Animal Liberation Now Quotes

“Either the minds of animals are not like ours, in which case the experiments are unlikely to benefit us and there is less justification for funding and carrying them out; or else the animals do have minds like ours, in which case we ought not to perform on the animal an experiment that would be considered outrageous if performed on one of us.”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed

“In fact, the idea of “The Rights of Animals” was once used to parody the case for women’s rights. When Mary Wollstonecraft, a forerunner of modern feminists, published her Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, her views were widely regarded as absurd, and before long an anonymous publication appeared titled A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes. The author of this satirical work (now known to have been Thomas Taylor, a distinguished Cambridge philosopher) tried to refute Mary Wollstonecraft’s arguments by showing that they could be carried one step further. If the argument for equality was sound when applied to women, why should it not be applied to dogs, cats, and horses? Yet to hold that these “brutes” had rights was manifestly absurd. Therefore the reasoning for the equality of women must also be unsound.”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed

“The question is not”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation Now

“Hence the fate of farm animals is not an ethical side issue. It concerns the majority of the earth’s large creatures: tens of billions of sentient beings”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation Now

“Any such common denominator that is possessed by all humans will not be possessed only by humans.”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed

“When you confine animals so that they cannot find food themselves, you have to produce food for them, and in every case, you have to put more food into the animals than you will get out of them.”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed

“If we are continuing to eat chicken produced by breeding birds who are in pain because their legs cannot support their fast-growing bodies, or meat from pigs kept confined indoors all their lives, it is hypocritical of us to object to eating dogs.”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed

“Unfortunately, brilliance in science is no guarantee of a sound grasp of ethics.”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation Now

“the misery and pain inflicted on animals that I described in the original 1975 edition of this book has not ceased.”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation Now

“Suomi had, over three decades and with funding from the NIH, deprived hundreds of infant monkeys of contact with their mothers, isolated them in small metal cages, and deliberately caused them to suffer anxiety, depression, diarrhea, hair loss, and to engage in forms of self-mutilation such as biting themselves and pulling out their own hair—social, emotional, and physical harm that lasted through their lives.”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed