29/02/2012
I know this is a site about editing, but most of our editing money goes to the care for street dogs in Bangkok, and underneath our love for dogs is our love for all animals, or sentient beings, as the Buddha called them. It is time man‘kind’ stopped the habit of eating animals and causing the suffering of endless animals that share our life on this planet. It could be argued that the world will not see peace until we overcome our appetite for meat. In our ignorance we lose the connection between what we are eating and the fact that some of the beings that we are eating, like chicken and turkeys, “never saw the sun, felt the earth, [had] a breath of fresh air, [and were] thrown into trucks for transport hundreds of miles without food or water, and never had one true moment of 'love,'” as one reviewer at Amazon said of the book that I am recommending here, “Eating Animals” by Jonathan Safran Foer. We love dogs and have them as pets because of their sensitivity and intelligence, yet we take baby pigs from their mothers and confine them in pens so that they never again have room to walk let alone run and then slaughter them and eat them, and they are just as sensitive and intelligent as dogs. These decisions on what to eat and what not to eat were arbitrarily made in the past and like most other things in life, we continue them out of thoughtless habit and in this case greedy appetite. As the Dalai Lama says, everything experiences the universe from its own center and everything, everything, has the same impulse to be happy as we do. Even plants respond to emotional changes in the environment. Like it or not, the university is alive and no part of it is without consciousness in one form or another. Each of us has to decide where to draw the line on what to eat. For me, I have indirectly killed and eaten more than enough animals in my lifetime. If you can’t stop, at least cut back, as the Dali Lama has said. He quit being a vegetarian for a while and then couldn’t stand it and went back to a meatless diet. If you have a heart, this book will be a painful read but it will change you forever. Click on the photo to go to the Amazon page, and have a look at the first two reviews.
Some quotes on not eating animals:
"For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love."
Pythagoras, mathematician
"To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime."
Romain Rolland, author, Nobel Prize 1915
"If a group of beings from another planet were to land on Earth—beings who considered themselves as superior to you as you feel yourself to be to other animals—would you concede them the rights over you that you assume over other animals?"
George Bernard Shaw, playwright, Nobel Prize 1925
"What is it that should trace the insuperable line? . . . The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"
Jeremy Bentham, philosopher
"In their behavior toward creatures, all men are N***s. Human beings see oppression vividly when they're the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought."
Isaac Bashevis Singer, author, Nobel Prize 1978
"Our task must be to free ourselves . . . by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty."
"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."
Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel Prize 1921
"I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being."
Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President
"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist
"As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields."
"What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit to their cruelty."
Leo Tolstoy author
“I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect . . . always when I have done I feel it would have been better if I had not fished."
Henry David Thoreau, author
"While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?"
"Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research.”
George Bernard Shaw
"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
"To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being."
Mahatma Gandhi, statesman and philosopher
"I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't . . .The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further."
Mark Twain, author
"Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."
Thomas Edison, inventor
“A vegetarian is a person who won't eat anything that can have children. “
David Brenner
“How can you eat anything with eyes?”
Will Kellogg
“Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child, as it is to the caterpillar.”
Bradley Miller
“If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.”
Paul McCartney
“I do not like eating meat because I have seen lambs and pigs killed. I saw and felt their pain. They felt the approaching death. I could not bear it. I cried like a child. I ran up a hill and could not breathe. I felt that I was choking. I felt the death of the lamb.”
Vaslav Nijinsky (dancer and choreographer)
“Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you anymore.”
Franz Kafka-Novelist (to the fishes in his aquarium)
“People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.”
Isaac Bashevis Singer
“For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.”
Pythagoras (6th century BC)
“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.”
Leo Tolstoy
“Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
“Recognize meat for what it really is: the antibiotic- and pesticide-laden co**se of a tortured animal.” Ingrid Newkirk, National Director of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
“Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.”
Samuel Butler, Note-Books, 1912
“Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”
Albert Einstein
“The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined. If beef is your idea of ‘real food for real people’ you'd better live real close to a real good hospital.”
Neal Barnard, M.D.
“We all love animals. Why do we call some ‘pets’ and others ‘dinner?’"
k. d. lang
“We pray on Sundays that we may have light/To guide our footsteps on the path we tread;/We are sick of war, we don't want to fight,/And yet we gorge ourselves upon the dead.”
