No wonder Muddlers initially think that becoming a vegetarian is like taking a vow of culinary abstinence mixed with voluntary poverty. Of course, in time Muddlers discover that there is an incredibly delicious, colorful, and nutritious animal-free cuisine out there to be discovered, a menu of possibilities that includes foods from every nation and ethnicity in the world. It is the great new food we gain, not the customary old food we lose, that is the real surprise, something all of us have to discover for ourselves.
Tom Regan Carolinian
Source
Ch. 6
- work
- Empty Cages (2004)
- year
- 2004
Cite this record
“No wonder Muddlers initially think that becoming a vegetaria…” Tom Regan. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-343D1C0112. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/343d1c0112
More from Tom Regan
What I had learned about human rights proved to be directly relevant to my thinking about animal rights. Whether any animals have rights depends on the true answer to one question: Are any animals subjects-of-a-life? This is the question that needs to be asked about animals because this is the question we need to ask about us.
People 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.
So the real question, I believe, is not whether some ARA's use violence. The real question is whether they are justified in doing so. Here are the main outlines of a possible justification. 1. Animals are innocent. 2. Violence is used only when it is necessary to rescue them so that they are spared terrible harms. 3. Excessive violence is never used. 4. Violence is used only after nonviolent alternatives have been exhausted, as time and circumstances permit. 5. Therefore, in these cases, the use of violence is justified.