Human Rights
Violence Towards Animals is the Root of Violence Towards Fellow Humans
From an early age, we are exposed to animal abuse everywhere around us without really understanding its implications. One of our first childhood outings is often a trip to the zoo. In these inviting settings, animals that have been torn from their natural habitats and kin suffer life imprisonment, sometimes in isolation. We clamour with excitement at the arrival of a circus, where animals are tortured so that they perform in the most unnatural ways for our entertainment. These animals are often kept in abysmal conditions-- such as small dirty cages, hard surfaces, and without access to the outdoors and sometimes even food and water to keep them performing out of fear. Yet because these are our big days, our excursions, our treats--and because we are taken under the supervision of parents or teachers--we rarely think about what it means for our fellow creatures to suffer. Naturally it takes a while for the full impact to hit us. Many people never even consider our treatment of animals.
Almost on a daily basis, we are exposed to companion animal abuse, animal slaughter, caging of birds, unnecessary dissections, and many other instances of harm to animals. We unconsciously accept these incidents and their perpetrators; unconsciously we condone a lack of respect to fellow beings that are more helpless and vulnerable than us.
The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has documented that a large percentage of murderers, rapists and other criminals start out as animal abusers in childhood. In fact, one of the necessary diagnostic criteria for sociopathy is a history of causing physical harm or torture to small animals. We always pick on someone more vulnerable, whether it is an animal or a human being. The “human” problems of domestic abuse, child abuse, sexual abuse, and even the large-scale abuse of one nation to another all stem from the human habit to devalue other life, starting with animal life. Changing how humans orient towards other creatures from a young age could be the beginning of alleviating a great deal of pain and suffering in this world.
Violence towards animals is the root of violence towards fellow humans.
Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
Quotes - the connection between human and animal rights
Surely, there is hope. Remember the song Amazing Grace? Do you know it was written by a former slave trader who, wracked with guilt and turning his back on slavery, wrote "I once was lost but now am found, Was blind, but now, I see." Surely, if he could wake up to a new perception, there is hope for the rest of us.
— Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, 'Compassionate Cooks'
When non-vegetarians say that “human problems come first” I cannot help wondering what exactly it is that they are doing for human beings that compels them to continue to support the wasteful, ruthless exploitation of farm animals.
— Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 1990
I believe I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't. To know that the results are profitable to the race would not remove my hostility to it. 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
Violence begins with the fork.
— Gandhi
I am sometimes asked, “Why do you spend so much time talking about kindness to animals when there is so much cruelty to men? I answer, “I am working at the roots.
— George T. Angell
Between the murder of an animal and the murder of a man, there's no more than ONE step!
— Count Leon Tolstoi
Use of the term ‘holocaust’ to describe today’s mistreatment of countless billions of animals should not trouble anyone—the torture and killing and breeding to kill should.
— David Cantor, nearly half of whose family perished in the Holocaust
In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.
— Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Letter Writer
It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the over-population of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat.
— Jeremy Rifkin, author of Beyond Beef, The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture, and President of the Greenhouse Crisis Foundation, Washington, D.C.
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 1915)
The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher.
I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.
— US President Abraham-Lincoln,
He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
— Immanuel Kant, philosopher (1724-1804)
