Konrad Lorenz Quotes

They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends? Therefore we are free to kill them? Why? What is so special about the form of consciousness we recognize that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpunished?...all this discussion of consciousness and whether animals have it is just a smokescreen. At bottom we protect our own kind. Thumbs up to human babies, thumbs down to veal calves.

Michael Vick may enjoy watching dogs fight. Someone else may find that repulsive but see nothing wrong with eating an animal who has had a life as full of pain and suffering as the lives of the fighting dogs. It's strange that we regard the latter as morally different from, and superior to, the former.

One person can take papers, photograph them without getting excited, return them, and give them away without any scruples; while someone else has to overcome an enormous obstacle.

Could you look an animal in the eyes and say to it, 'My appetite is more important than your suffering'?

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.

What can you do by killing? Nothing. You kill one dog, the master buys another-that's all there is to it.

I became a vegetarian after realizing that animals feel afraid, cold, hungry and unhappy like we do. I feel very deeply about vegetarianism and the animal kingdom. It was my dog Boycott who led me to question the right of humans to eat other sentient beings.

If you throw the baby away, that's garbage. But no, the heart's precious. You could get something, you could save a life. Well, you just threw away a baby but the heart's valuable. That's the horror and the terror and the hypocrisy that nobody can understand. We base communities on the idea of protecting children based on the sacrifice of adults. Adults work and die so that their next generation would grow and prosper.

I realized that all animals, not just dogs and cats and horses, were sentient beings; therefore, I just couldn't say I love animals and then eat them.

How do we know that we have a right to kill creatures that we are so little above, as dogs, for our curiosity or even for some use to us?

How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder?

I watched as that kid died. In his last few seconds there was pure terror in his eyes. You can't do that. You can't do that to a person. I don't care what anybody tells me, I don't care how many people go crazy and die, I don't care if the whole shuck human race ends. Even if that was the only thing that had to happen to find the cure, I'd still be against it.

Surely there will be some nonhuman animals whose lives, by any standards, are more valuable than the lives of some humans.

I never ride horseback now because my sympathy with the under-dog is too keen. After we have a gone a few blocks, I always dismount and say to the horse: 'We'll walk it together, old dear.

Whether I was a character in WCW, WWE or The Longest Yard, you want to be able to - the best part about myself is that I have a very wide range of emotions in that one second I can be speaking on Capital Hill about dog fighting and giving them a voice, which they can't obviously speak for themselves.

I am a huge animal lover. Growing up, my mother and I rescued countless animals - dogs, cats, birds, rabbits, even a turtle. I have been accused of caring more about animals than I do about people.

If you cannot attain knowledge without torturing a dog, you must do without knowledge.

Don't listen to me. I'm a maniac, but the voice in your head, ask it "Is it right to kill 200 million animals simply for fun?". What did it say? Right. There you go.

In their behavior toward creatures, all men are Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they're the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought.

We cannot have two hearts, one for the animals and one for men. In cruelty towards the former and cruelty to the latter there is no difference but in the victim.

I went hunting, I shot a deer, and it mortified me. I just couldn't do it again.

The pace of life feels morally dangerous to me.

Animal liberationists do not separate out the human animal, so there is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They're all mammals.

So long as even a single dog in my country is without food, my whole religion will be to feed it.