52 Quotes by Matthew Scully

As sentimentality towards animals can be overindulged, so, too, can grim realism, seeing only the things we want in animals and not the animals themselves.

Philosophical theories can in this way become a destructive venture, confusing matters with false choices and sterile power schemes the cruel are only too happy to accept. In hostile hands, they become a pretext for doing nothing, for brushing off real and urgent moral duties in the care of animals.

Reforms will come as all great reforms have always come in ridding us of evils against both man and animal – not as we change our moral principles but as we discern and accept the implications of principles already held.

Some readers will say that animals awaken fantasy, if not heresy, in those who attach moral significance to them. Yet often I think it is the more violent among us who are living out the fantasy, some delusion in which everything in nature is nothing and all is permitted.

The elephants we have seen taunted and tormented and slaughtered by the likes of Safari Club do not have time to wait while the world’s ethicists work out some centuries-long paradigm shift in moral thought.

Factory farming isn’t just killing: It is a negation, a complete denial of the animal as a living being with his or her own needs and nature... It confronts us with the animal equivalent of Abraham Lincoln’s condemnation of human slavery: ‘If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

To the factory farmer, in contrast to the traditional farmer with his sense of honor and obligation, the animals are 'production units,' and accorded all the sympathy that term suggests.