It is not an act of kindness to treat animals respectfully. It is an act of justice.
Interpretation
Treating animals with respect is fundamentally about their rights and justice, not just kindness.
This quote by Tom Regan emphasizes that respecting animals is not merely a matter of being kind; rather, it is a moral obligation rooted in justice. It suggests that animals have intrinsic rights that should be recognized and upheld, and treating them well is part of fulfilling those rights, much like any issue of justice in society.
In practice
During a speech on animal rights, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of justice for animals.
The other animals humans eat, use in science, hunt, trap, and exploit in a variety of ways, have a life of their own that is of importance to them apart from their utility to us. They are not only in the world, they are aware of it. What happens to them matters to them. Each has a life that fares better or worse for the one whose life it is.
What could be the basis of our having more inherent value than animals? Their lack of reason, or autonomy, or intellect? Only if we are willing to make the same judgment in the case of humans who are similarly deficient.
It is not larger, cleaner cages that justice demands...but empty cages; not traditional animal agriculture but a complete end to all commerce in the flesh of dead animals; not more humane hunting and trapping, but the total eradication of these barbarous practices.
I would encourage them never to forget that they were not always vegans. The self-righteousness of the recently converted hurts, it does not help, other animals.
Human kind cannot bear much reality.
I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
The significance of life is living.
How can we truly understand who we are unless we know who we were and what we have the power to become?
The Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshipin g mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters; as a political group they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action.
No American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found guilty of a crime by a court.
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