Peter Singer Quotes About Animals

Quotes about: Animals

• All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering, the animals are our equals.

  Peter Singer

  Encouragement, Nature, Animal

  "Peter Singer" by Ed Vulliamy, www.theguardian.com. February 14, 2009.

• If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Degrees, Doe

  Peter Singer (2015). “Animal Liberation”, p.31, Random House

• People tend to care about dogs because they generally have more experience with dogs as companions; but other animals are as capable of suffering as dogs are. Few people feel sympathy for rats. Yet rats are intelligent animals, and there can be no doubt that rats are capable of suffering and do suffer from countless painful experiments performed on them. If the army were to stop experiments on dogs and switch to rats instead, we should not be any less concerned.

  Peter Singer

  Dog, Army, Animal

  "Animal-rights pioneer says de Blasio carriage deal misses bigger picture" by Dana Rubinstein, www.politico.com. January 25, 2016.

• Becoming a vegan is a sure way of completely avoiding participation in the abuse of farmed animals. Vegans are a living demonstration of the fact that we do not need to exploit animals for food.

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Abuse, Needs

  Peter Singer, Jim Mason (2007). “The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter”, Rodale Books

• Animal factories are one more sign of the extent to which our technological capacities have advanced faster than our ethics.

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Ethics, Vegetarian

  Jim Mason, Peter Singer (1980). “Animal Factories”, Crown

• Personal purity isn’t really the issue. Not supporting animal abuse – and persuading others not to support it – is.

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Issues, Support

  Peter Singer, Jim Mason (2007). “The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter”, p.283, Rodale

• As for cages themselves, an ordinary citizen who kept dogs in similar conditions for their entire lives would risk prosecution for cruelty. A pig producer who keeps an animal of comparable intelligence in this manner, however, is more likely to be rewarded with a tax concession or, in some countries, a direct government subsidy.

  Peter Singer

  Country, Dog, Animal

  Peter Singer (1975). “Animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals”

• Sometimes animals may suffer more because of their more limited understanding. If, for instance, we are taking prisoners in wartime we can explain to them that although they must submit to capture, search, and confinement, they will not otherwise be harmed and will be set free at the conclusion of hostilities. If we capture wild animals, however, we cannot explain that we are not threatening their lives. A wild animal cannot distinguish an attempt to overpower and confine from an attempt to kill; the one causes as much terror as the other.

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Understanding, Suffering

• The most callous, stupid things were done just because regulations required them...It was not until 1983, for example, that U.S. federal agencies stated that substances known to be caustic irritants such as lye, ammonia, and oven cleaners, did not need to be tested on the eyes of conscious rabbits.

  Peter Singer

  Stupid, Eye, Animal

• Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. Sexists violate the principle of equality by favoring the interests of their own sex. Similarly, speciesists allow the interests of their own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is identical in each case.

  Peter Singer

  Sex, Animal, Race

• There has been opposition to experimenting on animals for a long time. This opposition has made little headway because experimenters, backed by commercial firms that profit by supplying laboratory animals and equipment, have been able to convince legislators and the public that opposition comes from uninformed fanatics who consider the interests of animals more important than the interests of human beings.

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Long, Important

• Becoming a vegetarian is not merely a symbolic gesture. Nor is it an attempt to isolate oneself from the ugly realities of the world, to keep oneself pure and so without responsibility for the cruelty and carnage all around. Becoming a vegetarian is a highly practical and effective step one can take toward ending both the killing of nonhuman animals and the infliction of suffering on them.

  Peter Singer

  Philosophical, Responsibility, Animal

  Peter Singer (1975). “Animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals”

• When children see animals in a circus, they learn that animals exist for our amusement. Quite apart from the cruelty involved in training and confining these animals, the whole idea that we should enjoy the humiliating spectacle of an elephant or lion made to perform circus tricks shows a lack of respect for the animals as individuals.

  Peter Singer

  Children, Animal, Elephants

• If we are concerned about the exploitation of human workers in countries with low standards of worker protection, we should also be concerned about the treatment of even more defenceless non-human animals.

  Peter Singer

  Country, Animal, Protection

  "Religion's regressive hold on animal rights issues" by Peter Singer, www.theguardian.com. June 8, 2010.

• If you're buying animal products and can go to the farm and actually see how the animals are looked after, yes, that's an important point. That's definitely the best way of assuring yourself that the animals are being well treated.

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Important, Way

  "Chew the Right Thing". Interview with Dave Gilson, www.motherjones.com. May 3, 2006.

• If zoos are like arks, then rare animals are like passengers on a voyage of the damned, never to find a port that will let them dock or a land in which they can live in peace. The real solution, of course, is to preserve the wild nature that created these animals and has the power to sustain them. But if it is really true that we are inevitably moving towards a world in which mountain gorillas can survive only in zoos, then we must ask whether it is really better for them to live in artificial environments of our design than not to be born at all.

  Peter Singer

  Zoos, Real, Moving

• Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed, we must destroy the Judeo-Christian religious tradition.

  Peter Singer

  Christian, Religious, Animal

• At present scientists do not look for alternatives simply because they do not care enough about the animals they are using.

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Alternatives, Looks

  Peter Singer (1975). “Animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals”

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

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Standards, Valuable

  Peter Singer (1975). “Animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals”

• I do not believe that it could never be justifiable to experiment on a brain-damaged human.

  Peter Singer

  Believe, Animal, Brain

• What is there about the notion of a person, at law, that makes every living member of the species Homo sapiens a person, irrespective of their mental capacities, but excludes every nonhuman animal - again, irrespective of their mental capacities?

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Law, Capacity

• Whatever the reason, for most of the present century, the literature and publicity of the old established [animal welfare] groups made a significant contribution to the prevailing attitude that dogs and cats and wild animals need protection, but other animals do not. Thus people came to think of "animal welfare" as something for kindly ladies who are dotty about cats, and not as a cause founded on basic principles of justice and morality.

  Peter Singer

  Dog, Attitude, Cat

• With the eventual acceptance of Darwin's theory we reach a modern understanding of nature, one which has since then changed in detail rather than in fundamentals. Only those who prefer religious faith to beliefs based on reasoning and evidence can still maintain that the human species is the special darling of the entire universe, or that other animals were created to provide us with food, or that we have divine authority over them, and divine permission to kill them.

  Peter Singer

  Religious, Acceptance, Animal

• An animal experiment cannot be justifiable unless the experiment is so important that the use of a brain-damaged human would be justifiable.

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Brain, Important

• So far as this argument is concerned nonhuman animals and infants and retarded humans are in the same category; and if we use this argument to justify experiments on nonhuman animals we have to ask ourselves whether we are also prepared to allow experiments on human infants and retarded adults; and if we make a distinction between animals and these humans, on what basis can we do it, other than a bare-faced - and morally indefensible - preference for members of our own species?

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Adults, Use

  Peter Singer (1975). “Animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals”

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