EcoSalon’s 30 favorite quotes about animals.

Whether you’re an aspiring crazy cat lady or partial to the clumsy wet-nosed affections of a dog, a conscious meat eater or a passionate animal-defending vegetarian, it’s hard not to be touched and inspired by animals and the unique connection that we have with them as humans. These 30 quotes from Ghandi, David Sedaris, Paul McCartney and many more illustrate some of the most poignant, uplifting and funny things people have to say about animals.

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men. – Alice Walker

Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not die, so do other creatures. – The Dalai Lama

Happiness is a warm puppy. – Charles M. Schulz

I wish outer space guys would conquer the Earth and make people their pets, because I’d like to have one of those little beds with my name on it. – Jack Handey

Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in. – Mark Twain

Animals never worry about Heaven or Hell. Neither do I. Maybe that’s why we get along. - Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems

Dogs come when they’re called; cats take a message and get back to you later. – Mary Bly

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. – Mahatma Ghandi

I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it’s such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her. – Ellen DeGeneres

Animals are such agreeable friends – they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms. – George Eliot

You can judge a man’s true character by the way he treats his fellow animals. - Paul McCartney

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between dog and man. – Mark Twain

Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill and eat animals the way we do. – Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Our Meals

Animals are my friends – and I don’t eat my friends. – George Bernard Shaw

Look, PETA! If God hadn’t wanted us to eat animals, he wouldn’t have made them so darn tasty! – Stephen Colbert

Our task must be to free ourselves… by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty. – Albert Einstein

Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise. – The Beatles

If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what’s unique about language isn’t the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What’s unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten. – Temple Grandin

The bee is more honored than other animals, not because she labors, but because she labors for others. - Saint John Chrysostom

When I was a kid, if a guy got killed in a western movie I always wondered who got his horse. – George Carlin

I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being. – Abraham Lincoln

Time spent with cats is never wasted. – Sigmund Freud

We should have each other to tea huh? We should have each other with cream, then curl up in the fire and sleep for a while – it’s the grooviest thing, it’s the perfect dream. – The Cure, ‘The Lovecats’

I love things made out of animals. It’s just so funny to think of someone saying, ‘I need a letter opener. I guess I’ll have to kill a deer.’ – David Sedaris

If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience. – Woodrow Wilson

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal. - Charles Darwin

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read. – Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho

Animals have these advantages over men: they have no theologians to instruct them, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills. – Voltaire

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which is deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals. – Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Everyone’s pet is the most outstanding. This begets mutual blindness. – Jean Cocteau

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ColumnReintegrating food production into our communities will increase transparency in the food system.

Unless you buy eggs from cage-free or pastured hens, your daily over-easy likely came from a bird whose entire life was passed in a 16-inch wide cage with four or five others.

While the hen struggled to push those thin-shelled, pale-yolked eggs from her poor, sick body, excrement rained down on her from the cages above. Perhaps she shared the tiny space with other birds so ill they were dying, or already dead. Such conditions are living hell for the chickens, and they aren’t so good for people, either. Last year’s widespread salmonella-induced egg recall proved it.

Yet if factory farmers and the politicians who pander to them get their way, the only mechanism available for exposing abuse of animals and dangerously filthy conditions could soon be a crime. The creation, possession, or distribution of investigative videos like this one taken by an undercover employee in an egg production facility in California would be punishable by law.

According to the New York Times, a bill now before the Iowa legislature would make it a crime to produce, distribute or possess photos and video taken without permission at an agricultural facility. It would also criminalize lying on an application to work at an agriculture facility “with an intent to commit an act not authorized by the owner.” Other states are considering similar legislation.

The implications for journalism, animal welfare and human health are serious. The reason we need secret videos and photographs to expose farm animal abuses and food safety violations is because agricultural facilities are no longer a part of our communities. They are hidden away in sparsely populated areas far from city and suburban centers. They are massive in scale, their corporate owners wield considerable political power, and they are accountable to no one. If you are unlucky enough to live near a factory farm, you only need your nose to know.

