Gary L. Francione Quotes

It's really not rocket science. If animals are not mere things; if they have moral value, we cannot justify eating, wearing, or using them particularly when we have no better reason than palate pleasure or fashion. If you are eating, wearing, or using animals, then your actions say that you regard them as mere things, despite what your words say.

There is no moral distinction between fur and other materials made from animals, such as leather, which also is the result of the suffering and death of sentient beings.

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.

You don't have to love animals to recognize that it is immoral and unjust to exploit them. But if you do love animals, but you continue to participate in their exploitation, you need to rethink your idea of what love means.

Because I'm a civil rights activist, I am also an animal rights activist. Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel and vicious taking of life. We shouldn't be a part of it.

Fur is not luxury: it is an industry of death and suffering.

Unconscious behavior is at the core. Think of the 40 billion animals we abuse and eat who are born into suffering. It's a karmic disaster.

But the question is, whether the animals who endure such sufferings of various kinds for the service and entertainment of man, would accept existence upon the terms on which they have it.

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

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.

A woman's mink coat represents the sacrifice of a lot of little animals, including her husband.

To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime.

There slowly grew up in me an unshakable conviction that we have no right to inflict suffering and death on another living creature, unless there is some unavoidable necessity for it.

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.

I hate the thought of animals being killed just for our pleasure...

We poor creatures are born for man's pleasure and amusement, and destined to go through endless sufferings and trials.

The idea that it is funny to see wild animals coerced into acting like clumsy humans, or thrilling to see powerful beasts reduced to cringing cowards by a whip-cracking trainer, is primitive and medieval. It stems from the old idea that we are superior to other species and have the right to hold dominion over them.

...eating animals involves an intentional decision to participate in the suffering and death of nonhumans where there is no plausible moral justification.

When we reflect upon the cruelties daily practised upon such of the animal creation as are given us for food, or which we ensnarefor our diversion, we shall be obliged to own that there is more of the savage in human nature than we are aware of.

I don't often agree with the RSPCA as I believe it is an animal's duty to be on my plate at supper time.

We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear.

Human cruelty knows no limits and that one needs immense courage and a will of iron to help others understand that animals are made of flesh and blood like us, that they suffer the same pains as us, that they deserve the same respect as us and that their continuous slaughter should not be part of human entertainment.

Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?