Top 60 Animal Suffering Quotes
#1. My own view is that being a vegetarian or vegan is not an end in itself, but a means towards reducing both human and animal suffering and leaving a habitable planet to future generations.
Peter Singer
#2. The vast carnival of cruelty called animal exploitation goes on and on
and it is all so needless, even counter-productive. There is already an adequate (often superior) non-animal substitute for virtually everything obtained by animal suffering and slaughter ...
H. Jay Dinshah
#3. If we are ever to halt climate change and conserve land, water and other resources, not to mention reduce animal suffering, we must celebrate Earth Day every day - at every meal.
Ingrid Newkirk
#4. Whaling should stop because it brings needless suffering to social, intelligent animals capable of enjoying their own lives. But against the Japanese charge of cultural bias, Western nations will have little defense until they do much more about the needless animal suffering in their own countries.
Peter Singer
#5. The public hardly suspects that their purchase of cosmetics, pet food, toothpaste, eggs and other common items have, in all likelihood, caused some form of animal suffering.
Marianne Thieme
#6. So in 1987 I gave up all animal products and became a vegan. Simply so that I could eat and live in accordance with my beliefs that animals have their own lives, that they're entitled to their own lives and that contributing to animal suffering is something that I don't want to be a part of.
Moby
#7. If you are interested in preventing animal suffering, the first thing you should give up is eggs and milk because the animals who produce those foods lead the most unhappy lives. You would do better to eat meat and stop eating eggs and dairy products.
Cesar Chavez
#8. I turned to human suffering because - this may sound odd - animal suffering is more difficult for me to deal with.
Rigoberto Gonzalez
#9. More than any set of practices, factory farming is a mind-set: reduce production costs to the absolute minimum and systematically ignore or "externalize" such costs as environmental degradation, human disease, and animal suffering.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#10. It is more important to prevent animal suffering, rather than sit to contemplate the evils of the universe praying in the company of priests.
Gautama Buddha
#11. It was something he had never quite understood about himself. He had seen thousands of men die in nearly ten years of war and could look on it at times with a near-total detachment, but an animal suffering - be it a horse or needra injured in battle, or the stag now dying - moved him deeply.
Raymond E. Feist
#12. You know, we all oppose animal cruelty. But sometimes we forget that animals on farms suffer and feel pain like all other animals. They, too, deserve to be protected from harm and cruelty.
Charlotte Ross
#13. There's no doubt in my mind that going vegetarian has made me feel better not only physically but also because I learned about the suffering of animals who are raised and killed for food. I feel good knowing I'm not contributing to that.
Sophie Monk
#14. Almost every pearl on sale today was born of the planned sexual violation of a small creature, and that considerable suffering hangs on those necklace strings.
Victoria Finlay
#15. We are all victims of the violence that animals suffer ... their liberation is also our liberation.
George Bernard Shaw
#16. Vivisection is wrong because it is an abuse of man's power over the helpless, involving pain and suffering. The name for this is cruelty, and cruelty is immoral, no matter what the reason for its introduction.
Jon Evans
#17. The most striking quality that humans and animals have in common is the capacity to experience suffering.
Matthieu Ricard
#18. Josh joined her at the window. She let him look. He should know that the world was not all lessons and iguanas and Nintendo. It was also this muddy simple boy tethered like an animal.
George Saunders
#19. Anybody who witnesses the suffering of animals and has a glimmer of hope of reducing that suffering can't take the position that it's all or nothing. We have to be pragmatic. Screw the principle.
Ingrid Newkirk
#20. I am for the animals, I couldn't care less about your need to eat animals, wear them, shoot them or exploit them. Too bad if you consider it suffering to let all that self-centered and traditional bullshit stop you from having the will to help the animals..
Rikki Rockett
#21. It doesn't matter if an animal can reason. It matters only that it is capable of suffering and that is why I consider it my neighbor.
Albert Schweitzer
#22. I don't care whether animals are capable of thinking; all I care about is that they are capable of suffering!
Jeremy Bentham
#23. It is true that every being is enjoying life or suffering as a direct result of his or her own past actions. The animals in the factory farms may have been meat-eating human beings in a previous birth; we don't know, and it is not our place to judge.
Sharon Gannon
#24. Could you look an animal in the eyes and say to it, 'My appetite is more important than your suffering'?
Moby
#25. I take it hard when an animal in my care suffers or dies. I take it even harder when the animal's suffering is the result of human exploitation or carelessness.
Linda Bender
#26. Being a thoughtful vegan makes our time on this Earth more peaceful and joyous, because you get to have a hand in promoting and increasing the happiness, good health and well-being of others
both animal and human
rather than being an instrument of their suffering and death.
Russell Simmons
#27. We are so unconscious about our actions that we don't even realize the immense suffering we are causing to animals, the planet, and ourselves.
