Quotes About Animals

Aduh! Mengapa manusia harus selalu membual bahwa daya pikirnya jauh lebih tinggi daripada yang dimiliki binatang? Ini menyebabkan manusia terlalu banyak menuntut kebutuhan hidup.

Who the hell let you animals into my office? I'll have you know I was playing a VERY unimportant game of chess right now with a man that kept saying King me.

Either human beings must be more instinctive, or animals must be more conscious than we had previously suspected. The similarities, not the differences, were what caught the attention.

So – as animal experiments have suggested – oxytocin does not affect reciprocity, just the tendency to take a social risk, to go out on a limb.

Are you a doctor?" Li said. "I'm better than that. I'm a vet. Vets do everything: brain surgery, heart surgery, lab analysis, dislocations –

Philosophical theories can in this way become a destructive venture, confusing matters with false choices and sterile power schemes the cruel are only too happy to accept. In hostile hands, they become a pretext for doing nothing, for brushing off real and urgent moral duties in the care of animals.

Go into the largest livestock operation, search out the darkest and tiniest stall or pen, single out the filthiest, most forlorn little lamb or pig or calf, and that is one of God's creatures you're looking at, morally indistinguishable from your beloved Fluffy or Frisky.

The fact that creatures cannot act morally toward us in no way diminishes our ability to act morally toward them.

For here we have the livestock industry and its best minds admitting that the production units suffer. They now concede, in theory and practice, that the animals are feeling pain, and not just physical pain either but emotional torment.

If a right is a prohibition on human wrongdoing, and if animals can be the object of wrongful human action, then to precisely that extent animals have rights - not, of course, among one another, but only in their encounters with us.

Even if our dealings with the lowly animals, this sort of relativism works its evils. What makes Mr. Komatsu's argument so insidious is its denial that there are realities about animals, that these realities are in crucial respects knowable, and that once known, we are morally obliged to accept and to act upon them regardless of culture or personal preference.

Why do any animals scream when they are wounded or killed, even when those screams can have no possible utility? Why do we scream, and why has evolution designed us to consciously experience our physical pain, but not them?

When standard agricultural practice treats billions of animals as unfeeling flesh, at the very moment when humankind has established beyond reasonable doubt their conscious mental and emotional lives, it is no good to go on as if nothing had changed.

Another determined skeptic of animal awarenss write that the definition of consciousness has eluded us for over a century. But this isn't the problem at all. The problem is that as animals meet the old definitions, like conscious pain and deliberate communication, the experts keep making up new definitions.

A reading skimming the preceding pages might never know it, but most people like animals and often love them, and indeed we live in a time of great change in attitudes about the care and treatment of animals. Animal protection in this way is like many other great moral and social causes now adopted into custom and law, ideas once viewed as a threat to civilized values but not accepted as the extension of civilized values.

The difference is that whereas hey defer to common sense, empathy, and decency in the case of human consciousness, in the case of animals they do the opposite. The creatures are held to an impossible standard of evidence, an ever receding empirical horizon, allowing us to declare in theory that since we can never really know how they think and feel, we may safely conclude that they do not and act accordingly.

That is the whole idea of mercy, after all, that it is entirely discretionary, entirely undeserved.... There is no such thing as a right to mercy, not for the animals and not even for us.

If we are defined by reason and morality, then reason and morality must define our choices, even where animals are concerned.

For me it was a simple moral step of extending that vision out into the world, for what are dogs but affable emissaries from the animal kingdom?

What gifts they all are if our hearts are inclined in the right way and our vision to the right angle - seeing animals as they are apart from our designs upon them, as fellow creatures on their own terms, some glorious and mighty like the elephant, some fearful and lethal like the tiger, some joyful and gentle like the dolphin, some lowly and unprepossessing like the pig, but not a one of them, however removed from our exalted world, hidden from its Maker's sight.

Just as in logic a thing cannot be and not be at the same time, in moral reasoning identical creatures cannot be worthy of moral consideration and unworthy of moral consideration; this dog or dolphin or elephant morally significant and those others are not.

So too have many other animals served us well over the ages. It was the use of livesock that first freed us from the chase, allowed man to settle and civilize himself, slowly rendering the hunter a useless and ever more ridiculous figures so engaged in what the name itself, game, implies.

Compassion for animals doesn't drain away some finite reserve of moral energy and idealism, to the detriment of human welfare, but surely adds to the supply.

Granting Digby that one can be too emotional about animals, it seems fair to ask if one cannot also be a little to emotional about food. Why is it excessive sentimentality to see rabbits as our harmless fluffy tailed friends, but not excessive sentimentality to go on and on about rabbits soaked in rich gravy with the parsley and Dijon mustard and stock from the paws and head and old England and all the rest?