And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.” So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.”   

-Genesis 1:20-22 NRSV Bible

And God said, "Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind." And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."

-Genesis 1:24-26 from the NIV Bible

If thy heart be straight with God, then every creature shall be to thee a mirror of life and a book of holy doctrine, for there is no creature so little or so vile, but that showeth and representeth the goodness of God.

-Thomas a Kempis (c.1379-1471)
The Imitation of Christ, 1426

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all...
...He prayeth well who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

-Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", 1798

Why are we by all creatures waited on?
Why do the prodigal elements supply
Life and food to me, being more pure than I,
Simple, and further from corruption?
Why brook'st thou, ignorant horse, subjection?
Why dost thou, bull, and bore so seelily,
Dissemble weakness, and by one man's stroke die,
Whose whole kind you might swallow and feed upon?
Weaker I am, woe is me, and worse than you,
You have not sinned, nor need be timorous.
But wonder at a greater wonder, for to us
Created nature doth these things subdue,
But their Creator, whom sin nor nature tied,
For us, His creatures, and His foes, hath died.

-John Donne (1572-1631) from Holy Sonnet XII

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, "As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark.  I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth."

-Genesis 9:8-11 from the NRSV Bible

"In that day I will also make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, the birds of the sky and the creeping things of the ground. And I will abolish the bow, the sword and war from the land, and will make them lie down in safety. I will betroth you to Me forever; yes, I will betroth you to Me in righteousness and in justice, in lovingkindness and in compassion, and I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness. Then you will know the LORD."

-the prophet Hosea (8th century B.C.) in Hosea 2:18-20
from the NASV Bible

You have heaven adorned, earth beautified, the sea populated with its own creatures, the air filled with birds which scour it in every direction. Studious listener, think of all these creations which God has drawn out of nothing; . . . recognize everywhere the wisdom of God; never cease to wonder, and, through every creature, to glorify the Creator.

-Basil the Great (329-379)

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: "What good is it?"

-Aldo Leopold (1886-1948), Round River, 1993

We talked of the beauty of the world of God’s and of the great mystery of it. Every blade of grass, every insect, ant, and golden bee, all so amazingly know their path, though they have not intelligence, they bear witness to the mystery of God and continually accomplish it themselves.

-Feodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), The Brothers Karamazov, 1880 ch 39

I believe in my heart that faith in Jesus Christ can and will lead us beyond an exclusive concern for the well-being of other human beings to the broader concern for the well-being of the birds in our backyards, the fish in our rivers, and every living creature on the face of the earth.

-John Wesley (1703-1791)
quoted in J.R. Hyland's God's Covenant with Animals, 2000

In Genesis 9, where we have the establishment of a covenant after the flood narrative, the narrator is at pains to make it clear that the covenant if not just with Noah and his descendants but with “every living creature” (9:10, 12-13, 15-17). Because all of creation is party to the covenant, it is not surprising that stones can bear witness to covenant renewal ceremonies (Josh 24:27), donkeys can speak the word of the Lord (Num 22:22-30), the land can grieve and vomit out its inhabitants (Lev 18:28; Jer 4:23-28; 14:2-6; Rom 8:22-23), trees and hills can sing for joy (Ps 96:12; 98:8), mountains can hear words of prophecy directed only to them (Ezek 36:1-15), and even roadside rocks recognize their Redeemer (Lk 19:40).

-Brian Walsh & Sylvia Keesmaat, 
“Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire, 2004

And in that hour,
The seeds of cruelty, that since have swell'd
To such gigantic and enormous growth,
Were sown in human nature's fruitful soil.
Hence date the persecution and the pain
That man inflicts on all inferior kinds,
Regardless of their plaints.

-William Cowper (1731-1800),
from The Winter Walk at Noon in Poetical Works

The abuse of a harmless thing is the essence of sin.     

