Animal rights

Animal rights, or animal liberation, is the movement to protect non-human animals from being exploited by humans. It is a radical movement, insofar as it aims not merely to attain more humane treatment for animals, but to include many animals within the moral community — that is, all those whose basic interests (for example, in not being made to suffer unnecessarily) ought to be given the same consideration as our own similar interests. The claim, in other words, is that non-human animals must no longer be regarded legally or morally as property, or treated merely as resources for human purposes, but should instead be regarded as persons. To this end the movement advocates that many animals be given legal rights to protect their basic interests.

Quotes

• "A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral." — Leo Tolstoy (On Civil Disobedience)
• "It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind." — Albert Einstein (Letter to Vegetarian Watch-Tower, Dec. 27, 1930)
• "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated." — Mahatma Gandhi
• "We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form." — William Ralph Inge
• "The question is not can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer?" Jeremy Bentham
• "In years of studying the (Animal Rights) mentality and engaging (activists) in debate, I have arrived at four basic characteristics that all ARAs seem to have in common. The proportions vary, of course, but all ARAs seem to have all four traits in some percentage. The four traits are as follows: Misplaced Compassion, Denial, Intellectual Laziness, and Arrogance." — Ward M. Clark (Misplaced Compassion - The Animal Rights Movement Exposed, Writer's Club Press, 2001)
• "You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughter-house is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity, expensive races, -- race living at the expense of race." — Ralph Waldo Emerson ("Fate")