#animal

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

#animal-rights #capitalism #ecology #sustainability #vegan

I do not particularly like the word 'work.' Human beings are the only animals who have to work, and I think that is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Other animals make their livings by living, but people work like crazy, thinking that they have to in order to stay alive. The bigger the job, the greater the challenge, the more wonderful they think it is. It would be good to give up that way of thinking and live an easy, comfortable life with plenty of free time. I think that the way animals live in the tropics, stepping outside in the morning and evening to see if there is something to eat, and taking a long nap in the afternoon, must be a wonderful life. For human beings, a life of such simplicity would be possible if one worked to produce directly his daily necessities. In such a life, work is not work as people generally think of it, but simply doing what needs to be done. ↗

— Masanobu Fukuoka

#farming #food #leisure #living #living-well

Psycholinguists argue about whether language reflects our perception of reality or helps create them. I am in the latter camp. Take the names we give the animals we eat. The Patagonian toothfish is a prehistoric-looking creature with teeth like needles and bulging yellowish eyes that lives in deep waters off the coast of South America. It did not catch on with sophisticated foodies until an enterprising Los Angeles importer renamed it the considerably more palatable "Chilean sea bass. ↗

— Hal Herzog

#food #foodie #language #linguistics #names

No animal should ever jump up on the dining-room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation. ↗

— Fran Lebowitz

#animal #certain #conversation #ever #furniture

It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions. ↗

— Mark Twain

#because #call #dull #dumb #his

The lamb misused breeds public strife And yet forgives the butcher's knife. ↗

— William Blake

#hypocrisy #poetry #vegetarianism #forgiveness

Walter had never liked cats. They'd seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy countries fetishize their militaries, saluting the uniforms of killers as cat owners stroke their animals' lovely fur and forgive their claws and fangs. He'd never seen anything in a cat's face but simpering incuriosity and self-interest; you only had to tease one with a mouse-toy to see where it's true heart lay...cats were all about using people ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#animals #cats #cats-being-needed #dogs #dogs-and-cats

Sometimes a great wound or concussion of the head, especially which happens by falling headlong from an high place, brings a prejudice and weakness to the animal faculty, dulling the understanding. ↗

— Thomas Willis

#brings #dulling #especially #faculty #falling

He who lives in the single exercise of his mental faculties, however usefully or curiously directed, is equally an imperfect animal with the man who knows only the exercise of muscles. ↗

— Francis Wright

#curiously #directed #equally #exercise #faculties

Something I've never been able to adapt to, to understand is how they can lavish such love and care on the animals and then see them sold for slaughter. I don't dare say anything about it, though. Richard and his friends would be down on me in a flash. But there's some kind of cold, unfeeling contradiction in that business. ↗

— Robert James Waller

#vegetarianism #business