QUOTES

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” Henry Beston, The Outermost House

Photo By Steve Adams

Photo By Pixaby

“The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?" —Jeremy Bentham

"There is a certain level of violence operating at the root of commodifying life—the process that requires, even in the most thoughtful of farming settings,...a prioritization of the animal-as-commodity above the animal as a singular being with a life, interests, and attachments of her own for which there can be no provision in determining her commodity value" —Kathryn Gillespie, The Cow With Ear Tag #1389

"In my judgement, veganism ought to be the baseline of the animal movement, because, as far as I'm concerned—and I think empirically—there's probably more suffering in a glass of milk or in a dish of ice cream than there is in a pound of steak. I mean, it all involves torture, but the idea that people make this distinction and say, 'Well, I don't eat meat, but I eat dairy"...To me that's about as sensible as saying, you know, 'I don't eat small cows, but I'll eat larger cows.' There really is no difference. I mean, there's suffering in the dairy product...probably more, because, if you think about it, animals used in the dairy industry are kept alive longer; they're treated worse."

—Gary L. Francione, quoted in Speciesism The Movie