Through Our Eyes

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

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons.  They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men. 

-Alice Walker

Wild animals never kill for sport.  Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow-creatures is amusing in itself.

-James Anthony Froude, Oceana, 1886

When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal.  When he destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman. 

 -Joseph Wood Krutch