Cesar Chavez - Star Trek: Voyager TV - Royal Babylon - McLibel 1997 - Iain Stewart TV - George Bernard Shaw - George Orwell - Friedrich Nietzsche - Thomas Jefferson - D H Lawrence - Tennessee Williams - Horizon TV - Charles Darwin - Alfred Russel Wallace - Bill Bailey - Beautiful Minds & Richard Dawkins TV - Carl Sagan TV - Daniel C Dennett - Cindy van Dover - James Herriot - Dave Foreman and Bill Haywood - Milan Kundera - The Sun - The Truth Behind: Loch Ness TV - Francis Bacon - Anatole France - Theodore Roosevelt - Gerard de Nerval - Jane Goodall - Great Thinkers TV - Bees, Butterflies and Blooms TV - Genesis 2:19&20 - Job 30:29 - Koran 6:38 - Penn & Teller TV - Ray Greek & PETA - Patti Strand & NAA - ALF Spokesperson - Walt Whitman - McVicar 1980 - Desmond Morris - Animal Apocalypse: Paranatural TV - Jeremy Irons & Life on Fire TV - Nature's Microworlds TV - Mark Twain - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - James Herriot - Charles Bukowski - Albert Schweitzer - Temple Grandin - Marc Bekoff - Walter de la Mare - George Eliot - Immanuel Kant - Haile Selassie - Kenneth Grahame - William Ralph Inge - Emile Zola - Stephen Jay Gould - Bill Oddie TV - Andrew Marr TV - Oceans TV - Arthur C Clarke TV - Derek TV - Jaina Sutras - Al Gore - Monty Python’s Flying Circus - Natural World TV - George McGavin TV - Cities: Nature’s New Wild TV - Australia: Earth’s Magical Kingdom TV - The UnXplained with William Shatner TV - The Truth is Out There TV -
We need, in a special way, to work twice as hard to make all people understand that animals are fellow creatures, that we must protect them and love them as we love ourselves … The basis for peace is respecting all creatures … That’s the basis, the beginning for peace … We know we cannot defend or be kind to animals until we stop exploiting them – exploiting them in the name of science, exploiting animals in the name of sport, exploiting animals in the name of fashion, and yes, exploiting animals in the name of food. Cesar Chavez
We’re taught that an animal guide accompanies us through life. Star Trek: Voyager s1e6: The Cloud, Chakotay to Janeway
By 1993, the Duke of Edinburgh, the owner of 56 shooting rifles, had brought down 30,000 birds from the skies, he’d killed two crocodiles as well as scores of wild boar, several hundred Scottish stags and an Indian tiger. Royal Babylon *****
McDonald’s are culpably responsible for cruel practices in the rearing and slaughter of some of the animals which are used in their food. McLibel (Two People Who Wouldn’t Say Sorry) 1997 ***** starring Helen Steel & David Morris & Eric Schlosser & Morgan Spurlock & Oliver Ford Davies, directors Franny Armstrong & Ken Loach
Flowers use animals to help them distribute their seeds. Iain Stewart, How to Grow a Planet II: The Power of Flowers, BBC 2012
Flowers drive the evolution of animals, especially primates. ibid.
They really are the lungs of the ocean. It’s remarkable what the humble grasses had achieved by five million years ago – a once forested planet was now dominated by open plains. Eight different species of grasses covering a quarter of all land. They’d selected which animals would live or die. And they’d fundamentally altered the ocean, playing a crucial role in our make-up of our atmosphere. Iain Stewart, How To Grow A Planet III: The Challenger
While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal living conditions on this earth? George Bernard Shaw
Four legs good, two legs bad. George Orwell
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. George Orwell
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. George Orwell, Animal Farm
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. ibid.
God’s first blunder – Man didn’t find the animals amusing – he dominated them and didn’t even want to be an ‘animal’. Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Antichrist 1888
Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours its own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor. Thomas Jefferson, letter 1787
Men! The only animal in the world to fear! D H Lawrence, Mountain Lion, 1923
May I speak plainly? ... If you’ll forgive me, he’s common ... He’s like an animal. He has an animal’s habits. There’s even something subhuman about him. Thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is. Stanley Kowalski, survivor of the Stone Age, bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle. And you – you here waiting for him. Maybe he’ll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you, that’s if kisses have been discovered yet. Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche Dubois
Other than light, what else could fuel life? A clue came from underneath a rubbish dump in Romania. Here cave scientists stumbled across a biological treasure trove ... It was like a bubble trapped in rock until it was broken into. Nothing from the surface had got into it perhaps for millions of years. What they had found was a world as dark and isolated as Lake Vostok ... But these creatures were unlike anything he had seen before ... the cave was completely cut off from the surface. Nothing could get through; the scum was a thick microbial mat. This was the base of the food chain. But what were the microbes living on? ... In the absence of sunlight they were using hydrogen sulphide as their energy source. Horizon: The Lost World of Lake Vostok, BBC 2000
Natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising throughout the world every variation even the slightest, rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good, silently and insensibly working. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress until the hand of time has marked the laps of ages. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing in the bushes, and various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp Earth and reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and yet so dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. Thus, from the war of Nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object we can think of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of Life, with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one, and that whilst this planet has gone cycling along according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved. ibid.
We behold the face of Nature bright with gladness. Every single organic being around us may be seen to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers. That each lives by a struggle at some period of its life. That heavy destruction inevitably falls either upon the young or old during each generation or at recurrent intervals. The face of Nature may be compared to a yielding surface with ten thousand sharp wedges packed close together and driven inwards by incessant blows. Sometimes one wedge being struck and then another with greater force. ibid.
Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. ibid.
Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal. Charles Darwin, Notebook B
The problem then was not only how and why do species change, but how and why do they change into new and well-defined species, distinguished from each other in so many ways; why and how they become so exactly adapted to distinct modes of life; and why do all the intermediate grades die out (as geology shows they have died out) and leave only clearly defined and well-marked species, genera, and higher groups of animals? Alfred Russel Wallace, autobiography
It then occurred to me that these causes or their equivalents are continually acting in the case of animals also; and as animals usually breed much more quickly than does mankind, the destruction every year from these causes must be enormous in order to keep down the numbers of each species, since evidently they do not increase regularly from year to year, as otherwise the world would long ago have been crowded with those that breed most quickly. Vaguely thinking over the enormous and constant destruction which this implied, it occurred to me to ask the question, Why do some die and some live? And the answer was clearly, on the whole the best fitted live ... and considering the amount of individual variation that my experience as a collector had shown me to exist, then it followed that all the changes necessary for the adaptation of the species to the changing conditions would be brought about ...