"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, poet and philosopher

"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 Edison, inventor

"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, author, Nobel 1915

"If you step back and look at the data, the optimum amount of red meat you eat should be zero."

Walter Willett, M.D., of Brigham and Women's Hospital, director of a study that found a close correlation between red meat consumption and colon cancer.

"Usually, the first thing a country does in the course of economic development is to introduce a lot of livestock. Our data are showing that this is not a very smart move and the Chinese are listening. They are realizing that animal-based agriculture is not the way to go.... We are basically a vegetarian species and should be eating a wide variety of plant food and minimizing our intake of animal foods....

"Once people start introducing animal products into their diet, that's when the mischief starts."

T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., of Cornell University, director of a study of 6,500 Chinese that found a close correlation between meat consumption and the incidence of heart disease and cancer.

"The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined. If beef is your idea of real food for real people, you'd better live real close to a real good hospital."

Neal D. Barnard, M.D., President, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Washington, D.C.

"When we kill the animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings."

William C. Roberts, M.D., editor of The American Journal of Cardiology

"All red meat contains saturated fat. There is no such thing as truly lean meat. Trimming away the edge ring of fat around a steak really does not lower the fat content significantly. People who have red meat (trimmed or untrimmed) as a regular feature of their diets suffer in far greater numbers from heart attacks and strokes."

Michael Klaper, M.D., Medical Director, EarthSave Foundation, Santa Cruz, California

"The thousands of people who have suffered food poisoning after eating beef will, no doubt, appreciate that their beef was aesthetically acceptable, even though it made them ill. Lovely to look at, dangerous to eat is not a standard that is likely to help beef sales."

Carol Tucker Foreman, Assistant Secretary of Agriculture during the Carter administration, commenting on the inadequacy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Streamlined (Meat) Inspection System (SIS).

"As happened with tobacco, health warnings about meat eating are multiplying, and awareness of the environmental effects of meat production is rising. Just as cigarettes lost their allure, meat is losing its social cachet in some countries. Food marketers in the United Kingdom estimate that 2 million people in that country are strict vegetarians. More important, the number of people limiting meat in their diets is rising rapidly. An estimated 6 million people in the United Kingdom dine on meatless meals most of the time."

Alan B. Durning and Holly B. Brough, in Taking Stock: Animal Farming and the Environment, Worldwatch Institute, Washington, D.C., 1991

"An alien ecologist observing... Earth might conclude that cattle is the dominant animal species in our biosphere."

David Hamilton Wright, Ph.D., Emory University biologist

"The impact of countless hooves and mouths over the years has done more to alter the type of vegetation and land forms of the West than all the water projects, strip mines, power plants, freeways, and subdivision developments combined."

Philip Fradkin in Audubon, National Audubon Society, NY, NY

"Most of the public lands in the West, and especially the Southwest, are what you might call cow burnt. Almost anywhere and everywhere you go in the American West you find hordes of [cows].... They are a pest and a plague. They pollute our springs and streams and rivers. They infest our canyons, valleys, meadows, and forests. They graze off the native bluestems and grama and bunch grasses, leaving behind jungles of prickly pear. They trample down the native forbs and shrubs and cacti. They spread the exotic cheatgrass, the Russian thistle, and the crested wheat grass. Weeds. Even when the cattle are not physically present, you see the dung and the flies and the mud and the dust and the general destruction. If you don't see it, you'll smell it. The whole American West stinks of cattle."

The late Edward Abbey, conservationist and author, in a speech before cattlemen at the University of Montana in 1985

"You can buy the land out there now for the same price as a couple of bottles of beer per acre. When you've got half a million acres and 20,000 head of cattle, you can leave the lousy place and go live in Paris, Hawaii, Switzerland, or anywhere you choose."

American rancher who owns grazing land in the Amazon, describing the attitude of cattle colonists in the Brazilian rain forest

"We got hooked on grain-fed meat just as we got hooked on gas guzzling automobiles. Big cars made sense only when oil was cheap; grain-fed meat makes sense only because the true costs of producing it are not counted."

Frances Moore Lappe', in "Diet for a Small Planet"

"A reduction in beef and other meat consumption is the most potent single act you can take to halt the destruction of our environment and preserve our natural resources. Our choices do matter. What's healthiest for each of us personally is also healthiest for the life support system of our precious, but wounded planet."

