Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

There's nothing humane about the flesh of animals who have had one or two or even three improvements made in their singularly rotten lives on today's factory farms.

After spending time with the rescued turkeys at Farm Sanctuary's shelter and seeing how similar they are to my furry companion animals at home, I knew I needed to do everything in my power to protect these friendly and curious birds from the daily pain and suffering they endure on factory farms.

Animal hoarding was a dirty secret until hoarders appeared on our TV screens and showed how they are compelled to collect so many dogs, cats or parrots that the animals end up in cages only inches bigger than their own bodies. For life.

Every year, about 10 billion farm animals go through America's horrific factory farm system: cows, pigs, chickens, sheep, lamb. There, they are subjected to unimaginable and torturous confinement in vast factories where they never see the light of day. Agribusiness goes out of its way to make sure you don't see the inside of those factory farms.

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?

Each year, billions of animals are subjected to cruelty on factory farms, feed lots, and slaughterhouses. The brutality that these animals endure would be grounds for felony cruelty charges if inflicted upon our cats and dogs.

What does animal welfare have to do with food safety? The animals are the food! They are living in their own excrement, developing horrific sores, stressed out, and, therefore, more vulnerable to illness and disease.

For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.

All of us in society are supposed to believe that cruelty to animals is wrong and that it is a good thing to prevent needless suffering. So if that is true, how can meat be acceptable under any but the most extraordinary circumstances, such as perhaps roasting the bird who died flying into a window?

I don't want any more concentration camps for animals that are cruelly treated, force-fed to fatten themselves up for our consumption.

There is no meaningful distinction between eating flesh and eating dairy or other animal products. Animals exploited in the dairy industry live longer than those used for meat, but they are treated worse during their lives, and they end up in the same slaughterhouse after which we consume their flesh anyway. There is probably more suffering in a glass of milk or an ice cream cone than there is in a steak.

Animals on factory farms all face pain and fear, just like the animals we share our homes with, yet are repeatedly abused in shocking ways.

The emergence and spread of virulent strains of avian influenza has been attributed by experts to the intensely overcrowded, unsanitary, and stressful conditions that often characterize large-scale factory farming in industrialized agriculture.

Those who actually hate animals to the point of being cruel to them are outcasts to the rest of us, no matter where in the world they live.

… the worst animals

There was a time when cowboys respected their horses instead of riding them to death just to show off for a crowd.

I've been involved in animal issues for quite a while, going back 24 years. I started reading up on factory farming and slaughterhouses and animal cruelty, and it didn't make sense for me to be part of it.

I just realized that if it's really compassion that drives you, maybe it's not enough just to stop eating animals but you maybe should boycott the whole animal industry, because... it's not what you as a compassionate being would want. So actually you should go one step further and become vegan.

I would be more angry if an animal were treated cruelly than people, because people can defend themselves.

It is generally deemed acceptable to shuttle children and adults between London and Somerset every week, but the considered view is that it would be very cruel to do the same with a dog.

Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history.

If you eat foie gras, I would really urge you to look at the practice that goes in to producing it. It is totally barbaric and involves force-feeding on the most horrific scale imaginable.

Animals feel pain and love and joy, just as humans. But in the industrialised meat, dairy, and egg industries, animals are denied everything that's natural and important to them. Some of them don't even feel the fresh air. They don't see the light.

We cut the throat of a calf and hang it up by the heels to bleed to death so that our veal cutlet may be white; we nail geese to a board and cram them with food because we like the taste of liver disease; we tear birds to pieces to decorate our women's hats; we mutilate domestic animals for no reason at all except to follow an instinctively cruel fashion; and we connive at the most abominable tortures in the hope of discovering some magical cure for our own diseases by them.