John James Audubon Quotes

It would be ugly to watch people poking sticks at a caged rat. It is uglier still to watch rats poking sticks at a caged person.

If you can kill animals, the same attitude can kill human beings. The mentality is the same which exploits nature and which creates wars.

Using animals for entertainment is big business, plain and simple.

Of course 'we humans' have a funny relationship with the beings with whom we share our planet. We eat them, we care for them, we admire them, we use them.

One disadvantage of being a hog is that at any moment some blundering fool may try to make a silk purse out of your wife's ear.

Any abuse of animals is the same as abuse of men, women, or children.

If we are concerned about the exploitation of human workers in countries with low standards of worker protection, we should also be concerned about the treatment of even more defenceless non-human animals.

What do we lose without wild animal acts at the circus? Absolutely nothing, except the opportunity to be haunted and heartbroken.

Confining marine animals to tanks and separating them from their families and their natural surroundings, just so people can watch them swim in endless circles, teaches us far more about humans than it does about animals - and the lesson is not a flattering one.

I am not saying that factory farming is the same as the Holocaust or the slave trade, but it's clear that there is an immense amount of suffering in it, and just as we think that the Nazis were wrong to ignore the suffering of their victims, so we are wrong to ignore the sufferings of our victims.

Factory farming, like comparable evils throughout history, depends for its existence upon concealment. It depends on people either not noticing or willfully averting their gaze.

When I was old enough to realize all meat was killed, I saw it as an irrational way of using our power, to take a weaker thing and mutilate it. It was like the way bullies would take control of younger kids in the schoolyard.

I was betting on cockfights in the Filipino workers' camps when I was 11.

Pigeon racing is a lousy, greedy, and often unlawful activity. One thing that it is not is kind to birds.

The white men told lies for each other. They drove off a great many of our cattle. Some branded our young cattle so they could claim them.

Humans have a fraught relationship with beasts. They are our companions and our chattel, our family members and our laborers, our household pets and our household pests. We love them and cage them, admire them and abuse them. And, of course, we cook and eat them.

Man is the only animal that can be skinned more than once.

We don't protect our young, and we tolerate predators of our own species.

I have no patience whatsoever with these gorilla damnifications of humanity.

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

There's something kind of horrific about milk. Think about it! Think about what we're doing. Milk is kind of gross.

I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things, they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness.

I'm constantly lying to my dog. He only responds to manipulation and blackmail.

Amplifying body-image issues, profiting from anxiety, and employing virtual slaves in sweatshops are bad enough, but the fashion industry is also actively hastening the destruction of the very Earth we walk on. It insists on launching fresh collections each season, declaring yesterday's range obsolete on a whim.

Both climate change and extinction are results of our tyranny over the nonhuman world and our domination of, and exploitation of, whole categories of each other - and those, in turn, are clearly linked to agriculture, the cattle-industrial complex, capitalism.