Ingrid Newkirk Quotes

I grew up in cattle country-that's why I became a vegetarian. Meat stinks, for the animals, the environment, and your health.

The health of the planet is at stake, because the cruelty and the waste that accompanies the slaughter of billions of animals each year literally infects us all. We could consume healthy plant-based food produced at almost infinitely less cost. What does that say, really, about us and what we're doing... to animals and to ourselves?

Since we can't count on the meat, egg, and dairy industries to protect animals from the most egregious forms of cruelty, what can we, as consumers, do? Opting out of paying someone to allow animals to die in a barn fire or at the slaughterhouse seems pretty reasonable.

People may hope that the meat they buy came from an animal who died without pain, but they do not really want to know about it. Yet those who, by their purchases, require animals to be killed do not deserve to be shielded from this or any other aspect of the production of the meat they buy.

It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams. Or that the calf that yielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around.

There's so many issues tied to the meat industry. I mean, social, environmental, humanitarian - all of them. I know that when I'm eating that I'm not hurting the planet, I'm not hurting other people on this planet, I'm not hurting animals... and I'm not hurting nature.

I realised what goes on in the egg industry and the dairy industry, so then I was like, 'That's it! Going vegan!' and I just kind of went cold turkey, basically.

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.

Most people don’t question the practice of eating meat. Many of these people care about animals and the environment, some deeply. But for some reason-force of habit, cultural norms, resistance to change-there is a fundamental disconnect whereby these feelings don’t translate into changes of behavior.

If a kid ever realized what was involved in factory farming, they would never touch meat again.

Cruelty to animals is an enormous injustice; so is expecting those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder to do the dangerous, soul-numbing work of slaughtering sentient beings on our behalf.

Being vegetarian here also means that we do not consume dairy and egg products, because they are products of the meat industry. If we stop consuming, they will stop producing. Only collective awakening can create enough determination for action.

There are viable (and usually better) alternatives to the use of animals for food, sport, clothing, & experimentation. I beg you to discontinue any actions that might cause or condone animal torture, abuse, or destruction.

The very people who shudder over the cruelty of the hunter are apt to forget that slaughter, in the grimmest sense of the word, is a process they entrust daily to the butcher; and that unlike the game of the forests, even the dumbest creatures of the slaughterhouse know what is in store for them.

We don't live the lives of Eskimos. We don't need to kill animals for fashion.

Animals die even if you eat vegetables. That is the nature of farming. There is a certain sacrifice involved.

While it's certainly true that many people think that dairy doesn't have a cost to the animal, it's because they never went to a dairy farm.

Veganism is an answer for almost every problem facing the world in terms of hunger and climate change.

The more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejecting it. It's already happening.

I think vegetarianism is a crucial ethical choice for an individual and a society.

I don't like to see animals in pain. That was very uncomfortable to me. I don't like factory farming. I'm not an advocate for the meat industry.

I became a vegetarian after I became aware of factory farming and slaughterhouses and the torture and inhumane handling of all these animals.

I have a tough stomach, and I've put myself through a lot. But when I first found out what happens to animals on modern factory farms and in today's slaughterhouses, I wanted to throw up - I literally couldn't believe it.

Therefore, vegetarianism alone can give us the quality of com-passion, which distinguishes man from the rest of the animal world.

You don't just one day say, 'That's it, I'm doing this, I'm going to throw all my shoes out and I'm not eating honey and I won't drive my car because there are animal bones in the tires...' because you'd drive yourself around the bend.