason
Unlike some people who have experienced the loss of an animal, I did not believe, even for a moment, that I would never get another.... I did know full well that there were just too many animals out there in need of homes for me to take what I have always regarded as the self-indulgent road of saying the heartbreak of the loss of an animal was too much ever to want to go through with it again. To me, such an admission brought up the far more powerful admission that all the wonderful times you had with your animal were not worth the unhappiness at the end.
CLEVELAND AMORY
The Cat Who Came for Christmas
The intelligences that are animals are here from many planetary sources. They have been seeded here to be amongst you. They have been seeded as you have been seeded. Different classes of animal have existed elsewhere for as long as long as you have existed -- it is only in what is considered to be your recent times that an influx of various types of species of animal have been brought here and allowed to evolve and spread around you and amongst you. This is after all one grand and interesting experiment.
SHANE MCMINN
Spirituality from the Stars
Ugly animals have it rough. We're more likely to eat them or let them go extinct, and less likely to adopt them from animal shelters.
JOSHUA A. KRISCH
"These Animals Are So Ugly That Scientists Don't Care About Them", Vocativ, March 9, 2016
If animals are things, then, since humans are animals, humans are also just things.
APATHYNIHILISM
user comment, "Are Animals 'Things'?", Harvard Magazine, March/April 2016
Animals have one thing that puts them way ahead of people: they don't dissemble, and you don't have to pretend in front of them.
IVAN KLIMA
Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light
To those of you who believe animals are disposable -- they are not! Please stop dumping your animals and take responsibility for them. Our shelter will always be fighting an uphill battle if we do not come together and treat our companion animals with the dignity they deserve.
MA SOUPISET
"Animals are not disposable", San Angelo Standard Times, March 9, 2016
If we're not supposed to eat animals ... how come they're made out of meat?
ANONYMOUS
Humans are a self-absorbed species. Sometimes we forget that we share this planet with millions of other creatures. While we pride ourselves on our uniqueness, a number of recent studies reveal that our animal friends are more like us--or at least more attuned to our ways--than might be expected.
ARI PHILLIPS
"Science is rapidly revealing just how smart animals are", Fusion, February 11, 2016
Zoos teach us that animals are like machine parts: separable, replaceable, interchangeable. They teach us that there is no web of life, that you can remove one part and put it into a box and still have that part. But that is all wrong.... Zoos teach us implicitly that animals need to be managed, that they can't survive without us. They are our dependents, not our teachers, our neighbors, our betters, our equals, our friends, our gods. They are ours. We must assume the interspecies version of the white man's burden, and out of the goodness of our hearts we must benevolently control their lives. We must "rescue them from the wild."
DERRICK JENSEN & KAREN TWEEDY-HOLMES
Thought to Exist in the Wild
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
Oceana
What do you see when you look at an animal? A kindred spirit, a creature much like you; but possibly, the very next moment, a beast, a stranger, just an animal. Animals are like those pictures that we see as one thing and then another; the duck that suddenly becomes a rabbit; the wine glass that's also an old woman in profile. Now the pig is a fellow creature, like Wilbur in Charlotte's Web. Now he's pork.
JEAN KAZEZ
Animalkind
My animals are a pain the backside.... I wake up most mornings with Abby, the cat, sitting on my chest, and Ruby, the dog, sitting next to me staring a hole through me, each trying to use their telepathic powers to encourage me to get up to feed them breakfast. Per the norm, I feed them before I feed myself.
JODY FULLER
"My animals are a pain in my backside", The LaFayette Sun, February 27, 2016
The fact that the lower animals are excited by the same emotions as ourselves is so well established, that it will not be necessary to weary the reader by many details. Terror acts in the same manner on them as on us, causing the muscles to tremble, the heart to palpitate, the sphincters to be relaxed, and the hair to stand on end. Suspicion, the offspring of fear, is eminently characteristic of most wild animals. Courage and timidity are extremely variable qualities in the individuals of the same species, as is plainly seen in our dogs. Some dogs and horses are ill-tempered, and easily turn sulky; others are good-tempered; and these qualities are certainly inherited. Everyone knows how liable animals are to furious rage, and how plainly they show it.
CHARLES DARWIN
On the Origin of the Species
Remember: Animals are not our selfie props. If there's any risk that your photo is going to hurt or stress an animal, it's not worth it.
ANGELA HENDERSON
"Dear Everyone, Animals Are Not Selfie Props", PeTA, February 22, 2016