Anna Sewell Quotes

The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but rather, 'Can they suffer?'

Anytime you work with animals, you begin to see more humanity in them.

The deeper minds of all ages have had pity for animals.

In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level. We choose the jungle and must abide by our choice.

Intellectually, human beings and animals may be different, but it's pretty obvious that animals have a rich emotional life and that they feel joy and pain. It's easy to forget the connection between a hamburger and the cow it came from. But I forced myself to acknowledge the fact that every time I ate a hamburger, a cow had ceased to breathe

Ich glaube sogar, durch Leidensk a« mpfe k o« nnten dieTiere zu Menschen werden. I believe that by suffering even animals could be made human.

What is it that should trace the insuperable line? ...The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

I do love animals so much, and have a great respect for them emotionally and intellectually, because they are so different from human beings.

There is no doubt that there is a huge difference between human and nonhuman animals. But what we are overlooking is the fact that nonhuman animals are conscious beings, that they can suffer.

I believe that animals are on the planet so that we can know love and compassion.

Do you not believe that animals know grief and fear and pain? The world of men is not an easy one for them.

There are many people out there (me being one of them) who can vouch that animals have feelings; they feel compassion and love, as well as pain!

One of the things that I always think about is the emotional sophistication of animals and how much we're learning about the emotional sophistication of animals. If you're eating a pig, you're essentially eating the equivalent of a four-year-old human being.

Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way." ... "Surely a better time must be drawing nigh when godlike human beings will become truly humane, and learn to put their animal fellow mortals in their hearts instead of on their backs or in their dinners.

Sometimes I read about someone saying with great authority that animals have no intentions and no feelings, and I wonder, 'Doesn't this guy have a dog?'

If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.

If you love animals and you care for them... don't wear them, because they have feelings and personalities just like humans do.

Could you look an animal in the eyes and say to it, 'My appetite is more important than your suffering'?

They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.

In 1968, I became a vegetarian after realizing that animals feel afraid, cold, hungry, and unhappy like we do.

The thing about animals that speaks to me so much is that my passion for the animals and against animal abuse is based on the knowledge that these creatures which think and feel can't speak for themselves. I feel it is my responsibility to speak for those who can't speak for themselves.

The more we learn of the true nature of non-human animals, especially those with complex brains and corresponding complex social behavior, the more ethical concerns are raised regarding their use in the service of man - whether this be in entertainment, as "pets," for food, in research laboratories, or any of the other uses to which we subject them.

Anyone who says that life matters less to an animal than it does to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for its life. The whole of the being of the animal is thrown into that fight, without reserve. When you say that the fight lacks a dimension of intellectual or imaginative horror, I agree. It is not the mode of being animals to have an intellectual horror: their whole being is in the living flesh...I urge you to walk, flank to flank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner.

Animals don't have a voice, so I think it is our job to give them one.

I was always empathetic with animals. It's a terrible and self-involved point of view that we do something because someone else is exploitable.