Kurt Cobain Quotes

There are people who try to justify eating fish by saying they have no feelings. Well, you watch a fish gasping for breath as it's pulled out of the water, and then try and tell me it has no feelings!

Killing of animals for food is one thing, but on the other hand they do not exist simply as things to be slaughtered. This is true of fishing, too. Many men fish and leave their victims to rot and stink. But what about the fish? Has he no rights - not to be romanticized as though he were a man - but real rights?

Animals are thinking, feeling creatures. They're sensitive.

The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but rather, 'Can they suffer?'

I grew up with lots of animals and I related more to them than I did to people. I feel a lot of empathy for them.

I became a vegetarian in 1995. I had some fried chicken, and my teeth hit the bone. My mind said, 'Dead bird, dead bird.' It didn't feel right, so I stopped. I kept eating fish until one day, in 1997, the chef brought my ginger-fried snapper with the head still on it.

This isn't animal experimentation, where you an imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Tell me something: Why is taste, the crudest of our sense, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other sense? If you stop and think about it, it's crazy. Why doesn't a horny person has as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it?

If you can justify killing to eat meat, you can justify the conditions of the ghetto. I cannot justify either one.

What is it that should trace the insuperable line? ...The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

If we are prepared to take the life of another being merely in order to satisfy our taste for a particular type of food, then that being is no more than a means to our end.

I do love animals so much, and have a great respect for them emotionally and intellectually, because they are so different from human beings.

Farm animals are just as interesting and intelligent as the dogs and cats who we know a bit betterYet they are treated by the meat industry as though they are inanimate objects with no feelings or personalities.

I famously tasted shark fin soup many, many years ago before we understood exactly what was going on with the harvesting of sharks. I've consequently come out against it. I make personal choices in my life and stand behind them.

The belief that 'animals' are superior or inferior to humans because they live in an eternal now is untrue, because no being lives in a now.

One of the most consistent defining qualities of sentience is that we define it as human, as the thing that we possess that others do not.

When I write about animals, I use anthropological techniques and the language you would use for a person. You don't have to anthropomorphize animals, just acknowledge their individuality.

For me, animals are not that much different from human beings.

If an animal has any rights at all, it's got the right not to be eaten.

We cannot talk simultaneously about animal rights and the 'humane' slaughter of animals.

To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada, while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apertheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.

I'm not a vegetarian. Now, don't get me wrong - I like animals. And I don't think it's just fine to industrialize their production and to churn them out like they were wrenches. But there's no way to treat animals well when you're killing 10 billion of them a year. Kindness might just be a bit of a red herring. Let's get the numbers of animals we're killing for eating down, and then we'll worry about being nice to the ones that are left.

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.

None of that is necessary. It's not as if we're in a situation where it is us or them.There's something peculiar about talking about the moral status of animals, when we are killing and eating them for no reason whatsoever.

99% of our uses of animals, including our numerically most significant use of them for food, do not involve any sort of necessity or any real conflict between human and nonhuman interests. If animals matter morally at all, then, even without accepting a theory of animal rights, those uses of animals cannot be morally justified.

The distinction between meat and other animal products is total nonsense. Vegetarianism is a morally incoherent position. If you regard animals as members of the moral community, you really don’t have a choice but to go vegan.