Animals: Tradition - Philosophy - Religion Article from All-Creatures.org

Reverence for Life & Truth: Reflections That Help Me Along in My Spiritual Journey

From Dr. Thomas Johnson, NCSP, CPQ, IP
June 2023

Until he extends the circle of compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.
~ Albert Schweitzer, M.D., Ph.D. 1875-1965, philosopher, musician, physician, theologian and Nobel laureate

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.
~ Albert Einstein, 1879-1955

Human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores.
~ William C. Roberts, M.D. editor-in-chief, The American Journal of Cardiology.

In my view no chemical carcinogen is nearly so important in causing human cancer as animal protein.
~ T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., Cornell professor of nutritional biochemistry and senior author of The China Project, the largest study linking nutrition and the risk of developing disease.

In the perfect world originally designed by God, man was meant to be a vegetarian.
~ Rabbi Jacob Cohen.

Never be ashamed to say, “No thank-you; I do not eat meat. I have conscientious scruples against eating the flesh of dead animals”.
~ Ellen White 1827-1915, co-founder of the Seventh Day Adventist Church

Thanks be to God: Since I gave up flesh and wine, I have been delivered from all physical ills.
~ John Wesley 1703-1791, founder of Methodism

Steven Rosen in Diet for Transcendence: Vegetarianism and The World Religions (1997) notes ‘Ellen G. White one of the founders of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, was an ardent vegetarian, as was John Wesley, the founder of Methodism,’ p. 25

Vegetarianism is a way of life that we should all move toward for economic survival, physical well-being, and spiritual integrity.
~ Father Thomas Berry, Catholic Priest and writer

I have from an early age abjured the use of meat and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.
~ Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans anymore than black people were made for whites or women for men.
~ Alice Walker, author

As the trucks rolled by, I saw cows and sheep in those trucks, being transported. One could only see their eyes in the slits in the trucks, and it struck me that that was very much like the scene out of the Holocaust of Jews being transported in cattle trucks to their fate. During the Holocaust, I am sure that the German people were aware that Jews and others were being treated in the most horrific way. They may not have known all the details. but they must have known something, but they didn’t want to think about it. And I think today, we also don’t want to think about the way in which animals are also treated. So there is a parallel in terms of our desire not to reflect on what is really happening.
~ Rabbi and Professor Dan Cohen-Sherbrook

I obtained statistics from various government sources. The slaughter figures were staggering. Ninety-three million pigs are slaughtered each year in the United States. Thirty million cattle. Two million calves. Six million horses, goats, and sheep. And eight billion chickens and turkeys..... I couldn’t imagine anyone working year after year in a job that required them to torture animals and subject themselves to constant physical danger...with nearly thirty-six injuries or illnesses for every one hundred workers, meat packing is the most dangerous industry in the United Sates.
~ Gail Eisnitz, author of Slaughterhouse

I am conscious that flesh eating is not in accordance with the finer feelings, and I abstain from it.
~ Albert Schweitzer, M.D., PH.D. 1875-1965

The eating of meat extinguishes the great seed of compassion.
~ The Buddha 563BC-483BC.

If people could begin to understand that if they could have respect for all creatures on this earth, only then can the murdering of human beings be stopped. But as long as they continue to slaughter animals, there are going to be wars, and we are not going to find peace. Peace will come after we discover that we should have reverence for all living things.
~ Casey Kasem, radio personality

I don’t eat meat because meat brings out negative qualities such as fear, anger, anxiety, aggressiveness, etc. Vegetables peacefully offer themselves to the earth when ripe, thus allowing a sublime and peaceful thought-consciousness.
~ Carlos Santana, musician

The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all the natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined.
~ Neal Bernard, M.D., founder and director, Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine

I don’t understand why asking people to eat a well balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on cholesterol lowering drugs for the rest of their lives.
~ Dean Ornish, MD., cardiologist and author of Love and Survival

A vegetarian diet lies at the basis of all reform, whether Civil, Social, Moral or Religious.
~ Dr. William Alcott 1789-1859, author and founder of the first American Vegetarian Society

People try to hide the fact that they are actually eating something that had a face and a heart, someone who had a soul.
~ Paul McCartney, musician

"It was a pleading look as if they were asking me not to put them in the pot." Chef Simon Beavis, quit his job at a seafood restaurant because he refused to boil lobsters on the grounds of cruelty

The assumption that animals are without rights, and the allusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788 - 1860, philosopher

I would rather swear fifty lies than take an animal, which had licked my hand in good fellowship and torture it.
~ George Bernard Shaw, 1856 - 1950, Nobel prize winning author

It takes less water to produce a year’s food for a pure vegetarian than to produce a month’s food for a meat eater ... The amount of water consumed by America’s meat habit is staggering.
~ John Robbins, author, Diet for a New America

All breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain nor treated with violence, nor abused nor tormented, nor driven away. This is the pure unchangeable Law.
~ Jainism, Sutrakritanga

I am a battery hen. I live in a cage so small I cannot stretch my wings. I am forced to stand night and day on a sloping wire mesh floor that painfully cuts into my feet. The cage walls tear my feathers, forming blood blisters that never heal. The air is so full of ammonia that my lungs hurt and my eyes burn and I think I am going blind. As soon as I was born, a man grabbed me and sheared off part of my beak with a hot iron and my little brothers were thrown into trash bags as useless alive.... Humans, I wish I were dead, and soon I will be dead, look for pieces of my wounded flesh wherever chicken pies and soups are sold.
~~ Karen Davis, Ph.D., president, United Poultry Concerns

No one really needs a mink coat in this world ... except minks.
~ Glenda Jackson, actress

Harmlessness is the only religion.
~ Jainism, Maxim

Ethics in our Western world has hitherto been largely limited to the relations of man to man. But this is a limited ethics. We need a boundless ethics, which will include the animals also.
~ Albert Schweitzer, Ph.D., M.D.

Pioneers of social reform are courageous individuals who are more concerned about truth, justice, and humanity than about how they will be perceived by others. ... For many years, vegetarian and vegan pioneers have been committed to the eradication of another great injustice: one that is committed against the animals so many people call food.
~ Brenda Davis, R.D. & Vesanto Melina, M.S., R.D., authors of Becoming Vegan: The Complete Guide to Adopting a Healthy Plant Based Diet,, 2000

An acre of land can yield 250 pounds of beef as compared to 40,000 pounds of potatoes. Fifteen total vegetarians can be fed on the same amount of land needed to feed one person on a meat-based diet.... Americans slaughter some six billion-farm animals each year for consumption. The average American non-vegetarian family of four each year eats half a steer, a whole pig, 100 chickens, 556 eggs, 280 gallons of milk products and over 50 pounds of fish. Many animals suffer inhumane conditions during their lives and then face violent deaths at the slaughterhouse.
~ North American Vegetarian Society

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