John Robbins, author of "Diet for a New America", and President, EarthSave Foundation, Santa Cruz, California

"It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the over-population of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat."

Jeremy Rifkin, author of "Beyond Beef, The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture", and President of the Greenhouse Crisis Foundation, Washington, D.C.

"A meat-fed world now appears a chimera. World grain production has grown more slowly than population since 1984, and farmers lack new methods for repeating the gains of the green revolution. Supporting the world's current population of 5.4 billion people on an American-style diet would require two-and-a-half times as much grain as the world's farmers produce for all purposes. A future world of 8 billion to 14 billion people eating the American ration of 220 grams of grain-fed meat a day can be nothing but a flight of fancy."

Alan B. Durning and Holly Brough, Worldwatch Institute, Washington, D.C.

"There can be no question that more hunger can be alleviated with a given quantity of grain by completely eliminating animals [from the food production process]. About 2,000 pounds of concentrates [grains] must be supplied to livestock in order to produce enough meat and other livestock products to support a person for a year, whereas 400 pounds of grain (corn, wheat, rice, soybeans, etc.) eaten directly will support a person for a year. Thus, a given quantity of grain eaten directly will feed 5 times as many people as it will if it is first fed to livestock and then is eaten indirectly by humans in the form of livestock products...."

M. E. Ensminger, Ph.D., internationally recognized animal agriculture specialist, former Department of Animal Science Chairman at Washington State University, currently President of Consultants-Agriservices, Clovis, California

"Changing eating habits in the North is an important link in the chain of events needed to create environmentally sustainable development that meets people's needs. The Beyond Beef campaign is an important step in that direction."

Dr. Walden Bello, Executive Director, Food First/The Institute for Food and Development Policy, San Francisco, California

"Suppose food were distributed equally. If everyone in the world ate as Americans do, less than half the present world population could be fed on the record harvests of 1985 and 1986. Of course, everyone doesn't have to eat like Americans. About a third of the world grain harvest -- the staples of the human feeding base -- is fed to animals to produce eggs, milk, and meat for American-style diets. Wouldn't feeding that grain directly to people solve the problem? If everyone were willing to eat an essentially vegetarian diet, that additional grain would allow perhaps a billion more people to be fed with 1986 production."

Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, authors of "The Population Explosion", 1990

"Family farmers are victims of public policy that gives preference to feeding animals over feeding people. This has encouraged the cheap grain policy of this nation and has made the Beef Cartel the biggest hog at the trough."

Howard Lyman, Executive Director, Beyond Beef campaign, former senior lobbyist for the National Farmers Union

"In my opinion, one of the greatest animal-welfare problems is the physical abuse of livestock during transportation.... Typical abuses I have witnessed with alarming frequency are; hitting, beating, use of badly maintained trucks, jabbing of short objects into animals, and deliberate cruelty."

Temple Grandin, Ph.D., internationally recognized livestock handling consultant and board member of the meat industry's Livestock Conservation Institute 

"For most humans, especially for those in modern urban and suburban communities, the most direct form of contact with nonhuman animals is at meal time: we eat them.... The use and abuse of animals raised for food far exceeds, in sheer numbers of animals affected, any other kind of mistreatment."

Peter Singer, author of "Animal Liberation", and professor of philosophy at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia 

"The amount of meat lost each year through careless handling and brutality would be enough to feed a million Americans for a year."

John McFarlane, Executive Director, The Council for Livestock Protection, a meat industry organization

"I know, in my soul, that to eat a creature who is raised to be eaten, and who never has a chance to be a real being, is unhealthy. It's like...you're just eating misery. You're eating a bitter life."

Alice Walker, author and poet

"In fact, if one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people."

Ruth Harrison, author of "Animal Machines"

"Yet saddest of all fates, surely, is to have lost that sense of the holiness of life altogether; that we commit the blasphemy of bringing thousands of lives to a cruel and terrifying death or of making those lives a living death -- and feel nothing."

The Right Reverend John Austin Baker, Bishop of Salisbury, England, commenting on the cruelty of modern animal agriculture

"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."

Ralph Waldo Emerson in "Fate"

"If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals."

Albert Einstein

"If slaughterhouses had glass walls, we would all be vegetarian." 

