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Animal Defenders of Westchester |
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Home Page We advocate on all animal protection and exploitation issues, including experimentation, factory farming, rodeos, breeders and traveling animal acts. Animal Defenders of Westchester |
Articles Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is:
"Because the animals are like us." Ask the experimenters why it is morally
okay to experiment on animals, and the answer is: "Because the animals are
not like us." Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction. ~Charles
R. Magel God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented
cages. ~Jacques Deval, Afin de vivre bel et bien We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our
distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were
able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form. ~William
Ralph Inge, Outspoken Essays, 1922 From beasts we scorn as soulless, The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk?" but rather,
"Can they suffer?" ~Jeremy Bentham I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better
for it. ~Abraham Lincoln Personally, I would not give a fig for any man's religion whose horse,
cat and dog do not feel its benefits. Life in any form is our perpetual
responsibility. ~S. Parkes Cadman No one in the world needs a mink coat but a mink. ~Author Unknown
Never wear anything that panics the cat. ~P.J. O'Rourke Cruelty is one fashion statement we can all do without. ~Rue
McClanahan Ever occur to you why some of us can be this much concerned with animals
suffering? Because government is not. Why not? Animals don't vote. ~Paul
Harvey Support your right to arm bears. ~Cleveland Amory Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above
him when he shows no mercy to what is under him? ~Pierre Troubetzkoy
Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the
sight. ~Albert Schweitzer Hunting is not a sport. In a sport, both sides should know they're in
the game. ~Paul Rodriguez Featured Link: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Man is the
only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he
does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast
enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. ~George
Orwell, Animal Farm Cockfighting was illegal in Oklahoma until 1963, when a judge ruled that
chickens are not animals and therefore unprotected by anticruelty laws. ~U.S.
News & World Report, 6 December 1999 Animals give me more pleasure through the viewfinder of a camera than
they ever did in the crosshairs of a gunsight. And after I've finished
"shooting," my unharmed victims are still around for others to enjoy. I
have developed a deep respect for animals. I consider them fellow living
creatures with certain rights that should not be violated any more than
those of humans. ~Jimmy Stewart If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we
are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical
to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same
reasons. ~C.S. Lewis Michael W. Fox, vice-president of the Humane Society, said that, "to call
an animal with whom you share your life a 'pet,' is reminiscent of men's
magazines where you (a figure of speech, don't take it personally) have the
Pet of the Month." It is supposed that the continued use of the word "pet"
to designate dogs or cats threatens to reduce their level of respect to the
current status of twentieth century North American women. Now that's
radical. ~The McGill Red Herring People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer
to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs. ~Author Unknown Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in
sport, but in earnest. ~Bion, "Water and Land Animals," Plutarch
The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest. ~Henry David
Thoreau Drinking without being thirsty and making love at any time, Madame, are
the only things that distinguish us from other animals. ~Pierre-
Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, The Marriage of Figaro, 1784, translated
I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say
because it's such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is
attractive, but I have photographs of her. ~Ellen DeGeneres When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a
vandal. When he destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman. ~Joseph
Wood Krutch The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether
you are at the right or wrong end of a gun. ~P.G. Wodehouse If you love animals called pets, why do you eat animals called dinner? ~As
seen on a shirt The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual
superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves
his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot. ~Mark Twain, What Is
Man, 1906 Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the
torture and death of his fellow-creatures is amusing in itself.
~James Anthony Froude, Oceana, 1886 The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made
for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created
for men. ~Alice Walker As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he
always had the same thought: in their behaviour toward creatures, all men
were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he
pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that
might is right. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer Life is life - whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference
there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human conception
for man's own advantage. ~Sri Aurobindo When I was twelve, I went hunting with my father and we shot a bird.
He was laying there and something struck me. Why do we call this fun to
kill this creature [who] was as happy as I was when I woke up this morning.
