#animals

It more or less has the shape of a love song, but 'Crescent Moon' reflects more my longing for an ancient romantic context that includes wild animals, fire, danger of death, stellar navigation, and seasonal intuition. ↗

— Frank Black

#context #danger #death #fire #includes

How could it ever be to our purpose to rob another living being of his or her purpose? ↗

— Will Tuttle

#compassion #life #diet

We are not encouraged, on a daily basis, to pay careful attention to the animals we eat. On the contrary, the meat, dairy, and egg industries all actively encourage us to give thought to our own immediate interest (taste, for example, or cheap food) but not to the real suffering involved. They do so by deliberately withholding information and by cynically presenting us with idealized images of happy animals in beautiful landscapes, scenes of bucolic happiness that do not correspond to anything in the real world. The animals involved suffer agony because of our ignorance. The least we owe them is to lessen that ignorance. ↗

— Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

#dairy #eggs #factory-farming #food #ignorance

the mangrove killfish, lives in South American and southern US coastal swamps that can either dry up or become so toxic that the fish has to find refuge in the mud or by flipping and jumping across land. Amazingly, its skin and gills change so the killfish can breathe air and survive out of the water for as long as ten weeks. ↗

— Karen Shanor

#change

It's brutal out there. A bear will eat a lactating ewe alive, starting with her udders. as a rule, animals in the wild don't get good deaths surrounded by their loved ones. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#food #death

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

#ethics #humans #vegetarianism #dreams

I am no theologian, and do not have the answers to these questions, and one of the reasons I enjoy the animals on the farm so much is that they don't think about their pain, or question it, they accept it and endure it, true stoics. I have never heard a donkey or cow whine (although I guess dogs do). I told my friend this: pain, like joy, is a gift. It challenges us, tests, defines us, causes us to grow, empathize, and also, to appreciate its absence. If nothing else, it sharpens the experience of joy. The minute something happens to me that causes pain, I start wondering how I can respond to it, what I can learn from it, what it has taught me or shown me about myself. This doesn't make it hurt any less, but it puts it, for me, on a more manageable level. I don't know if there is a God, or if he causes me or anybody else to hurt, or if he could stop pain. I try to accept it and live beyond it. I think the animals have taught me that. The Problem of Pain is that it exists, and is ubiquitous. The Challenge of Pain is how we respond to it. ↗

— Jon Katz

#farm #pain #problem #experience

I think using animals for food is an ethical thing to do, but we've got to do it right. We've got to give those animals a decent life and we've got to give them a painless death. We owe the animal respect. ↗

— Temple Grandin

#animals #humanity #death

The dog is the most faithful of animals and would be much esteemed were it not so common. Our Lord God has made His greatest gifts the commonest. ↗

— Martin Luther

#dogs #faith

Sounds become more like other sounds that neighbor them. That is why one congressman oinks, another moos, and another bleats. ↗

— Bauvard

#congress #funny #humor #funny