Take the hog farms in North Carolina as an example. Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has been collecting stories from North Carolina residents who live near the state’s giant hog operations. The stench and pollution permeates their walls and clothing, makes their children sick, and prevents them from going outside. Such a system is profitable for producers, but comes at a high cost for our human society, and the animals that are the unwilling participants in the system.

I have a dream that in my lifetime we find a way to reintegrate food production of all types back into our communities. If farms, animal operations, slaughterhouses, and other facilities that process food were smaller in size and located in the regions they serve, the resulting transparency would go a long way toward decreasing animal cruelty and increasing food safety. When workers, owners, farmers, animals, and consumers are all part of the same community, there will be accountability to the community that doesn’t exist in the global marketplace, and we won’t need secret videos.

Until we can elect politicians and policy makers who will work toward a food system that’s fair to both animals and people, it’s up to us as consumers. The next time you’re shopping for food, think about what kind of system you want to support with your dollars.

Image: Emrank via Flickr

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, exploring the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

Image: Alice Popkorn

This is not a new question or a new debate, but perhaps for the first time, two non-meat eaters took different sides in the argument during a recent debate at Berkeley’s Brower Center. The conversation between vegetarian-rancher Nicolette Hahn Niman and “Mad Cowboy” Howard Lyman focused on the ethics of eating meat and the environmental impacts of meat production.

Hahn Niman became a vegetarian in college but later married rancher Bill Niman. She is the author of the book Righteous Porkchop, which discusses the differences between small-scale, environmentally responsible animal husbandry and factory farming. Though she believes that eating meat can be ethically and environmentally defensible, she chooses to remain a vegetarian.

Lyman is a former large-scale rancher whose come-to-vegan moment came in the form of a near-fatal spinal tumor that doctors told him was caused by the chemicals used in farming. His conversion and the publication of his book, Mad Cowboy, got him on Oprah and got Oprah into trouble with the Cattlemen’s Beef Association when she mentioned in the interview that the news about Mad Cow Disease might just put her off her hamburgers. EcoSalon attended the debate which was sponsored by Earth Island Journal and moderated by Ari Durfel, founder of Gather Restaurant (also known as the guy who kept his trash in his living room for a year.)

The first question was: What are the environmental reasons to be vegetarian?

Predictably, both participants agree that factory farming is absolutely the worst thing for the environment, as well as for human and animal health. But they answer the question differently. Both experts touch on meat production as a major cause of global warming. Lyman focuses on the term humane meat, asking if killing can be humane and asserting that the only reason we eat meat is because we have an addiction to fat.

Hahn Niman focuses on the facts behind meat production and global warming, citing the often quoted statistic that 18 percent of global warming gasses come from meat production. But, she asserts, “nearly half this from deforestation in developing world and very little of that meat is going to USA. In the USA we are not deforesting at all for meat production.” Hahn Niman goes on to say that livestock production, when done correctly, can actually build soils and contribute to reforestation while also providing valuable fertilizer for agriculture.

“Both of you agree large scale CAFO farming is not okay. Is there a certain scale that you could be comfortable with? Or is general livestock across board wrong?

Acknowledging briefly that of course there is a way to farm better, Lyman stays focused on individual consumer actions rather than farming practices, asserting that there is no way a person can live in an urban area like Berkeley, eat meat and benefit the environment. “Unless you’re willing to raise and kill own meat, no way can you have anything but a negative effect”.

Hahn Niman makes the point that talking about avoiding meat is a false choice because all food production contributes to global warming through carbon, methane, and nitrous oxide omissions. She also mentions that certain non-meat items have a larger carbon footprint than certain meat items. Hahn Niman then reverts to Niman Ranch talking points, asserting that at Niman Ranch, 99 percent of diet is naturally growing/occurring grains and grasses produced by the sun without irrigation feed, or chemicals. When animals eat this basically free food, they become nutritious food for humans. She adds that 85 percent of land in the USA isn’t suitable to row farming of grains and vegetables and ends with the question, “If it’s not meat, what is the appropriate use of land for best impact?”

The next question focused on the ethics of eating meat.

