100+ Animal Liberation Quotes | InspiringQuotes.us

source: "Getting from A to Z: Why Animal Activists Should Support Incremental Reforms to Help Animals" by Bruce Friedrich, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 21, 2011.

topic: Moving, Animal, Rights, Animal Liberation, Animal Rights Activists

Being kind to animals is not enough. Avoiding cruelty is not enough. Housing animals in more comfortable, larger cages is not enough. Whether we exploit animals to eat, to wear, to entertain us, or to learn, the truth of animal rights requires empty cages, not larger cages.

- Tom Regan

topic: Animal, Rights, Be Kind, Animal Abuse, Animal Liberation

All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals.

- Peter Singer

source: "Peter Singer" by Ed Vulliamy, www.theguardian.com. February 14, 2009.

topic: Encouragement, Animal, Equality, Shattering, Sufferers

I'm in favor of animal liberation. Why? Because I'm an animal.

- Edward Abbey

topic: Animal, Favors, Liberation, Animal Liberation

To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada, while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apertheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.

- Peter Singer

source: "Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals". Book by Peter Singer, 1975.

topic: Mother, Dog, Baby, South Korea, Seals

As for cages themselves, an ordinary citizen who kept dogs in similar conditions for their entire lives would risk prosecution for cruelty. A pig producer who keeps an animal of comparable intelligence in this manner, however, is more likely to be rewarded with a tax concession or, in some countries, a direct government subsidy.

- Peter Singer

topic: Country, Dog, Animal, Ordinary Citizens, Prosecution

The big difference between animal liberation activists and other so-called 'terrorists' is the targets; no innocent victims are ever targeted in animal lib campaigns. If you are not abusing and exploiting animals, there is no need to fear for one's safety.

- Jerry Vlasak

topic: Animal, Differences, Safety, Innocent Victims, Animal Liberation

If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?

- Peter Singer

source: Peter Singer (2015). “Animal Liberation”, p.31, Random House

topic: Animal, Doe, Use, Animal Liberation, Possessing

In a world where so much that is wild and free has been lost to us, we must leave these beautiful animals free to swim as they will and must. They do us no harm and wish us none and we should let them alone.

- Ric O'Barry

topic: Beauty, Beautiful, Nature, Animal Kingdom, Animal Liberation

Animal liberation is also human liberation. Animal liberationists care about the quality of life for all. We recognize our kinship with all feeling beings. We identify with the powerless and the vulnerable, the victims, all those dominated, oppressed and exploited. And it is the non-human animals whose suffering is the most intense, widespread, expanding, systematic and socially sanctioned of all.

- Henry Spira

topic: Animal, Feelings, Suffering, Animal Liberation

Should one break in and free the animals? That is illegal, but the obligation to obey the law is not absolute. It was justifiably broken by those who helped runaway slaves in the American South, to mention only one possible parallel.

- Peter Singer

topic: Animal, Law, Broken, Animal Liberation

The statement "I am in pain" may be one piece of evidence for the conclusion that the speaker is in pain, but it is not the only possible evidence, and since people sometimes tell lies, not even the best possible evidence. Even if there were stronger grounds for refusing to attribute pain to those who do not have language, the consequences of this refusal might lead us to reject the conclusion. Human infants and young children are unable to use language. Are we to deny that a year-old child can suffer?

- Peter Singer

source: Peter Singer (1975). “Animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals”

topic: Children, Pain, Lying, One Piece, Animal Liberation

What is there about the notion of a person, at law, that makes every living member of the species Homo sapiens a person, irrespective of their mental capacities, but excludes every nonhuman animal - again, irrespective of their mental capacities?

- Peter Singer

topic: Animal, Law, Capacity, Animal Liberation, Homo Sapiens

Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. Sexists violate the principle of equality by favoring the interests of their own sex. Similarly, speciesists allow the interests of their own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is identical in each case.

- Peter Singer

topic: Sex, Animal, Race, Speciesism, Animal Liberation

If animals are no longer quite outside the moral sphere, they are still in a special section near the outer rim. Their interests are allowed to count only when they do not clash with human interests. If there is a clash - even a clash between a lifetime of suffering for a nonhuman animal and the gastronomic preference of a human being - the interests of the nonhuman are disregarded. The moral attitudes of the past are too deeply embedded in our thought and our practices to be upset by a mere change in our knowledge of ourselves and of other animals.

