Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes About Animals

Quotes about: Animals

• Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn't motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn't enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Animal, Numbers, Suffering

• We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Ignorance, Opportunity, Animal

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2010). “Eating Animals”, p.208, Penguin UK

• Not responding is a response--we are equally responsible for what we don't do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Animal, Air, Hands

• Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don't), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and laws, wear keepsakes, apologize years after an offense, whisper, fear themselves, interpret dreams, hide their genitalia, shave, bury time capsules, and can choose not to eat something for reasons of conscience. The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Dream, Children, Party

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, November 2, 2009.

• Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Dog, Cat, Animal

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, www.huffingtonpost.com. 2009.

• Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  War, Kissing, Animal

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.99, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Only someone who'd never been an animal would put up a sign saying not to feed them.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Animal, Sign Sayings

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.28, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Elsewhere the paper notes that vegetarians and vegans (including athletes) 'meet and exceed requirements' for protein. And, to render the whole we-should-worry-about-getting-enough-protein-and-therefore-eat-meat idea even more useless, other data suggests that excess animal protein intake is linked with osteoporosis, kidney disease, calcium stones in the urinary tract, and some cancers. Despite some persistent confusion, it is clear that vegetarians and vegans tend to have more optimal protein consumption than omnivores.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Cancer, Food, Athlete

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, March 4, 2010..

• It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Children, Responsibility, Animal

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, 2009.

• If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals. Can we tell a new story?

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  War, Animal, Choices

• Whether we're talking about fish species, pigs, or some other eaten animal, is such suffering the most important thing in the world? Obviously not. But that's not the question. Is it more important that sushi, bacon, or chicken nuggets? That's the question.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Animal, Pigs, Talking

• Isn't it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we're doing what we're doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Baseball, Children, Animal

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, November 2, 2009.

• We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Animal, America, Rights

• Almost always when I told someone I was writing a book about "eating animals", they assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a case for vegetarianism. It's a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Book, Writing, Animal

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, 2010.

• We need a better way to talk about eating animals. We need a way that brings meat to the center of public discussion in the same way it is often at the center of our plates. This doesn't require that we pretend we are going to have a collective agreement. However strong our intuitions are about what's right for us personally and even about what's right for others, we all know in advance that our positions will clash with those of our neighbors. What do we do with that most inevitable reality? Drop the conversation, or find a way to reframe it?

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Strong, Reality, Animal

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, 2010.

• This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Animal, Aquariums, Berlin

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, 2009.

• This isn't animal experimentation, where you an imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Tell me something: Why is taste, the crudest of our sense, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other sense? If you stop and think about it, it's crazy. Why doesn't a horny person has as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it?

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Strong, Crazy, Animal

• Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Animal, Feet, Might

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, 2009.

• What the meat industry figured out is that you don't need healthy animals to make a profit. Sick animals are more profitable... Factory farms calculate how close to death they can keep animals without killing them. That's the business model. How quickly they can be made to grow, how tightly they can be packed, how much or how little can they eat, how sick they can get without dying...We live in a world in which it's conventional to treat an animal like a block of wood.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Block, Animal, Meat Industry

• The animals are those things that God likes but doesn't love.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Animal, Likes

• Cruelty...prefers abstraction. Some have tried to resolved this gap by hunting or butchering an animal themselves, as if those experiences might somehow legitimize the endeavor of eating animals. This is very silly. Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it woudln't be the most reasonable way to understand why you should or shouldn't do it.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Silly, Animal, Hunting

• Silently the animal catches our glance. The animal looks at us, and whether we look away (from the animal, our plate, our concern, ourselves) or not, we are exposed. Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Animal, Looks, Plates

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, November 2, 2009.

• My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds, and the animals descended the ramp.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Dream, Rain, Animal

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.312, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• People who care about animals tend to care about people. They don't care about animals to the exclusion of people. Caring is not a finite resource and, even more than that, it's like a muscle: the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Exercise, Caring, Animal

  "Jonathan Safran Foer on the Morality of Vegetarianism". Interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, www.theatlantic.com. December 11, 2009.

• There is an overabundance of rational reasons to say no to factory-farmed meat: It is the No. 1 cause of global warming, it systematically forces tens of billions of animals to suffer in ways that would be illegal if they were dogs, it is a decisive factor in the development of swine and avian flus, and so on.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Dog, Animal, Suffering

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