Animal Rights Activists

"Suppose...we reflect on the building of London Bridge, we cannot then help admiring the genius and assiduity of man. But could all the torture and destruction that this has caused to the poor horses, who drew the stones and cleared the rubbish, be brought to light, what an emblem of crime would this beautiful bridge exhibit; many years’ labour has it cost; many teams have been constantly at work, and the extreme severity of the labour imposed on them was almost at any time to be seen. Now, if all the strainings, the lashes, the blows, and the wrenchings with all the bits, had been kept account of, how immense would be the list..."

"[E]very animal has more right to the use of its own body than others have to use it."

"Axiom 5. That we should never admit of the propriety of the will or volition of one animal being the agent of another, unless we should perceive its own good to result from it, or that justice should require it."

"After looking carefully into the matter, and after some years' experience in its non-use, I can state without hesitancy that, contrary to the prevailing opinion, the flesh of animals is not necessary as an article of food. … We shall find numerous articles of food, as we study the matter, that, so far as body nourishing, building, and sustaining qualities are concerned, contain twice, and in some cases over twice, as much as any flesh food that can be mentioned."

"Axiom 8. That the importance of any action is measured by the degree of pleasure or pain that it causes or prevents."

"It is a crime against humanity, while people are starving, to funnel massive amounts of crops through animals so we can eat animals when those crops should be feeding human beings."

"30 years ago, about 2% of the population was either vegetarian or vegan. Twenty years ago, about 2% of the population was vegetarian or vegan. Ten years ago, about 2% of the population was vegetarian or vegan. Are you catching a theme? It hasn’t changed in 30 years. So a lot more people claim to be vegetarian or vegan now than claimed to be vegetarian or vegan 20 and 30 years ago. But if you look at the actual numbers, if you look at when you do the polling in the most accurate way and you say, “In the last month, which of these products have you not consumed,” it turns out that about 2% of the population is vegetarian or vegan."

"What is happening to [animals] on modern farms and in modern slaughterhouses is beyond most of the worst moments of our lives...that's their entire existence."

"lab grown [meat] is just a misnomer. Lab grown is what the media often times likes to call it. It’s somewhat sensationalist. But lab grown is just wrong. At scale, once this stuff is commercialized, it’s not going to be grown in a lab—it’s going to be grown in essentially a meat brewery. That’s what it’s going to look like. So every processed food starts in a food lab but we don’t say lab grown Cheerios, or lab grown whatever else. It isn’t anymore. It started in a food lab, now it’s in a factory. And the factories for clean meat are going to look like breweries, so we’re calling it clean meat and we’re talking about meat breweries."

"Individual action is great, but antibiotic resistance and climate change—they require more. Besides, convincing the world to eat less meat hasn't worked. For 50 years, environmentalists, global health experts and animal activists have been begging the public to eat less meat. And yet, per capita meat consumption is as high as it's been in recorded history."

"Jesus' message is about love and compassion, but there is nothing loving or compassionate at factory farms and slaughterhouses, where billions of animals endure miserable lives and die violent deaths. Jesus mandates kindness and mercy for all God's creatures. He'd be appalled by the suffering that we inflict on animals today to indulge our acquired taste for their flesh. Catholics, and all Christians, have a choice. When we sit down to eat, we can add to the violence, misery and death in the world, or we can respect God's creatures with a vegetarian diet. I believe we're obligated to make choices that are as merciful as possible, and we can all do that at the dinner table with a vegetarian diet. There won't be any factory farms and slaughterhouses in heaven."

"What we need to do is...to produce the meat that people love, but we need to produce it in a whole new way. I've got a couple of ideas. Idea number one: let's grow meat from plants. Instead of growing plants, feeding them to animals, and all of that inefficiency, let's grow those plants, let's biomimic meat with them, let's make plant-based meat. Idea number two: for actual animal meat, let's grow it directly from cells. Instead of growing live animals, let's grow the cells directly. It takes six weeks to grow a chicken to slaughter weight. Grow the cells directly, you can get that same growth in six days."

"We need to change the meat, because we aren’t going to change human nature."

"To remake meat is how we solve climate change. Remaking meat is how we prevent the next pandemic. Remaking meat is how we take antibiotics out of the food system."

"We don't want to disrupt the meat industry, we want to transform it. We need their economies of scale, their global supply chain, their marketing expertise and their massive consumer base."

"There are lots of gun rights groups, but the one that you hear about and the one that is feared is the NRA. I'd rather be loved -- and feared."

"Animals for the most part just need to be left alone."

"The whole ‘rights’ thing is fraught with so much. I’m not sure I believe in any natural right."

"Interviewer: [W]ould you let people hunt for food if they did it respectfully?"

"Interviewer: How about pets, Wayne? Would you envision a future with no pets in the world?"

"Animals are no one’s property, and they have the right not be ‘taken,’ ‘harvested,’ or ‘culled’ or any other euphemism for murder that wildlife managers use. They are no one’s property, just as you and I are no one’s property other than our own."