~Marv Levy Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals "love" them. But those who
respect their natures and wish to let them live normal lives, love them
more. ~Edwin Way Teale, Circle of the Seasons, 1953 It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb
because it is dumb to his dull perceptions. ~Mark Twain The woods were made for the hunters of dreams, Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally
speaking, they are ignored. ~Alice Walker In an earlier stage of our development most human groups held to a tribal
ethic. Members of the tribe were protected, but people of other tribes
could be robbed or killed as one pleased. Gradually the circle of
protection expanded, but as recently as 150 years ago we did not include
blacks. So African human beings could be captured, shipped to America and
sold. In Australia white settlers regarded Aborigines as a pest and hunted
them down, much as kangaroos are hunted down today. Just as we have
progressed beyond the blatantly racist ethic of the era of slavery and
colonialism, so we must now progress beyond the speciesist ethic of the era
of factory farming, of the use of animals as mere research tools, of
whaling, seal hunting, kangaroo slaughter and the destruction of wilderness.
We must take the final step in expanding the circle of ethics. ~Pete
Singer Get a feel for fur: Slam your fingers in a car door. ~Anonymous, on
the use of steel traps to capture fur-bearing animals, cited in Audubon,
November 1990 Dogs are getting bigger, according to a leading dog manufacturer.
~Leo Rosten Whether hunting is right or wrong, a spiritual experience, or an outlet
for the killer instinct, one thing it is not is a sport. Sport
is when individuals or teams compete against each other under equal
circumstances to determine who is better at a given game or endeavor.
Hunting will be a sport when deer, elk, bears, and ducks are... given
12-gauge shotguns. Bet we'd see a lot fewer drunk yahoos (live ones,
anyway) in the woods if that happened. ~R. Lerner, letter, Sierra,
March-April 1991 Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you
would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made [man] is the most
detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one... that possesses
malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to
be pain. ~Mark Twain Evolutionary biology is now uttering and seeking those forces that link
us with all those that have being. If we can discover the meaning in the
trilling of a frog, perhaps we may understand why it is for us not merely
noise but a song of poetry and emotion. ~Adrian Forsyth, A Natural
History of Sex, 1986 Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it
does so at the expense of human character. ~George Bernard Shaw I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are
profitable to the human race or doesn't.... The pain which it inflicts upon
unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me
sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further. ~Mark
Twain The basis of all animal rights should be the Golden Rule: we should
treat them as we would wish them to treat us, were any other species in our
dominant position. ~Christine Stevens When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when the tiger
wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. ~George Bernard Shaw The animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more
complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with 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 splendor and travail of the earth. ~Henry Beston, The Outermost
House, 1928 I abhor vivisection with my whole soul. All the scientific discoveries
stained with innocent blood I count as of no consequence. ~Mahatma
Gandhi I abhor vivisection. It should at least be curbed. Better, it should be
abolished. I know of no achievement through vivisection, no scientific
discovery, that could not have been obtained without such barbarism and
cruelty. The whole thing is evil. ~Charles Mayo, founder of the Mayo
Clinic I had bought two male chimps from a primate colony in Holland. They
lived next to each other in separate cages for several months before I used
one as a [heart] donor. When we put him to sleep in his cage in preparation
for the operation, he chattered and cried incessantly. We attached no
significance to this, but it must have made a great impression on his
companion, for when we removed the body to the operating room, the other
chimp wept bitterly and was inconsolable for days. The incident made a deep
impression on me. I vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive
creatures. ~Christian Barnard, surgeon Terms like that, "Humane Society," are devised with people like me in
mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams I think animal testing is a terrible idea; they get all nervous and give
the wrong answers. ~Author Unknown Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child
as it is to the caterpillar. ~Bradley Millar A Robin Redbreast in a cage If a ferret bites you it is nearly always your own fault. ~Phil
Drabble The human spirit is not dead. It lives on in secret.... It has come to
believe that compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain
its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not
limit itself to mankind. ~Albert Schweitzer, Novel Peace Prize address,
"The Problem of Peace in the World Today" Hunt each other - leave the animals alone. ~As seen on a shirt People
must have renounced, it seems to me, all natural intelligence to dare to
advance that animals are but animated machines.... It appears to me,
besides, that [such people] can never have observed with attention the
character of animals, not to have distinguished among them the different
voices of need, of suffering, of joy, of pain, of love, of anger, and of all
their affections. It would be very strange that they should express so well
what they could not feel. ~Voltaire, Trate sur la tolerance Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals
once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature
were pursued, we would need no zoos at all. ~Michael Fox, Sierra,
November-December 1990 The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys
chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is
precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combatted at the
public expense, and not fostered. ~H.L. Mencken, quoted in New York
Evening Mail, 2 February 1918 The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our
treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous
example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only
guarantee of morality. ~Schopenhauer Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all
evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still
savages. ~Thomas A. Edison 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. ~Romain
Rolland, Nobel Prize 1915 When it comes to having a central nervous system, and the ability to feel
pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.
