Through Our Eyes

In the wilderness is the preservation of the world.

When it comes to having a central nervous system, and the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.

-Ingrid Newkirk

To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man.  For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal.  But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse.  If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous.  And that is the unpardonable crime.

-Romain Rolland, Nobel Prize 1915

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.

-Thomas A. Edison

The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity.  Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.      

-Schopenhauer

Zoos are becoming facsimiles – or perhaps caricatures – of how animals once were in their natural habitat.  If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.  

-Michael Fox, Sierra, Nov-Dec,1990

In an earlier stage of our development most human groups held to a tribal ethic.  Members of the tribe were protected, but people of other tribes could be robbed or killed as one pleased.  Gradually the circle of protection expanded, but as recently as 150 years ago we did not include blacks.  So African human beings could be captured, shipped to America and sold.  In Australia white settlers regarded Aborigines as a pest and hunted them down, much as kangaroos are hunted down today.  Just as we have progressed beyond the blatantly racist ethic of the era of slavery and colonialism, so we must now progress beyond the speciesist ethic of the era of factory farming, of the use of animals as mere research tools, of whaling, seal hunting, kangaroo slaughter and the destruction of wilderness.  We must take the final step in expanding the circle of ethics.

-Pete Singer

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.    

-George Bernard Shaw

Get a feel for fur:  Slam your fingers in a car door. 

~Anonymous, on the use of steel traps to capture fur-bearing animals, cited in Audubon, November 1990

It is just like man’s vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions. 

-Mark Twain