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Wild Animal Suffering Quotes

Browse 6 quotes about Wild Animal Suffering.

Wild Animal Suffering Quotes

“... wild animals suffer from a wide range of harms regardless of their reproductive strategies, including hunger, disease, parasitism, and natural disasters. These harms often cause intense suffering, and we should not disregard this suffering merely because the sufferers happen to live in the wild, or because they happen to have non-human bodies. We rightly acknowledge a moral duty to relieve intense suffering experienced by humans, including when it is due to natural causes, and there is no justification for restricting this moral duty to humans only ... .”

SufferingEthicsVeganismSpeciesismWild Animal Suffering
Book:Reasoned Politics
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“George Williams, the revered evolutionary biologist, describes the natural world as “grossly immoral.” Having no foresight or compassion, natural selection “can honestly be described as a process for maximizing short-sighted selfishness.” On top of all the miseries inflicted by predators and parasites, the members of a species show no pity to their own kind. Infanticide, siblicide, and rape can be observed in many kinds of animals; infidelity is common even in so-called pair-bonded species; cannibalism can be expected in all species that are not strict vegetarians; death from fighting is more common in most animal species than it is in the most violent American cities. Commenting on how biologists used to describe the killing of starving deer by mountain lions as an act of mercy, Williams wrote: “The simple facts are that both predation and starvation are painful prospects for deer, and that the lion's lot is no more enviable. Perhaps biology would have been able to mature more rapidly in a culture not dominated by Judeo-Christian theology and the Romantic tradition. It might have been well served by the First Holy Truth from [Buddha's] Sermon at Benares: “Birth is painful, old age is painful, sickness is painful, death is painful...”” As soon as we recognize that there is nothing morally commendable about the products of evolution, we can describe human psychology honestly, without the fear that identifying a “natural” trait is the same as condoning it. As Katharine Hepburn says to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”

EvolutionNatural SelectionWild Animal SufferingPredationIdyllic View
Book:The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
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“Human morality, some may argue, applies only to human actions - not to the actions of animals. I agree with this. [...] However, morality must certainly apply to human inaction, and especially our inaction in preventing harm, suffering, and awfulness. What is the moral justification for the "hands off " dogma regarding nature? We often interfere with nature for the good of humans and human industry. Why not for the good of individual animals? Bloody Nature is a machine for pushing genes into the future. Does it really "know best"?”

Wild Animal Suffering
Book:Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide
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“We don't even have to harm or kill animals in order to stop Nature from doing her evil deeds. We could simply prevent their reproduction, or even merely cease our current "conservation efforts" that involve breeding animals. Breeding wild animals and releasing them into the wild is doing the ugly work of Genesis all over again-and cruelly claiming that it's "good.”

Wild Animal Suffering
Book:Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide
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“It is strange that philosophers first show how one animal supports itself by destroying another, and then enter into discussions on the apparent admirable order of things in their present state. But though this may be a necessary contrivance, and the only way in which life can be supported, it can never be a beautiful one, in our short sights, notwithstanding that something worse might be, were this not the case.”

EthicsWild Animal Suffering
Book:Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes
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