- Peter Singer

source: Peter Singer (2015). “Animal Liberation”, p.195, Random House

topic: Attitude, Animal, Past, Disregarded, Animal Liberation

It is an indication of the extent to which people are now isolated from the animals they eat that children brought up on storybooks that lead them to think of a farm as a place where animals wander around freely in idyllic conditions might be able to live out their entire lives without ever being forced to revise this rosy image.

- Peter Singer

topic: Children, Animal, Thinking, Idyllic, Rosy

There has been opposition to experimenting on animals for a long time. This opposition has made little headway because experimenters, backed by commercial firms that profit by supplying laboratory animals and equipment, have been able to convince legislators and the public that opposition comes from uninformed fanatics who consider the interests of animals more important than the interests of human beings.

- Peter Singer

topic: Animal, Long, Important, Animal Liberation

People tend to care about dogs because they generally have more experience with dogs as companions; but other animals are as capable of suffering as dogs are. Few people feel sympathy for rats. Yet rats are intelligent animals, and there can be no doubt that rats are capable of suffering and do suffer from countless painful experiments performed on them. If the army were to stop experiments on dogs and switch to rats instead, we should not be any less concerned.

- Peter Singer

source: "Animal-rights pioneer says de Blasio carriage deal misses bigger picture" by Dana Rubinstein, www.politico.com. January 25, 2016.

topic: Dog, Army, Animal, Animal Liberation

It may be thought justifiable to require tests on animals of potentially life-saving drugs, but the same kinds of tests are used for products like cosmetics, food coloring, and floor polishes. Should thousands of animals suffer so that a new kind of lipstick or floor wax can be put on the market? Don't we already have an excess of most of these products? Who benefits from their introduction, except the companies that hope to profit from them?

- Peter Singer

topic: Animal, Drug, Suffering, Life Saving, Animal Liberation

With the eventual acceptance of Darwin's theory we reach a modern understanding of nature, one which has since then changed in detail rather than in fundamentals. Only those who prefer religious faith to beliefs based on reasoning and evidence can still maintain that the human species is the special darling of the entire universe, or that other animals were created to provide us with food, or that we have divine authority over them, and divine permission to kill them.

- Peter Singer

topic: Religious, Acceptance, Animal, Animal Liberation

We ought to consider the interests of animals because they have interests and it is unjustifiable to exclude them from the sphere of moral concern; to make this consideration depend on beneficial consequences for human beings is to accept the implication that the interests of animals do not warrant consideration for their own sakes.

- Peter Singer

topic: Animal, Sake, Spheres, Animal Liberation

No consideration at all is given to the interests of the "pests" - the very word "pest" seems to exclude any concern for the animals themselves. But the classification "pest" is our own, and a rabbit that is a pest is as capable of suffering, and as deserving of consideration, as a white rabbit who is a beloved companion animal.

- Peter Singer

source: Peter Singer (2015). “Animal Liberation”, p.212, Random House

topic: Animal, White, Suffering, Companion Animals, Animal Liberation

Whatever the reason, for most of the present century, the literature and publicity of the old established [animal welfare] groups made a significant contribution to the prevailing attitude that dogs and cats and wild animals need protection, but other animals do not. Thus people came to think of "animal welfare" as something for kindly ladies who are dotty about cats, and not as a cause founded on basic principles of justice and morality.

- Peter Singer

topic: Dog, Attitude, Cat, Wild Animal, Animal Liberation

Even people who are aware that the traditional family farm has been taken over by big business interests, and that some questionable experiments go on in laboratories, cling to a vague belief that conditions cannot be too bad, or else the government or the animal welfare societies would have done something about it.

- Peter Singer

source: Peter Singer (1975). “Animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals”

topic: Taken, Animal, Government, Family Farms, Animal Liberation

...the proposed air force and army experiments were designed so that many animals would suffer and die without any certainty that this suffering and death would save a single human life or benefit humans in any way at all; but the same can be said of millions of their experiments performed each year in the United States alone.

- Peter Singer

source: Peter Singer (1975). “Animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals”

topic: Army, Animal, Years, Suffering And Death, Animal Liberation

If that means going onto their farms, releasing their animals and burning the place to the ground, that's morally justifiable, in our opinion...There were always innocent people who got hurt somewhere along the way but it was important that those who oppressed one group of people be stopped, and we don't see the animal liberation struggle being substantially different from these other struggles.... A sustained campaign against a particular industry or a particular organization has the potential to be quite effective.