"I’ve always had an affinity for wildlife, and the direct assault made on that wildlife by hunters and trappers has always infuriated me … At the same time, I don’t have a hands-on fondness for animals. I did not grow up bonded to any particular nonhuman animal. I like them and I pet them and I’m kind to them, but there’s no special bond between me and other animals…"

"I don’t love animals or think they are cute."

"We equate speciesism—the belief that one’s species is superior to all others—with racism and sexism."

"If society says that it doesn’t want the recreational killing of wildlife then we should do away with it, just the way we’ve done away with cockfighting and dogfighting."

"Animals have their own rights. We’re animals too."

"Behind the scenes of this surge [in demand for meat alternatives]—everywhere you turn, from advising new companies and funding scientific research to sparking our cultural obsession with meat alternatives—is Bruce Friedrich."

"Bruce Friedrich...realized at a certain point that his activism wasn’t achieving his goal — getting fewer people to kill, eat and wear animals...These days, he is hoping capitalism might work where activism and persuasion fell short."

"Having hunters oversee wildlife is like having Dracula guard the blood bank."

"If we could shut down all sport hunting in a moment, we would."

"Interviewer: About fishing … do you avoid campaigning against it because there isn’t a ground-swell movement in our culture to eliminate it?"

"How many times, for instance, have we not heard people speak with all the authority of conviction about the "canine teeth" and "simple stomach" of man, as certain evidence of his natural adaptation for a flesh diet! At least we have demonstrated one fact; that if such arguments are valid, they apply with even greater force to the anthropoid apes—whose "canine" teeth are much longer and more powerful than those of man … And yet, with the solitary exception of man, there is not one of these last which does not in a natural condition absolutely refuse to feed on flesh! M. Pouchet observes that all the details of the digestive apparatus in man, as well as his dentition, constitute "so many proofs of his frugivorous origin"—an opinion shared by Professor Owen, who remarks that the anthropoids and all the quadrumana derive their alimentation from fruits, grains, and other succulent and nutritive vegetable substances, and that the strict analogy which exists between the structure of these animals and that of man clearly demonstrates his frugivorous nature. This is also the view taken by Cuvier, Linnæus, Professor Lawrence, Charles Bell, Gassendi, Flourens, and a great number of other eminent writers."

"No man who aims at making his life an harmonious whole, pure, complete, and harmless to others, can endure to gratify an appetite at the cost of the daily suffering and bloodshed of his inferiors in degree, and of the moral degradation of his own kind. I know not which strikes me most forcibly in the ethics of this question the injustice, the cruelty, or the nastiness of flesh-eating. The injustice is to the butchers, the cruelty is to the animals, the nastiness concerns the consumer. With regard to this last in particular, I greatly wonder what persons of refinement—aye, even of decency—do not feel insulted on being offered, as a matter of course, portions of corpses as food! Such comestibles might possibly be tolerated during sieges, or times of other privation of proper viands in exceptional circumstances, but in the midst of a civilised community able to command a profusion of sound and delicious foods, it ought to be deemed an affront to set dead flesh before a guest."

"Things are not going well for me. My chef at the Charité strongly disapproves of women students and took this means of showing it. About a hundred men (no women except myself) went round the wards today, and when we were all assembled before him to have our names written down, he called and named all the students except me, and then closed the book. I stood forward upon this, and said quietly, "Et moi aussi, monsieur." [And me, Sir.] He turned on me sharply, and cried, "Vous, vous n'êtes ni homme ni femme; je ne veux pas inscrire vôtre nom." [You, you are neither man nor woman; I don't want to write your name.] I stood silent in the midst of a dead silence."

"It has been well said … that there are steps on the way to the summit of Dietetic Reform, and, if only one step be taken, yet that single step will be not without importance and without influence in the world. The step, which leaves for ever behind it the barbarism of slaughtering our fellow-beings, the Mammals and Birds, is, it is superfluous to add, the most important and most influential of all."

"[T]hroughout history there are records of individuals who have provided answers to these puerile attempts at defending flesh eating. And those blokes who call vegetarianism faddish just aren’t aware of the history of ethical vegetarianism! People have always challenged the Regime of Blood!"

"Long before this, when reading that excellent book, The Ethics of Diet, I had wished to visit a slaughter-house, in order to see with my own eyes the reality of the question raised when vegetarianism is discussed. … The precise reason why abstinence from animal food will be the first act of fasting and of a moral life is admirably explained in the book, The Ethics of Diet; and not by one man only, but by all mankind in the persons of its best representatives during all the conscious life of humanity."

"The desire to protect animals derives inevitably from better acquaintance with them, from the realization that they are sensitive and intelligent creatures, affectionate and seeking affection, powerless in a cruel and incomprehensible world, exposed to all the whims of the master species. According to the animal haters, those who are fond of animals are sick people. To me it seems just the other way around, that the love for animals is something more, not something less. As a rule, those who protect animals have for them the same feeling as for all the other defenseless or abused creatures: the battered or abandoned children, the sick, the inmates of penal or mental institutions, who are so often maltreated without a way of redress. And those who are fond of animals don't love them for their "animality" but for their "humanity" — their "human" qualities. By which I mean the qualities humans display when at their best, not at their worst. Man's love for the animal is, at any rate, always inferior in intensity and completeness to the love the animal has for the human being that has won its love. The human being is the elder brother, who has countless different preoccupations, activities and interests. But to the animal that loves a human being, this being is everything. That applies not only to the generous, impetuous dog, but also to the more reserved species, with which it is more difficult to establish a relationship without personal effort and plenty of patience."

