Animals: Rights and Wrongs

With a special nod to Matthew Scully

An Offensive Collection

I suppose I am among the very few vegetarian Christian libertarians. I believe in freedom. I also believe in protecting those who cannot protect themselves. Here are some daunting quotes to back up my opinions. I normally believe I am right; after all, I wouldn't express an opinion if I doubted it. But this is different. How anyone can look and read and think, and then turn away, is beyond me. Probably only the already converted are looking, but if not, do you really want this stain on you?

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A dead cow or sheep lying in the pasture is recognized as carrion. The same sort of carcass dressed and hung up in a butcher's stall passes as food.
-- J.H. Kellogg

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

And when I think of the suffering of the creatures in our factory farms, laboratories, puppy mills, or of any animal neglected or mistreated by man, for me there is no more powerful question than to ask: "What would the Good Shepherd think of this?"
-- Matthew Scully

Animals are more than ever a test of our character, of mankind's capacity for empathy and for decent, honorable conduct and faithful stewardship.... We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality, but in a sense because they don't; because they all stand unequal and powerless before us.
-- Matthew Scully

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.
-- Isaac Bashevis Singer

"Calves are adorable," as columnist David Plotz expressed it in Slate magazine, "but veal is delicious. God gave man dominion over the beasts of the Earth (and) if any animal has economic utility, we should farm it." Actually, if we are going to get pious about it, God gave us lots of things, and one of them is conscience. Veal, no matter what seasonings cover it, or what sanctimony defends it, does not carry the "taste of elegance." Veal carries, as Alice Walker observes, "the taste of a bitter life."
-- Matthew Scully

Complaints about the smell of our factory farms, and only the smell, are the final insult...We notice these places, many of us, only when the odors reach our homes and new subdivisions, affecting our own quality of life. We create these animals for our profit and pleasure, playing with their genes, violating their dignity as living creatures, forcing them to lie and live in their own urine and excrement, turning pens into penitentiaries and frustrating their every desire except what is needed to keep them breathing and breeding. And then we complain about the smell.
-- Matthew Scully

Do we, as humans, having an ability to reason and to communicate abstract ideas verbally and in writing, and to form ethical and moral judgments using the accumulated knowledge of the ages, have the right to take the lives of other sentient organisms, particularly when we are not forced to do so by hunger or dietary need, but rather do so for the somewhat frivolous reason that we like the taste of meat? In essence, should we know better?
-- Peter Cheeke

Flesh-eating is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to moral feeling -- killing.
-- Leo Tolstoy

Having granted some protections to some animals, we are constantly confronted with the logic of our own laws, troubled by perfectly rational connections between the random or "wanton" acts of cruelty the law forbids and the systematic, institutional cruelties it still permits. If this animal is to be protected, why not his identical one, too?
-- Matthew Scully

I do not want to make my stomach a graveyard of dead animals.
-- George Bernard Shaw

I don`t hold animals superior or even equal to humans. The whole case for behaving decently to animals rests on the fact that we are the superior species. We are the species uniquely capable of imagination, rationality, and moral choice - and that is precisely why we are under an obligation to recognize and respect the rights of animals.
-- Brigid Brophy

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian. We feel better about ourselves and better about the animals, knowing we're not contributing to their pain.
-- Paul and Linda McCartney

If you declare that you are naturally designed for such a diet, then first kill for yourself what you want to eat. Do it, however, only through your own resources, unaided by cleaver or cudgel or any kind of ax.
-- Plutarch

I know a "crime against nature" when I see one. It is usually a sign of crimes against nature that we cannot bear to see them at all, that we recoil and hide our eyes, and no one has cringed at the sight of a soybean factory.
-- Matthew Scully

I know, in my soul, that to eat a creature who is raised to be eaten, and who never has a chance to be a real being, is unhealthy. It's like...you're just eating misery. You're eating a bitter life.
-- Alice Walker

I look my age. It is the other people who look older than they are. What can you expect from people who eat corpses?
-- George Bernard Shaw

In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses. And, in a population that is all educated, and at about the same level of physical refinement, it is practically impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig... I can still remember as a boy the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughterhouse.
-- H.G. Wells

In fact, if one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people.
-- Ruth Harrison

In protecting animals, it is always just one step from the mainstream to the fringe. To condemn the wrong is obvious, to suggest its abolition radical.
-- Matthew Scully