Sharon Gannon
#28. It's easy to just see what you want to see in your own comfort bubble, but to really get out there and experience the suffering of animals is an awakening. I had to become proactive and take a stand.
Alison Eastwood
#29. You do not like to suffer yourself. How can you inflict suffering on others?
Ramana Maharshi
#30. It seems improbable, unless one knows how obstinately, purposefully and unerringly any stricken animal will find its way to the same place where in the past it has endured suffering and recovered.
Georgi Vladimov
#31. One simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain ... is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#32. Often, when a human suffers through major emotional traumas, a lack of well being follows if their feelings about the trauma are not completely expressed. When the trauma is severe and the suffering is continuous, their animal companion's condition may deteriorate too.
Colleen M. Flanagan
#33. Animal rights, at its heart, is the most unextreme philosophy I can imagine. It is about nonviolence. It is about compassion. It is about not harming and not causing suffering and not killing when we don't have to
Stephanie Ernst
#34. Mind precedes all phenomena, mind matters most, everything is mind-made. If with an impure mind, you speak or act, then suffering follows you as the cartwheel follows the foot of the draft animal. If with a pure mind, you speak or act, then happiness follows you as a shadow that never departs
Gautama Buddha
#35. The question is not can animals speak but can they suffer.
Jeremy Bentham
#36. Whether we're talking about fish species, pigs, or some other eaten animal, is such suffering the most important thing in the world? Obviously not. But that's not the question. Is it more important that sushi, bacon, or chicken nuggets? That's the question.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#37. Animals manifestly enjoy excitement, and suffer from annul and may exhibit curiosity.
Charles Darwin
#38. Pain is pain, and the importance of preventing unnecessary pain and suffering does not diminish because the being that suffers is not a member of our own species.
Peter Singer
#40. The indifference, callousness, and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering towards animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of human spirit.
Ashley Montagu
#41. Most people may not realize the tremendous value that therapy/companion/comfort animals have for the purposes of easing the suffering of those with PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), particularly within the military.
Ken Wahl
#42. People differ in where they direct their empathy and their compassion. Many people are intensely concerned about the suffering of non-human animals, and some do not care at all. There are cultural differences.
Paul Bloom
#43. Giving cancer to laboratory animals has not and will not help us to understand the disease or to treat those persons suffering from it.
Albert Sabin
#44. There could conceivably be circumstances in which an experiment on an animal stands to reduce suffering so much that it would be permissible to carry it out even if it involved harm to the animal ... [even if] the animal were a human being.
Peter Singer
#45. We are social animals. Others' suffering is ultimately your suffering; their happiness is ultimately your happiness.
Dalai Lama
#46. Kafka saw both himself and Red Peter as hybrids, as monstrous thinking devices mounted inexplicably on suffering animal bodies.
J.M. Coetzee
#47. Eating animals involves an intentional decision to participate in the suffering and death of nonhumans where there is no plausible moral justification.
Gary L. Francione
#48. I refuse to eat animals because I cannot nourish myself by the sufferings and by the death of other creatures. I refuse to do so, because I suffered so painfully myself that I can feel the pain of others by recalling my own sufferings.
David Sztybel
#49. We are compelled by the commandment of love contained in our hearts and thought, and proclaimed by Jesus, to give rein to our natural sympathy for animals. We are also compelled to help them and spare them suffering.
Albert Schweitzer
#50. A side benefit of the new and developing technologies is that soon we won't have to feel guilty about the suffering and denigration of the animals because we will have made them up.
Joy Williams
#51. To me, cruelty is the worst of human sins. Once we accept that a living creature has feelings and suffers pain, then by knowingly and deliberately inflicting suffering on that creature, we are guilty, whether it be human or animal.
Jane Goodall
#52. The inconvenience and the suffering of any children or any family members pales in comparison to the suffering and oppression that goes on in these animal laboratories.
Jerry Vlasak
#53. Even should it be conclusively proved that human beings benefit directly from the suffering of animals, its infliction would nevertheless be unethical and wrong.
Hugh Dowding, 1st Baron Dowding
#54. Subjecting other living things to pain, suffering, and death is the biggest fault in the human race
Zoe Rosenberg
#55. Once admit that we have the right to inflict unnecessary suffering and you destroy the very basis of human society.
John Galsworthy
#56. No animal has to suffer for me to live.
Linda Blair
#57. By working to alleviate the suffering of animals you are working at the cause level of human suffering.
Sharon Gannon
#58. A suffering or tortured animal always filled her with such a surge of sympathy that it lifted her clean out of herself.
L.M. Montgomery
#59. Anyone who tries to improve the lives of animals invariably comes in for criticism from those who believe such efforts are misplaced in a world of suffering humanity.
Jane Goodall
#60. Even animals who sometimes seem unlovable to humans, have also feelings. They can suffer just as we do.
Sabrina Le Beauf
