Carolina QuotesPeople like me, people who believe in animal rights, feel the same way about eagles and elephants, pigs and porpoises, as most people feel about cats and dogs. Don't get me wrong. Animal Rights Advocates (ARAs) don't want pigs sleeping in our beds or elephants riding in our cars. We don't want to make “pets” of these animals. What we want is something simpler: we just want people to stop doing terrible things to them.
Tom Regan Carolinian
Source
Prologue
- work
- Empty Cages (2004)
- year
- 2004
Cite this record
“People like me, people who believe in animal rights, feel th…” Tom Regan. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-2F93039D90. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/2f93039d90
More from Tom Regan
The less gifted do not exist to serve the interests of the more gifted. The former are not mere things when compared to the latter, to be used as means to the latter's ends. From the moral point of view, each of us is equal because each of us is equally a somebody, not a something, the subject-of-a-life, not a life without a subject.
And they say ARAs are violent. The bitter truth would be laughable if it were not so tragic. The violence done to things by some ARAs (buy which I mean the violent destruction of insensate property) is nothing compared to the violence done to feeling creatures by the major animal user industries. A raindrop compared to an ocean. On a day-to-day basis, by far the greatest amount of violence done in the "civilized" world occurs because of what humans do to other animals. That the violence is legally protected, that in some cases (for example, vivisection) it is socially esteemed, only serves to make matters worse.
I would never have become an animal rights advocate if I had not first been a human rights advocate, especially for those humans (the very young and the very old, for example) who lack the understanding or power to assert their rights for themselves.