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The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder

Book by David Quammen · 3 quotes · Animal Rights, Bit, Bite

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The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder Quotes

“Medical research using chimpanzee surrogates is not just a hot issue, made hotter in recent years by the rise of animal-rights movement and, in counterpoint, by the terror AIDS. It's also... a central conundrum within the much larger issue of humanity's relationship to nature. It's bigger than AIDS; it's bigger than the enterprise of according legalistic 'rights' to a few thousand species of vertebrates. By a sequence of almost syllogisticallly linked questions, it leads straight to the core of a very personal yet very global matter - whether we humans are really part of the natural world or not. It demands eventually that we ask ourselves, Is a human life sacred, or just valuable? And the corollary, If a valuable entity proliferates itself by a factor of six billion, is each unit still as valuable as it was?”

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“John Deck was a snake fancier. He had only been rattler-bit a few times. At an early age he'd had his own pit full of diamondbacks, a plywood affair out near the garage. Some of the snakes would scootch themselves up vertically along the boards and John, cocky lad, used to knock them back down with his own quick right hand, until one day he presumed against a snake that was readier than he was, and caught a palmload of fangs.”

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