Introduction to Animal Rights Quotes

“If we take morality seriously, then we must confront what it dictates: if it is wrong for Simon to torture dogs for pleasure, then it is morally wrong for us to eat meat.”
― Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?

“Our conduct merely demonstrates that despite what we say about the moral significance of animal interests, we are willing to ignore those interests whenever we benefit from doing so - even when the benefit is nothing more than our pleasure or convenience.”
― Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?

“Old habits die hard, but that does not mean they are morally justified. It is precisely in situations where both moral issues and strong personal preference is coming to play that we should be most careful to think clearly. As the case of meat-eating shows, however, sometimes our brute preferences determine a moral thinking rather than the other way around. Many people have said to me "Yes I know it's morally wrong to eat meat, but I just love hamburgers.”
― Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?

“If people defend the imposition of pain and suffering on animals based on what is "natural" or "traditional", it usually means that they cannot otherwise justify their conduct.”
― Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?

“The argument used to support slavery and the argument used to supposrt animal exploitation are structurally similar: we exclude beings with interest from the moral community because there are some supposed differences between "them" and "us" that has nothing to do with the inclusion of these beings in the moral community.”
― Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?

“In many ways, prevailing ways of thinking about animals should make us skeptical of our claim that it is our rationality that distinguishes "us" from "them.”
― Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?

“We would finally have to confront our moral schizophrenia about animals, which leads us to love some animals, treat them as members of our family, and never once doubt their sentience, emotional capacity, self-awareness, or personhood, but at the same time we stick dinner forks into other animals who are indistinguishable in any relevant sense from our animal companions.”
― Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?

“We cannot simultaneously regard animals as resources and as beings with moral significant interests. IN an effort to provide humane treatment for animals, we tried to prohibit the infliction of unnecessary suffering through animal welfare laws that assumed from the outset that animals were resources from human use.”
― Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?

“The ability to communicate may be relevant to whether we make you the host of a talk show, or give you a job teaching in a university, but it is not relevant to whether we should kill you and remove your organs for transplant into another human, or whether we should enslave you so that you may labor for those without your particular disability.”
― Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?

“Whatever characteristic we identify as possessed only by humans will not be possessed by all humans. Some humans will have the exact same deficiency that we attribute to animals, and although we may not allow such humans to drive cars or attend universities, most of us would shut out the prospect of enslaving such humans, using them as unconsenting subjects in biomedical research, or otherwise using them exclusively as a means to an ends.”
― Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?

“We have historically focused on the use of human language, for example, as a unique characteristic that separates us from animals and makes us "better." Who says? In the first place, there is, and we have seen, compelling evidence that animals other than humans can learn human language. Moreover, there is a great deal of empirical evidence that animals are able to communicate, often in very sophisticated ways, with members of their own species. The more relevant question, however, is what is inherently better about a species that uses human words and symbols to communicate? Birds can fly; we cannot. What makes the ability to use words and symbols better for moral purposes than the ability to fly? The answer, of course, is that we say so.”
― Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?

“In short, humans possess no characteristic unique to themselves that can justify differential treatment solely on the basis of species.”
― Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?

“The senses and intuition, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, of which man posts, may be found in an incipient or even sometimes in a well developed condition, in the lower animals." -Darwin”
― Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?

“Indeed, the proposition that humans have mental characteristics wholly absent in animals confounds the theory of evolution, which, although disputed by some religious extremists, is generally accepted by most educated people throughout the world. Charles Darwin made quite clear that there are no uniquely human characteristics when he wrote that "the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not one of kind.”
― Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?