#animals

For animals that are overworked, underfed, and cruelly treated; for all wistful creatures in captivity that beat their wings against bars; for any that are hunted or lost or deserted or frightened or hungry; for all that must be put to death...and for those who deal with them we ask a heart of compassion and gentle hands and kindly words. ↗

— Albert Schweitzer

#animals #compassion #death

To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. ↗

— Mahatma Gandhi

#goodness #humanity #lambs #sheep #life

Animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do. ↗

— Gregory Maguire

#man #peace #people #life

I wish I could convey the perfection of a seal slipping into water or a spider monkey swinging from point to point or a lion merely turning its head. But language founders in such seas. Better to picture it in your head if you want to feel it...I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses. ↗

— Yann Martel

#life

Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral. ↗

— Charles Darwin

#love #morality #sympathy #love

Often, vegan advocates assume that a person's defensiveness is the result of selfishness or apathy, when in fact it is much more likely the result of systematic and intensive social conditioning. ↗

— Melanie Joy

#animal-advocates #animals #apathy #defensiveness #social-condition

Why we should believe in wolf children seems somehow easier to understand than the ways we distinguish between what is human and what is animal behavior. In making such distinctions we run the risk of fooling ourselves completely. We assume that the animal is entirely comprehensible and, as Henry Beston has said, has taken form on a plane beneath the one we occupy. It seems to me that this is a sure way to miss the animal and to see, instead, only another reflection of our own ideas. ↗

— Barry Lopez

#men

The dog’s agenda is simple, fathomable, overt: I want. “I want to go out, come in, eat something, lie here, play with that, kiss you. There are no ulterior motives with a dog, no mind games, no second-guessing, no complicated negotiations or bargains, and no guilt trips or grudges if a request is denied. ↗

— Caroline Knapp

#animals #dogs #simple #motivational

Answer me, you who believe that animals are only machines. Has nature arranged for this animal to have all the machinery of feelings only in order for it not to have any at all? ↗

— Voltaire

#emotions #nature

Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#ethics #industry #meat #nature