George Bernard Shaw
“As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.”
Leo Tolstoy, author
“The eating of meat extinguishes the seed of great compassion.”
Mahaparinirvana (Buddhist)
“I do feel that spiritual progress does demand at some stage that we should cease to kill our fellow creatures for the satisfaction of our bodily wants.”
Gandhi
“I will not eat anything that walks, runs, skips, hops or crawls. God knows that I've crawled on occasion, and I'm glad that no one ate me.”
Alex Poulos
“One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay.”
George Bernard Shaw
“My situation is a solemn one. Life is offered to me on condition of eating beefsteaks. But death is better than cannibalism. My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed not by mourning coaches, but by oxen, sheep, flocks of poultry, and a small traveling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarfs in honor of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow creatures.”
George Bernard Shaw
“I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.”
Isaac Bashevis Singer
“Heart attacks . . . God's revenge for eating his little animal friends.”
Author Unknown
“Vegetarian food leaves a deep impression on our nature. If the whole world adopts vegetarianism, it can change the destiny of humankind.”
Albert Einstein
“Our task must be to free ourselves . . .widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.”
Albert Einstein
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
Gandhi
“If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalist for the same reasons.”
C. S. Lewis
“Among the noblest in the land - Though man may count himself the least - That man I honor and revere, Who without favor, without fear, In the great city dares to stand, The friend of every friendless beast.”
Henry W. Longfellow
“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
“Tongue - a variety of meat, rarely served because it clearly crosses the line between a cut of beef and a piece of a dead cow.”
Bob Ekstrom
“While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?”
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
“Coexistence . . .what the farmer does with the turkey - until Thanksgiving.”
Mike Connolly
“It is strange to hear people talk of Humanitarianism, who are members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to children and animals, and who claim to be God-loving men and women, but who, nevertheless, encourage by their patronage the killing of animals merely to gratify the cravings of appetite.”
Otoman Zar-Adusht Ha'nish (1844-1936)
“If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian. We feel better about ourselves and better about the animals, knowing we're not contributing to their pain.”
Paul (1942- ) and Linda McCartney
“You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the rabbit and plays with the apple, I'll buy you a new car.”
Harvey Diamond
“But for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy.”
Plutarch (c.AD 46-c.120)
“Flesh eating is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act, which is contrary to moral feeling: killing. By killing, man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity, that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures like himself and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel.”
Leo Tolstoy
“Flesh eating is unprovoked murder.”
Benjamin Franklin
“To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body.”
Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948)
“We stopped eating meat many years ago. During the course of a Sunday lunch we happened to look out of the kitchen window at our young lambs playing happily in the fields. Glancing down at our plates, we suddenly realized that we were eating the leg of an animal who had until recently been playing in a field herself. We looked at each other and said, ‘Wait a minute, we love these sheep—they're such gentle creatures. So why are we eating them?’ It was the last time we ever did.”
Linda and Paul McCartney (musicians)
"Those who, by their purchases, require animals to be killed have no right to be shielded from the slaughterhouse or any other aspect of the production of the meat they buy. If it is distasteful for humans to think about, what can it be like for the animals to experience it?"
Peter Singer
"My dream is that people will come to view eating an animal as cannibalism."
Henry Spira
“In every respect, vegans appear to enjoy equal or better health in comparison to both vegetarians and non-vegetarians.”
T. Colin Campbell, PhD Professor of Nutrition, Cornell University (letter dated 3/29/98)
"Awareness is bad for the meat business. Conscience is bad for the meat business. Sensitivity to life is bad for the meat business. DENIAL, however, the meat business finds indispensable."
John Robbins, Diet for a New America
"There will come a time...when civilized people will look back in horror on our generation and the ones that preceded it: the idea that we should eat other living things running around on four legs, that we should raise them just for the purpose of killing them! The people of the future will say "meat-eaters!" in disgust and regard us in the same way we regard cannibals and cannibalism."
Dennis Weaver
"The animals you eat are not those who devour others; you do not eat the carnivorous beasts, you take them as your pattern. You only hunger after sweet and gentle creatures who harm no one, which follow you, serve you, and are devoured by you as the reward of their service."