The fact that Hahn Niman is a vegetarian who believes meat eating is a personal and ethical choice puts her in an interesting position and illustrates how stickily personal questions of ethics can be. She raises animals and bonds with them. She is a rancher who has no ethical problem with killing animals, but evidently has a personal problem with it. Perhaps she just doesn’t like meat, but she never says so. She does say that she believes the human body has evolved to eat meat and that our brains developed because of it. She emphasizes that as animals, we are part of the system of living, dying, and regenerating.

Lyman takes issue with Hahn Niman’s assertion that we evolved to eat meat, saying that we were designed to be herbivores and that animals have feelings and the capacity for love. He says if we don’t have to eat animals to survive, how can we kill them? Are we willing to do it ourselves, or would we rather have someone else do it? He says that eating animals is just feeding our addiction and it is wrong.

Hahn Niman vehemently disagrees that human beings evolved to be herbivores, adding that raising animals for food doesn’t mean you don’t care or don’t think animals have feelings. She says death by humane slaughter is better than violent or slow death in the wild (a bit of red herring, if you ask me). For her, the biggest question is how the meat is produced and the answer is that an omnivorous diet can be sustainable.

The moderator asks Howard, whether or not we were designed to eat meat, do we have to eat meat?

Howard throws out his own red herring, saying, “If we’re true omnivores why aren’t we eating our cats and dogs?” Then he says he supports small-scale farms doing it better but does not think animals are necessary for his survival, though he’s not convinced everyone has to become a vegan.

Hahn Niman counters that omnivore doesn’t mean you eat everything. “We make choices. But studies show omnivorous diet gives you survival and immune advantages – just avoiding meat as a category when some things are worse than meat for the environment is not a reasonable response.”

During the audience question period both speakers had an opportunity to offer real-world tips on how to eat better for the environment and also a perspective about why the factory-farming model exists in the first place.

Hahn Niman says to minimize footprint, you should get dairy and meat from grass-fed sources. Such foods have a lower footprint, are healthier, tastier, and are almost never fed drugs. Unprocessed, fresh, whole foods close to harvest are always good choices, as is eating seasonally. “Applying all these values to all of what you eat, whether meat, vegan or vegetarian, is going to be more environmentally sound and healthier.”

Lyman says the best thing a person can do is to spend some time thinking about what you actually like and what you actually want to eat for your life. Do research, start with small steps. Try Meatless Monday. “Look at issue honestly and ask what you are truly able and willing to do. And ask what you must do for posterity.”

One member of the audience asks: “How on earth could we farm enough meat sustainably to actually make it mainstream for world? Could we convert animal agriculture entirely to pasture?”

Hahn Niman says yes; “You could absolutely do that if western cultures reduced consumption modestly. I’m a huge advocate of reduced meat consumption – I support meatless Monday. But abolishing totally is not a good idea.”

Lyman says, “If we wanted to talk about viability of doing things right, we have to price it according to the value of inputs going in. We would have to remove those subsidies [going to CAFO producers]. We would have people driving up to McDonald’s and having to pay eight dollars for a burger. Niman isn’t available everywhere and isn’t affordable for most. And Niman can’t make enough profit to expand. People with the gold are gaming the system. It is rigged.”

What do you think? Can you be an environmentalist and eat any meat, even “sustainably raised” meat?

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

Image: Laurel Fan

I can’t quite begin to imagine what the laboratory flesh created by scientists last month might taste like, but petri pork may be hitting the breakfast table sooner than you know.

Nobody knows what it tastes like because the scientists who created this delicacy are not actually allowed to eat their creations, but if their descriptions of the texture are any indication of deliciousness, I think I’ll go vegan.

The meat was described as being “sticky” with a texture that one scientist likened to “wasted muscle tissue.” Yum.

Maybe it’s no accident that the research was partially funded by a sausage company. Most of the cheap flesh in sausages, processed foods and fast food relies on carefully calibrated, chemically produced flavors and textures to make it palatable anyway, so I suppose there might be a market for this sticky sinew.

Feel sick yet? Try this: To make the test tube pork, cells are extracted from a live pig and then bathed in a nourishing “broth” of blood products made from animal fetuses. The cells are encouraged to grow and multiply until eventually they turn into a substance like animal flesh. Clearly, using ground-up animal fetuses to produce lab meat is ethically questionable, but scientists say they are working on a way to make a synthetic “broth” free of animal products. Would this still cause an ethical conundrum?

