#species

Planting native species in our gardens and communities is increasingly important, because indigenous insects, birds and wildlife rely on them. Over thousands, and sometimes millions, of years they have co-evolved to live in local climate and soil conditions. ↗

— David Suzuki

#birds #climate #communities #conditions #gardens

For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice. ↗

— Erwin Schrodinger

#any #becomes #community #destructive #egoism

Just as we reject racism, sexism, ageism, and heterosexism, we reject speciesism. The species of a sentient being is no more reason to deny the protection of this basic right than race, sex, age, or sexual orientation is a reason to deny membership in the human moral community to other humans. ↗

— Gary L. Francione

#ageism #basic #being #community #deny

Any reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes. ↗

— James Madison

#any #apt #classes #fill #good

With the exception of certain rodents, no other vertebrate except Homo sapiens habitually destroys members of his own species. ↗

— Anthony Storr

#destroys #except #exception #habitually #his

A reduction of meat consumption by only 10% would result in about 12 million more tons of grain for human consumption. This additional grain could feed all of the humans across the world who starve to death each year- about 60 million people! ↗

— Marc Bekoff

#food #humans #life #speciesism #starving

If education really educates, there will, in time, be more and more citizens who understand that relics of the old West add meaning and value to the new. Youth yet unborn will pole up the Missouri with Lewis and Clark, or climb the Sierras with James Capen Adams, and each generation in turn will ask: Where is the big white bear? It will be a sorry answer to say he went under while conservationists weren't looking. ↗

— Aldo Leopold

#conservations #endangered-species #exploration #history #the-west

I made the choice to be vegan because I will not eat (or wear, or use) anything that could have an emotional response to its death or captivity. I can well imagine what that must feel like for our non-human friends - the fear, the terror, the pain - and I will not cause such suffering to a fellow living being. ↗

— Rai Aren

#animals #compassion #equality #ethical-vegan #kindness

We generally accept that it's natural for carnivorous wild animals to kill other animals in order to live. But people don't often think (or even know) about the extraordinary and unnatural suffering that humans inflict on the animals that we freely harvest for food, with the help of modern high technology and the animal food sciences. ↗

— Marc Bekoff

#food #speciesism #vegan #food

We proclaim human intelligence to be morally valuable per se because we are human. If we were birds, we would proclaim the ability to fly as morally valuable per se. If we were fish, we would proclaim the ability to live underwater as morally valuable per se. But apart from our obviously self-interested proclamations, there is nothing morally valuable per se about human intelligence. ↗

— Gary L. Francione

#birds #fish #humans #intelligence #morally-valuable