John Jacques Rousseau
"When we kill the animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings."
William C. Roberts, M.D., editor of The American Journal of Cardiology
"All red meat contains saturated fat. There is no such thing as truly lean meat. Trimming away the edge ring of fat around a steak really does not lower the fat content significantly. People who have red meat (trimmed or untrimmed) as a regular feature of their diets suffer in far greater numbers from heart attacks and strokes."
Michael Klaper, M.D., Medical Director, EarthSave Foundation, Santa Cruz, California
"If you step back and look at the data, the optimum amount of red meat you eat should be zero."
Walter Willett, M.D., of Brigham and Women's Hospital, director of a study that found a close correlation between red meat consumption and colon cancer.
"Usually, the first thing a country does in the course of economic development is to introduce a lot of livestock. Our data are showing that this is not a very smart move and the Chinese are listening. They are realizing that animal-based agriculture is not the way to go . . . We are basically a vegetarian species and should be eating a wide variety of plant food and minimizing our intake of animal foods . . . "Once people start introducing animal products into their diet, that's when the mischief starts." --T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., of Cornell University, director of a study of 6,500 Chinese that found a close correlation between meat consumption and the incidence of heart disease and cancer
"The thousands of people who have suffered food poisoning after eating beef will, no doubt, appreciate that their beef was aesthetically acceptable, even though it made them ill. `Lovely to look at, dangerous to eat' is not a standard that is likely to help beef sales."
Carol Tucker Foreman, Assistant Secretary of Agriculture during the Carter administration, commenting on the inadequacy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Streamlined (Meat) Inspection System (SIS).
"If man wants freedom why keep birds and animals in cages? Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places! I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men."
Leonardo da Vinci
“There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties . . . The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.”
Charles Darwin
“When it comes to having a central nervous system, and the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.”
Ingrid Newkirk
“If experiments on animals were abandoned on grounds of compassion, mankind would have made a fundamental advance.”
Richard Wagner
“It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
“I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.”
Ecclesiastes
“Not to hurt our humble brethren is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough.”
St. Francis of Assisi
“If you have men who will exclude any of god's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.”
St. Francis of Assisi
“Basically we should stop doing those things that are destructive to the environment, other creatures, and ourselves and figure out new ways of existing.”
Moby
“Plant life instead of animal food is the keystone of regeneration. Jesus used bread instead of flesh and wine in place of blood at the Lord's Supper.”
German Composer Richard Wagner
“It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.”
Mark Twain
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever does.”
Margaret Mead
“We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
“To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the suffering of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands (now billions) of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime.”
Romain Rolland—Nobel 1915
“Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”
Thomas Edison
“To become vegetarian is to step into the stream which leads to nirvana.”
Buddha
“Forty years ago on the set of Gunsmoke I read the book The Holy Science. Since then I have not eaten meat.”
Dennis Weaver
“Since visiting the abbatoirs of S. France I have stopped eating meat.”
Vincent Van Gogh (in a letter to his brother Theodore)
“The most energetic workers I have encountered in my world travels are the vegetarian miners of Chile.”
Charles Darwin
“I feel very deeply about vegetarianism and the animal kingdom. It was my dog Boycott who led me to question to right of humans to eat other sentient beings.”
Cesar Chavez (pacifist head of the United Farm Workers)
“Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you—alas, it is true of almost every one of us!”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.”
Isaac Bashevis Singer
“It is man's sympathy with all creatures that first makes him truly a man.”
Dr. Albert Schweitzer—Nobel 1952
"I am the same in all beings."
Bhagavad Gita
"Respect for animal life is an integral part of morality.
A good Buddhist does not kill animals for pleasure or
eat flesh. They are his humble brethren and not lower
creatures over whom he has dominion by divine right.
Serenity of spirit and love for all sentient creation are
enjoined by the Buddha."
S. Radhakrishnan
"Animals have varying degrees of consciousness,
as indeed people do. The consciousness that is
within them is as valid and eternal as you own,
however."
Jane Roberts
"In Buddhism the highest spiritual ideal
is to cultivate compassion for all sentient
beings and to work for their welfare to
the greatest possible extent."
Dalai Lama
Amazon.com: Eating Animals: Jonathan Safran Foer: Books