"It is difficult to become familiar with animals without becoming fond of them, provided one doesn't wish to domineer them. I have never heard that love for animals has changed to hate, but many cases where the opposite happened. Many hunters, obliged to observe the animals while stalking them, in time grow increasingly reluctant to kill them, and finally wish to become wardens in the national parks, to help protect them. Very few vivisectors seem to be hampered by this natural evolution that leads to the love and respect of the animals through a deeper knowledge of them."

"Many of the medical men who have denounced the practice of vivisection as inhuman, fallacious and dangerous have been among the most distinguished in their profession. Rather than a minority, they ought to be called an élite. And in fact, opinions should not only be counted — they should also be weighed. The first great medical man who indicated that vivisection is not just inhuman and unscientific, but that it is unscientific because it is inhuman was Sir Charles Bell … At the time the aberration of vivisection began to take root in its modern form, he declared that it could only be practiced by callous individuals, who couldn't be expected to penetrate the mysteries of life."

"Man is a moral creature. The moral sense is so deeply rooted in human beings that no thief, no murderer has ever asked the abrogation of the penalties against theft and murder. All the laws that have ruled human organization in the past and rule them at present are based on the moral sense: on what is right and wrong. And no religion, no legislature has ever deemed it necessary to define right and wrong, because no one has any doubt as to the meaning of these terms. Only the worshippers of the pseudoscience of modern times regard morality and immorality, justice and injustice, good and evil, as anti-scientific concepts, since it is not possible to reproduce them in a laboratory. … The reasonings of the vivisectionists are unscientific because they don't take into account the intangible realities of life. The moral law is one such intangible reality: And it is the incomprehension of this reality that marks the inescapable failure of experimental science when applied to living beings, with its inevitable sequence of tragic errors."

"The moral sense is at the root of pity. Pity means compassion — the capacity to resent someone else's suffering as if it were one's own. The absence of pity is a mark of obtuseness: incapacity of identifying oneself with those who are in pain or downtrodden. Worthy of pity are mainly mistreated or bereaved children, the old, the sick, all those that are helpless and abused. This includes the majority of animals. And we mustn't ask ourselves whether or not they are able to go to heaven, whether or not they are able to reason, or to speak, or to count, or to vote, but we must ask ourselves only one question: "Are they able to suffer?" And it is their misfortune that they are only too able to suffer."

"Can one regard a fellow creature as a property item, an investment, a piece of meat, an ‘it,’ without degenerating into cruelty towards that creature?"

"[Editors had asked him to tone down his columns] I shout at them. They shout at me. I resign and stamp my feet. I'm terrible — probably the most difficult columnist in Britain to deal with."

"[From full-page advertisements placed by Coleman for his book Oil Apocalypse] This isn't a script for a horror movie [...] The lorry that collects your rubbish won't be running. Streetlights won't burn. Hospitals will have to close . . . There won't be any more television programmes. You won't be able to charge your mobile telephone. Within a generation, five out of six people on the planet will be dead. I'll repeat, five out of six people on the planet will be dead."

"I suppose I try and write in blood a lot of the time. I suppose a lot of it is violent in that if I get angry about something, I don't try to hide it."

"You must prepare yourself for a different world. A world in which the rich ride horses, the middle classes use bicycles and the poor walk. If you are planning for the long-term - and in this scenario, five years is long-term - don't buy a house that relies on you having petrol for your car. You want a house in a town with a small garden where you can grow vegetables, and you want to be relatively close to railways, hospitals, shops, and libraries. The government shutting down local post offices is an enormously stupid thing to do."

"The bloody minded live longer – especially if they are marooned in one of those appalling places we call hospitals. Complain a good deal and ask as many questions as you can. Make a fuss and remind everyone in a uniform or a white coat that you are a human being."

"Carry a stout stick. I recommend carrying a stick even if you don't need it for support. Sticks are good for hitting and prodding people who have annoyed or patronised you."

"Coleman's explanation suggests he has an oddly polarised view of gender - but then this is a man whose very fixed ideas about women are not noticeably informed by feminism. In People Watching (1995), women are not only warned away from big cars, but advised to "carry a small handbag to give an impression of helplessness. A large handbag will give the impression that you are totally independent and do not need to be protected by a male." In 1987 he said it was a "tragedy" that by the year 2000 half of all doctors qualifying from medical school would be women. "I thnk that is an appalling prospect... Women make wonderful nurses-they make rotten doctors." The main problem, he explained, was that neither male nor female nurses liked taking orders from women doctors: "Because they feel inferior they feel the need to push that little bit harder than anyone else.""