~Ingrid Newkirk Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to
cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit.
The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But
the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness
will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this
time may come. ~Albert Schweitzer Deer hunting would be fine sport, if only the deer had guns.
~William S. Gilbert There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in
their mental faculties.... The difference in mind between man and the higher
animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. The
love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man. We have
seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties,
such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of
which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes a
well-developed condition, in the lower animals. ~Charles Darwin Because the heart beats under a covering of hair, of fur, feathers, or
wings, it is, for that reason, to be of no account? ~Jean Paul Richter
God made all the creatures and gave them our love and our fear, To give
sign, we and they are His children, one family here. ~Robert Browning
Deliberate cruelty to our defenceless and beautiful little cousins is
surely one of the meanest and most detestable vices of which a human being
can be guilty. ~William Ralph Inge The indifference, callousness and contempt that so many people exhibit
toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering in
animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great
impoverishment of the human spirit. All education should be directed toward
the refinement of the individual's sensibilities in relation not only to
one's fellow humans everywhere, but to all things whatsoever. In the
societies of the Western world compassionate intelligence is encouraged in
girls - in boys it is tabu. The tabu on tenderness in which boys are
conditioned, the emphasis on "manliness," "machoism," plays havoc with the
male's capacity for compassionate intelligence. Tenderness is considered to
be feminine, and that is sufficient to remove it from the repertoire of
masculine behavior. Indeed, things have reached such a pass in the Western
world that many men seem to have lost all understanding of its meaning. The
masculine world would substitute for it the idea of "justice." The
difficulty with that is that there is not much compassion in their justice,
and justice without compassion is not justice at all. ~Ashley Montague
Wear your own skin. ~As seen on a shirt They are slaves who fear to speak There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a
gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer
Every year tens of thousands of animals suffer and die in laboratory
tests of cosmetics and household products... despite the fact that the test
results do not help prevent or treat accidental or purposeful misuse of the
products. Please join me in using your voice for those whose cries are
forever sealed behind the laboratory doors. ~Woody Harrelson Man is not the lord of all the world's animals. He is the protector. ~John
Forsythe The life spark in my eyes is in no way different than the life spark in
the eyes of any other sentient being. ~Michael Stepaniak, quoted in
Joanne Stepaniak, The Vegan Sourcebook, 1998 This tendency [to cruelty] should be watched in them [children], and if
they incline to any such cruelty, they should be taught the contrary usage.
For the custom of tormenting and killing other animals will, by degrees,
harden their hearts even towards men.... And they, who delight
in the suffering and destruction of inferior creatures, will not be apt to
be very compassionate or benign to those of their own kind. Children should
from the beginning be brought up in an abhorrence of killing or tormenting
living beings.... And indeed, I think people from their cradles should be
tender to all sensible creatures.... All the entertainment and talk of
History is of nothing but fighting and killing; and the honour and renown
that is bestowed on conquerors, who, for the most part, are but the great
butchers of mankind, further mislead youth. ~John Locke Beyond domestic animals and our response to their fealty and affection,
we have a peculiar charge concerning the wild animals which supply our
clothes, food and adornments. ~S. Parkes Cadman We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we
treat the animals. Animals suffer as much as we do. True humanity does not
allow us to impose such sufferings on them. It is our duty to make the
whole world recognize it. Until we extend our circle of compassion to all
living things, humanity will not find peace. ~Albert
Schweitzer, The Philosophy of Civilization If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter
of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their
fellow men. ~St. Francis of Assisi |
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