Quotes About Ethics

Find a printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm.

You have to do something bad to do something good.

Everyone performs bad actions. I do. Father does. Even you do. A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions.

Given that eating animals is in absolutely no way necessary for my family — unlike some in the world, we have easy access to a wide variety of other foods — should we ear animals?

When we walk around thinking we have a greater right to eat an animal than the animal has a right to live without suffering, it's corrupting. I'm not speculating. This is our reality. Look at what factory farming is. Look at what we as a society have done to animals as soon as we had the technological power. Look at what we actually do in the name of "animal welfare" and "humaneness," then decide if you still believe in eating meat.

What about guns with sensors in the handles that could detect if you were angry, and if you were, they wouldn't fire, even if you were a police officer? What about skyscrapers made with moving parts, so they could rearrange themselves when they had to, and even open holes in their middles for planes to fly through?

The end of suffering does not justify the suffering

The worst it got was near the end. A lot of people died right at the end, and I didn't know if I could make it another day. A farmer, a Russian, God bless him, he saw my condition, and he went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me. He saved your life. I didn't eat it. You didn't eat it? It was pork. I wouldn't eat pork. Why? What do you mean why? What, because it wasn't kosher? Of course. But not even to save your life? If nothing matters, there's nothing to save.

Being reliable is something. Being good.

In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.

There is something about eating animals that tends to polarize: never eat them or never sincerely question eating them; become an activist or disdain activists.

The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.

She said I could have a seat on the couch if I wanted to, but I told her I didn't believe in leather, so I stood.

Killing an animals oneself is more often then not a way to forget the problem while pretending to remember. This is perhaps more harmful than ignorance. It is always possible to wake someone from sleep, but there is no amount of noise that will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.

Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn't motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn't enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?

Cruelty: Not only the willful causing of unnecessary suffering, but the indifference to it.

The power brokers of factory farming know that their business model depends on consumers not being able to see (or hear about) what they do.

It might sound fantastic, but when we bother to look, it's hard to deny that our day-to-day choices shape the world.

We live in a world in which it's conventional to treat an animal like a hunk of wood and extreme to treat an animal like an animal.

Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses?

When we lift our forks, we hang our hats somewhere. We set ourselves in one relationship or another to farmed animals, farm-workers, national economies, and global markets. Not making a decision--eating 'like everyone else'--is to make the easiest decision, a decision that is increasingly problematic.

Anyone who suggests that there is a perfect symbiosis between the farmers' interest and the animals' is probably trying to sell you something (and it's not made of tofu)

These factory farmers calculate how close to death they can keep the animals without killing them. That's the business model. How quickly can they be made to grow, how tightly can they be packed, how much or how little can they eat, how sick can they get without dying.

We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.