“I actually haven’t heard much protesting on the ethics and I don’t see a problem in that area. After all, they’re simply growing muscle cells, I believe, which are not sentient and thus can’t feel deprived of having much of an existence,” says Bonnie Powell, inventor of the word Ethicurean and Founder of the blog by that name. “Given [what] we subject animals to in order to grow replacement organs, serve as pharmaceutical factories for our drugs, and of course routinely abuse them for food, this seems like a relatively mild use.”

“We already treat animals as protein widgets to be processed by the Meatrix factory for our needs. In-vitro meat is simply the refinement of this process – minus the animal pain and suffering. Still, I am philosophically (if not morally) opposed to producing more of our food in the lab, divorced from nature and the complex, holistic system by which nature produces nutrients, which we still don’t fully understand.”

From an environmental and anti-cruelty point of view, the argument for test tube meat can be made to sound compelling. Livestock production is a waste of resources due to the inherent inefficiency of converting plants to animal flesh. Ruminant animals also produce copious amounts of methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas. PETA has come out in favor of the idea of in-vitro meat production as a way to alleviate animal suffering and address some of the environmental issues with livestock production.

Cruelty is one of the reasons conscious meat eaters avoid factory-farmed meat in favor of meat produced on a smaller, more responsible scale and purchased through buying clubs, farmers’ markets, and meat CSAs. As the founder of a couple of well known Bay Area meat CSAs, I asked Powell if she thought any of her CSA members and would be receptive to laboratory produced meat in the future.

“While a significant portion of our CSA members are ex-vegetarians like me, looking for an ethical source of meat, I don’t see this being much of a draw for them. The humane animal treatment is but one appealing aspect of a small-farm meat CSA,” says Powell. “The others are a desire to see this kind of ecologically responsible farming prosper again, keep money in the community, and because this kind of meat tastes so different – so much more animal in essence than factory meat. In my experience CSA members tend to be people who like cooking and who like real food – which in-vitro meat is just simply not, any more than textured soy protein flavored to taste like teriyaki chicken is.”

So maybe the issue really will come down to taste.

“I cannot imagine test tube meat ever going mainstream because the ‘yuck’ factor is huge. Also, the process of producing anything in vitro is incredibly capital and resource intensive,” says Nicolette Hahn Niman, Marin County, Calif. rancher, lawyer, and author of Righteous Pork Chop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms. “Just think about all the resources that go into in vitro labs.

Niman (you’ve no doubt heard of Niman Ranch meats) reflected further.

“The other thing is this: I don’t think it’s even desirable to entirely get rid of animals in farming – reduce yes, eliminate no. The best farming mimics the complexity of nature, where plants and animals function together,” says Niman. “That’s the kind of farming humans should be striving for, rather than wasting precious resources on things like in vitro meats.”

Assuming the financial and textural concerns are resolved, my worry is that test tube meat won’t even have to go mainstream.

Perhaps food producers will simply incorporate it into processed and frozen foods without government or consumer oversight or labeling. After all, that’s the reason around 70% of the processed foods on our grocery shelves contain unlabeled GMOs. Why go to the trouble of selling something if all you have to do is invent it and grease a few regulatory palms to make sure it finds a market?

What do you think? If test tube meat was made tasty, affordable, and cruelty free, would you willingly buy it? PETA, not surprisingly, are welcoming the possibility.

Image: Mike Licht

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

The casting call went out last January, not to big Hollywood agents but to animal shelters and rescue groups across the country.

Looking for four-legged crooners, black and white, who can get along with others on tour, do the old soft paw on stage, and won’t leap off into the audience when they hear the sound of applause.

Dozens of shelter dogs got the parts for the The 101 Dalmatians Musical including Rascal, a puppy with a broken leg found on the side of the road. Like the others, he has been given a new leash on life by getting to reside on a Florida ranch and travel in a celebrity tour bus while the show begins a national tour this month, starting in Minneapolis.

Animal trainer, Joel Slaven, told the Associated Press it was tough finding dogs to cast for the show.