- Jerry Vlasak

topic: Hurt, Struggle, Mean, Got Hurt, Others Struggles

Christian theology provides some of the best arguments for respecting animal life and for taking seriously animals as partners with us within God's creation. It may be ironical that this tradition, once thought of as the bastion of human moral exclusivity, should now be seen as the seed-bed for a creative understanding of animal liberation.

- Andrew Linzey

source: Andrew Linzey (2016). “Christianity and the Rights of Animals”, p.5, Wipf and Stock Publishers

topic: Christian, Animal, Creative, Exclusivity, Christian Theology

Perhaps one of the most important things you can do for human beings is wean them off an animal-based diet. It hardens the arteries and runs up our health-care costs. The last thing a poor person can afford is a heart attack or cancer or a stroke. And that's all linked to a meat-based diet. I think animal liberation is human liberation.

- Ingrid Newkirk

topic: Running, Cancer, Heart, Arteries, Heart Attack

Typically, defenders of experiments on animals do not deny that animals suffer. They cannot deny the animals' suffering, because they need to stress the similarities between humans and other animals in order to claim that their experiments may have some relevance for human purposes. The experimenter who forces rats to choose between starvation and electric shock to see if they develop ulcers (which they do) does so because the rat has a nervous system very similar to a human being's, and presumably feels an electric shock in a similar way.

- Peter Singer

topic: Stress, Animal, Order, Ulcers, Electric Shock

The newspapers do little better. Their coverage of nonhuman animals is dominated by "human interest" events like the birth of a baby gorilla at the zoo, or by threats to endangered species; but developments in farming techniques that deprive millions of animals of freedom of movement go unreported.

- Peter Singer

source: Peter Singer (1975). “Animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals”

topic: Baby, Zoos, Animal, Animal Liberation, Endangered Species

...chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans are thinking, self-aware beings, capable of planning ahead, who form lasting social bonds with others and have a rich social and emotional life. The great apes are therefore an ideal case for showing the arbitrariness of the species boundary. If we think that all human beings, irrespective of age or mental capacity, have some basic rights, how can we deny that the great apes, who surpass some humans in their capacities, also have these rights?

- Peter Singer

topic: Emotional, Thinking, Animal, Planning Ahead, Emotional Life

I am personally not advocating violence. I am simply saying that it is a morally acceptable tactic and it may be useful in the struggle for animal liberation. I don't know.

- Jerry Vlasak

topic: Struggle, Animal, Tactics, Animal Liberation

Some of us seem to be born with a drive to try to make the world kinder.

- Karen Dawn

source: "Animal Advocate and Author Karen Dawn: The Welfare of Animals and the Earth". Interview with Barbi Twins, www.marandapleasantmedia.com. January 27, 2015.

topic: Trying, World, Born, Factory Farming, Kinder

Once we ask why it should be that all human beings - including infants, the intellectually disabled, criminal psychopaths, Hitler, Stalin, and the rest - have some kind of dignity or worth that no elephant, pig, or chimpanzee can ever achieve, we see that this question is as difficult to answer as our original request for some relevant fact that justifies the inequality of humans and other animals.

- Peter Singer

topic: Animal, Pigs, Elephants, Animal Liberation

Sometimes animals may suffer more because of their more limited understanding. If, for instance, we are taking prisoners in wartime we can explain to them that although they must submit to capture, search, and confinement, they will not otherwise be harmed and will be set free at the conclusion of hostilities. If we capture wild animals, however, we cannot explain that we are not threatening their lives. A wild animal cannot distinguish an attempt to overpower and confine from an attempt to kill; the one causes as much terror as the other.

- Peter Singer

topic: Animal, Understanding, Suffering, Wartime, Wild Animal

So far as this argument is concerned nonhuman animals and infants and retarded humans are in the same category; and if we use this argument to justify experiments on nonhuman animals we have to ask ourselves whether we are also prepared to allow experiments on human infants and retarded adults; and if we make a distinction between animals and these humans, on what basis can we do it, other than a bare-faced - and morally indefensible - preference for members of our own species?

- Peter Singer

topic: Animal, Adults, Use, Animal Liberation

Pain and suffering are in themselves bad and should be prevented or minimized, irrespective of the race, sex, or species of the being that suffers. How bad a pain is depends on how intense it is and how long it lasts, but pain of the same intensity and duration are equally bad, whether felt by humans or animals.

- Peter Singer