animal-rights

I really don't think it's a case of not caring at all about animals. Instead, I think it's a case of caring so much about one's own self that everything else becomes immaterial.

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.

People care about animals. I believe that. They just don__ want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It__ wrong. They__e packed body to body, and can__ escape their waste, and never see the sun. Their nails grow around the bars of their cages. It__ wrong. They feel their slaughters. It__ wrong, and people know it__ wrong. They don__ have to be convinced. They just have to act differently. I__ not better than anyone, and I__ not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what__ right. I__ trying to convince them to live by their own.

I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.

To be a vegetarian is to disagree - to disagree with the course of things today... starvation, cruelty - we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it's a strong one.

Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test_consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.

I am very proud of the fact that 20 years [sic] on people tell me they became a vegetarian as a result of_'Meat is Murder'. I think that is quite literally rock music changing someone's life - it's certainly changing the life of animals. It is one of the things I am most proud of.

Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribuisness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero's entertainments or Mengele's experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme - and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human behings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I haven't succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.

A simple trick from the backyard astronomer: if you are having trouble seeing something, look slightly away from it. The most light-sensitive parts of our eyes (those we need to see dim objects) are on the edges of the region we normally use for focusing. Eating animals has an invisible quality. Thinking about dogs, and their relationship to the animals we eat, is one way of looking askance and making something invisible visible.

The persistence of the story of animal consent into the contemporary era tells of a human appreciation of the stakes, and a desire to do the right thing.

My blood was boiling, which is not a good thing for a coldblood.Dracula was dead. Rex was dying or dead.Breakfast was dying. And I was caring about it all. Meanwhile, that blasted Gunnar did nothing but sit and stare at his teevee all day. He was the reason we were all here, the reason we were suffering and dying, and he barely noticed us.I hissed so hard it hurt.

The choice-obsessed modern West is probably more accommodating to individuals who choose to eat differently than any other culture has ever been, but ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore - ____ easy; I__l eat anything_ - can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society. Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list.

Before child labor laws, there were businesses that treated their ten-year-old employees well. society didn__ ban child labor because it__ impossible to imagine children working in a good environment, but because when you give that much power to businesses over powerless individuals, it__ corrupting. 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__ corrupting.

We think of dogs as being more like people than pigs; but pigs are highly intelligent animals and if we kept pigs as pets and reared dogs for food, we would probably reverse our order of preference. Are we turning persons into bacon?

If you want to test cosmetics, why do it on some poor animal who hasn't done anything? They should use prisoners who have been convicted of murder or rape instead. So, rather than seeing if perfume irritates a bunny rabbit's eyes, they should throw it in Charles Manson's eyes and ask him if it hurts.

It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.

The Americans were understandably on hair triggers. There was a good reason for all of this security. For despite TV images of quick victory, much of Baghdad certainly had not fallen and firefights with die-hard Ba__thists loyal to Saddam Hussein were raging all over the city.

Who knows what the long-term effects of saving rescue dogs are and the healing lessons and love they bring to Earth? Each one of us has the capacity to influence hundreds - even thousands of people or animals through the way we live our lives.