Apparently, following the release of the popular live-action Disney “101 Dalmatians” in 1996 there was a rush on Dalmatians as  family pets, a role not suited to the breed. After the cute puppy stage, many new owners abandoned the dogs which flooded  shelters. Since then, canine rescuers are protective of the animals being exploited.

“When the movies came out, they were over-bred and that made the breed, which already has some health problems, even worse. People got the dogs, couldn’t afford the vet bills, found the dogs untrainable, or that they didn’t get along with kids. Shelters, Humane Societies and rescue groups don’t want anyone to use these dogs for entertainment, and they don’t want to help someone who’s going to do this again,” Slavin said.

I guess they came around when Slavin convinced them the animals would be treated like divas and dapper, leading men. Training the newbies like Rascal (above) involved helping the choreographer stage a three-minute finale of all dogs performing a dance routine to a tune by composer Dennis De Young of Styx fame. I hear it’s “jaw dropping.”

But instead of using the Dalmatians throughout the show, their parts are primarily played by actors, as in the musical Cats.

Images: Bree Bailey, The 101 Dalmatians Musical

Welcome to The September Issue, a frockumentary chronicling the genius behind the fattest ever edition of Vogue, weighing in at over four pounds, reaching 13 million readers and boosting the sinking morale of the $300-billion global fashion industry.

I don’t know about you but I don’t like my documentaries contrived any more than my fashion. Albeit entertaining, this one by R.J. Cutler smacks of high level spin and pretense.

Adding to the “entertainment value” was an art-versus-bottom dollar subplot pitting the painfully bored Vogue chief Anna Wintour against brilliant, model-turned-photo stylist Grace Coddington, both British veterans who have been with the magazine for more than 20 years.

Coddington makes a statement with her unkempt orange mane and naked, aging face, an appearance which defies everything that lets Vogue survive, namely stick-figured, cover-girl celebs with flawless airbrushed faces who are posed like Barbies in lay-outs specifically engineered to sell fashion.

True, it’s always been about the sales, but four pounds of retail pitching might be overkill.

Coddington cringes throughout the film as she battles her nemesis Wintour. We the audience tend to root for the vulnerable underdog in the power struggle as the boss eliminates various elements of Coddington’s romantic fashion spreads at her whim – images labored over with great attention to lighting and detail to add depth to the 2007 September book.

One comes away with little empathy for the emaciated Wintour, who, so taken with herself as a removed icon, keeps her trademark goggles on while observing the indoor runway shows. Guess she figures she has seen it all so missing a few nuances of color and texture shouldn’t be a big deal. Her vacant expression dares the wizards behind the curtain to try and impress her.

If Coddington is the magazine’s soul, Wintour emerges the cold-blooded business brain going through the tedious motions but never really responding to her vibrant environment. Never mind that hundreds of talented, unemployed journalists are waiting in the wings for that chance-of-a-lifetime job monopolized by Wintour for two decades.

Appearing even more bored that the overblown caricature portrayed brilliantly by Meryl Streep in Prada, Wintour seems desperate to pad Vogue and her paycheck at any cost – even resurrecting fur on the cover in the 90s to save the dying trade.

A longtime Peta target for her Cruella Deville attraction to pelts, Wintour is pompous in her disregard for the mission of animal rights groups who have fought hard to sensitize humans to animal cruelty and the absurdity of slaughtering  for fashion’s sake alone. Recently, she told Sixty Minutes she needed to get security to protect her from anti-fur militants. She insisted she likes fur and that is the only reason she wears it. Right.

I find the most staged scene in the film is Vogue’s annual meeting in Paris with the movers and shakers of the retail world, such as the head of Neiman Marcus, who nudges Wintour to wield her influence to get couture houses to speed up delivery of gowns to an ever-increasing and demanding clientele. Hogwash! There was no increasing demand for $15,000 gowns even prior to the recession, and the only demanding clientele is the celebrity stylist crowd that manipulates its clout to borrow treasures for a day.

The only message I came away with is that it might be time for Wintour to hang up her Warhol wig, glasses and venti Starbucks paper cup and give someone else a shot at salvaging her doomed fashion rag. Perhaps it should be someone like Grace, who embodies her name while clinging to what matters most to fashion visionaries and fans – the process of creating and wearing desirable, three-dimensional art.