I think there will come a time, and this is down the road a great many years, when civilized people will look back in horror on our generation and the ones that have preceded it: the idea that we should eat other living things running around on four legs, that we should raise them just for the purpose of killing them! The people of the future will say, 'meat-eaters!' in disgust and regard us in the same way that we regard cannibals and cannibalism.
-- Dennis Weaver

It ill becomes us to invoke in our daily prayers the blessings of God, the Compassionate, if we in turn will not practice elementary compassion towards our fellow creatures.
-- Mohandas Gandhi

[I]t is difficult to picture the great Creator conceiving of a program of one creature (which He has made) using another living creature for purposes of experimentation. There must be other, less cruel ways of obtaining knowledge.
-- Adlai Stevenson

It's also worth recalling that people can agree on the same objectives for different reasons: A secular philosopher like Peter Singer can oppose factory farming because it's unethical by his theories of justice. An environmentalist can oppose factory farming because it's reckless stewardship. A conservative can oppose factory farming because it is destructive to small farmers and to the decent ethic of husbandry those farmers live by. A religious person can oppose factory farming because it is degrading to both man and animal -- an offense to God.
-- Matthew Scully

My mother thought it would make us feel better to know animals had no souls and thus their deaths were not to be taken seriously. But it didn't help and when I think of some of the animals I've known, I wonder. The only really "soulful" eyes in the world belong to the dog or cat who sits on your lap or at your feet commiserating when you cry.
-- Liz Smith

My refusing to eat flesh occasioned an inconveniency, and I was frequently chided for my singularity, but, with this lighter repast, I made the greater progress, for greater clearness of head and quicker comprehension
-- Benjamin Franklin

Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all living beings, we are all savages.
-- Thomas Edison

Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson

Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more.
-- Franz Kafka (While admiring fish in an aquarium)

People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.
-- Isaac Bashevis Singer

Poor animals! How jealously they guard their pathetic bodies... that which to us is merely an evening's meal, but to them is life itself.
-- T. Casey Brennan

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men.
-- Alice Walker

The factory farm is an economic necessity, cuts costs for the consumer, unavoidable in the global economy, a fact of life, a way of life, a livelihood, blah blah blah, all this to justify an obvious moral evil so sickening and horrendous it would leave us ashen, producing goods now replaceable, and employing people who could be making those alternative products instead. All this so we can have our accustomed veal or lamb or fried chicken or pork chop or hot dog at the ballpark.
-- Matthew Scully

[T]he standard vegetarian argument that the average person eats meat, and yet could not bear to see how it was produced, actually speaks well for the average person. Imagine a world in which most people enjoyed hearing and seeing the details.
-- Matthew Scully

The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.
-- Leonardo da Vinci

Torturing animals to prolong human life has separated science from the most important thing that life has produced - the human conscience.
-- John Cowper Powys

Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places! I have since an early age abjured the use of meat...
-- Leonardo da Vinci

Various philosophers and religious leaders tried to convince their disciples and followers that animals are nothing more than machines without a soul, without feelings. However, anyone who has ever lived with an animal--be it a dog, a bird, or even a mouse--knows that this theory is a brazen lie, invented to justify cruelty.
-- Isaac Bashevis Singer

We are all God's creatures--that we pray to God for mercy and justice while we continue to eat the flesh of animals that are slaughtered on our account is not consistent.
-- Isaac Bashevis Singer

We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson

We have enslaved the rest of animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.
-- William Inge

We have found ways never before imagined to torture and maim animals and make their lives a misery, almost a living hell for many thousands locked in cages in the multinational food industry, in government establishments devoted to finding the newest and best weapons for humans to kill each other, and in laboratories where often the most important thing being researched is the latest in lipstick or face cream.
-- David Oderberg

We pray on Sundays that we may have light
To guide our footsteps on the path we tread;
We are sick of war, we don't want to fight,
And yet we gorge ourselves upon the dead.
-- George Bernard Shaw

When a man's love of finery clouds his moral judgment, that is vanity. When he lets a demanding palate make his moral choices, that is gluttony. When he ascribes the divine will to his own whims, that is pride. And when he gets angry at being reminded of animal suffering that his own daily choices might help avoid, that is moral cowardice.
-- Matthew Scully

When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man, we call him a vandal. When he wantonly destroys one of the works of God, we call him a sportsman.
-- Joseph Wood Krutch

You can't eat your friends and have them too.
-- Franz Kafka

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed to the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the rabbit and plays with the apple, I'll buy you a new car.
-- Harvey Diamond

Your science may torture all it likes with your precious license, but the vengeance of Heaven will fall on your race. More will perish because of science than will live because of it.
-- John Cowper Powys