Anonymous

"The dissolution of commercial animal farming as we know it obviously requires more than our individual commitment to vegetarianism. To refuse on principle to buy products of the meat industry is to do what is right, but it is not to do enough. To recognize the rights of animals is to recognize the related duty to defend them against those who violate their rights, and to discharge this duty requires more than our individual abstention. It requires acting to bring about those changes that are necessary if the rights of these animals are not to be violated. Fundamentally, then, it requires a revolution in our culture's thought about, and its accepted treatment of, farm animals... But prejudices die hard, all the more so when they are insulated by widespread secular customs and religious beliefs, sustained by large and powerful economic interests, and protected by the common law. To overcome the collective entropy of those forces against change will not be easy. The animal rights movement is not for the faint heart."

Tom Regan

"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

"My dream is that people will come to view eating an animal as cannibalism." 

Henry Spira

"The day may come when the rest of animal creation may acquire those rights which could never have been withheld from them but by the hand of tyranny...a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week or even a month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, can they reason? Nor can they talk? But can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes..." 

Jeremy Bentham

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." 

Henry David Thoreau

"The very people who shudder over the cruelty of the hunter are apt to forget that slaughter, in the grimmest sense of the word, is a process they entrust daily to the butcher; and that unlike the game of the forests, even the dumbest creatures of the slaughterhouse know what is in store for them."

 Lewis Mumford

"Strange lot this, to be dropped down in a world of barbarians - men who see clearly enough through the barbarity of all ages except their own." 

Ernest Crosby

"For the sake of some little mouthful of flesh, we deprive a soul of the sun and light and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy."

Plutarch

"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

"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"

Isaac Bashevis Singer 

"The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected to the fate of men"

Emile Zola

"Some will take refuge in the old cliché that humans are different from other animals. But when did a difference justify a moral prejudice? When did those with black hair have a right to mistreat those with red hair...or even those with blue or purple hair...Surely the crucial similarity that men share with other animals is the capacity to suffer? Regardless of the number of legs or the woolliness of our fur, we can all suffer..."

Richard Ryder

"Not having known anything better does not alleviate the suffering of the animal. Its fundamental desires remain and it is the frustration of those desires that is a great part of its suffering. There are so many examples: the dairy cow who is never allowed to raise her young, the battery hen who can never walk or stretch her wings, the sow who can never build a nest or root for food in the forest litter, etc. Eventually we frustrate the animal's most fundamental desire of all - to live."

David Cowles-Hamar.

"In point of fact, I am the very opposite of an anthropomorphiser. I don't hold animals superior or even equal to humans. The whole case for behaving decently to animals rests on the fact that we are the superior species. We are the species uniquely capable of imagination, rationality and moral choice - and that is precisely why we are under an obligation to recognise and respect the rights of animals."

Brigid Brophy

"The first time I ever entered a battery house I thought it was the entrance to Hell" 

Violet Spalding

"The church so hated these good people (the Albigenses - a "heretical" sect of thirteenth century France) whose Christ-like compassion was such a judgement on its own pagan and anti-Christian violence, that their vegetarian habits were not only represented as signs of a diabolical heresy, but were also used as a means to detect and convict them. For when prisoners were taken, sheep were led to them and knives were provided for their butchery. Those who refused to kill the animals were burnt at the stake, and the majority did refuse since to take sentient life violated the very basis of their faith." 

Esme Wynne-Tyson

"I hope to make people realise how totally helpless a animals are, how dependent on us, trusting as a child must be that we will be kind and take care of their needs...[They] are an obligation put on us, a responsibility we have no right to neglect, or violate by cruelty." 

James Herriot

"I do not like eating meat because I have seen lambs and pigs killed. I saw and felt their pain. They felt their approaching death. I could not bear it. I cried like a child. I ran up a hill and could not breathe. I felt that I was choking. I felt the death of the lamb." 

Vaslav Nijinski

"What is the importance of human lives? Is it their continuing alive for so many years like animals in a menagerie? The value of a man cannot be judged by the number of diseases from which he escapes. The value of a man is in his human qualities: in his character, in his conscience, in the nobility and magnanimity, of his soul. Torturing animals to prolong human life has separated science from the most important thing that life has produced - the human conscience." 

John Cowper Powys  

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