Jim Mason
Jim Mason
American animal rights activist and author,
Animal Factories,
An Unnatural Order
"Animals have been regarded as property for way too long. It's high time we took on a more loving and responsible relationship with our kindred beings in the web of life on this beautiful planet. I always think and act as a guardian towards my kindred beings, never as their owner."
"Americans, at least, have a tremendous appetite for meat, dairy products and eggs. They have little appetite, however, for information on the lives of the animals that produce what they eat. Perhaps they sense something. Do they sense that beyond the mountain of steaks, hamburgers, sausages, cold cuts, ice cream, milkshakes, cheeses, pizzas, pastries, souffles and omelets consumed each year lies a whole mountain range of animal suffering and death?"
"It is the worldview of the human supremacist: The view or belief held by one species, Homo sapiens sapiens, that it has a divine right — a God-given license — to use animals and everything else in the living world for its own benefit. This worldview is strongest in Western traditions, but it has spread to Russia, China, Japan and most of the rest of the world."
"Some think human society seems to be steadily going insane. They note the ridiculous hatreds that keep us nearly constantly at war with each other. They see we are fouling our global nest, wiping out much of the planet’s life and making life more and more miserable for ourselves. I don’t think we are going insane; I think we have just not learned to look deeply enough into the causes of our current social and environmental problems. I believe with a growing number of others that these problems began several millennia ago when our ancestors took up farming and broke the primal bonds with the living world and put human beings above all other life..."