-A. W. Tozer (1897-1963)

Should reverence for life be a priority in our lives? … Each day around the world, humans display supreme arrogance by ordering the death of other creatures for convenience, for progress or for sport.

-Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.

For thou lovest all things that exist and hast a loathing for none of the things which thou hast made, for thou wouldest not have made anything if thou hadst hated it.

-Wisdom of Solomon 11:24 from the RSV Bible

It is not with respect to our convenience or discomfort, but with respect to their own nature that the creatures are glorifying to their Artificer.

-Augustine (354-430), City of God, 426

Jesus pioneered a relationship ethic based on compassion. Being a disciple means building relationships - with the Creator and with all creation and creatures.

-Leonard Sweet, SoulTsunami, 1999

Why does the Christ-following community strive for an ecologically responsible way of life? Because it is a worshiping community that joins its song with all of creation. When it is renewed in knowledge according to the image of the Creator, this community knows that its worship must both be in harmony with the rest of creation and must facilitate and make possible the free praise of our creaturely kin.

-Brian Walsh & Sylvia C. Keesmaat, 
Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire, 2004  

"Hear, O my people, and I will speak,
O Israel, and I will testify against you:
I am God, your God.
I do not rebuke you for your sacrifices
or your burnt offerings, which are ever before me.
I have no need of a bull from your stall
or of goats from your pens,
for every animal of the forest is mine,
and the cattle on a thousand hills.
I know every bird in the mountains,
and the creatures of the field are mine.”

-Psalm 49:7-11 NIV Bible

 

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties… The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.

-Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

Pain is pain, whether it be inflicted on man or on beast; and the creature who suffers it, whether man or beast, being sensible to the misery of it, whilst it lasts, suffers evil… The white man…can have no right, by virtue of his color, to enslave and tyrannize over a black man… For the same reason, a man can have no natural right to abuse and torment a beast.

-Dr. Humphrey Primatt, 1776

God is the God of the animals in a far lovelier way, I suspect, than many of us dare to think, but he will not be the God of a man by making a good beast of him.

-George Macdonald (1824-1905), “The Last Farthing,” 
Unspoken Sermons, Second Series 1885

In relation to animals, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.

-Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991)

 

The question is not, can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But, can they suffer?

-Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)

Why…is the hunter who shoots a deer for venison subject to more criticism than the person who buys a ham at the supermarket?  Overall, it is probably the intensively reared pig who has suffered more.

-Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 1975

I never saw a wild thing
Sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
Without ever having felt sorry for itself.

-D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), Self-pity

Wildlife is decreasing in the jungles, but it is increasing in the towns.   

       -Mohandes Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)

 

To be well used, creatures and places must be used sympathetically, just as they must be known sympathetically to be well known… The "animal scientist" to whom it is of no concern whether or not animals suffer will almost inevitably aid and abet the destruction of the decent old ideal of animal husbandry and, as a consequence, increase the suffering of animals. I hope that my country may be delivered from the remote, cold abstractions of university science.

-Wendell Berry, "An Argument for Diversity,"
What Are People For? 1990

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

-Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), Complete Works

Without free animal life, I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen.

-Alice Walker

In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level. We choose the jungle and must abide by our choice.

-C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) God in the Dock, 1947

My own eyes are not enough for me … I will see through the eyes of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many is not enough … I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee. More gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog.

-C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), An Experiment In Criticism, 1961

Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives.

-Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)

Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble it, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to the animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you -- alas, it is true of almost every one of us!

-Feodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), The Brothers Karamazov, 1880 ch 41

The fragile balance of plants and animals that share the Earth took millions of years to develop. Some life-forms have persisted in nearly their original state, surviving episodes of mass extinction. Some, like ourselves, are relative newcomers. The ones that perished will not return. Neither will the thousands of species that are disappearing each year due in large part to such human influences as habitat destruction, introduction of invasive species, and over harvesting. If we continue reducing Earth's biodiversity at this rate, the consequences will be profound. The web of life connects the smallest bacterium to the giant redwood and the whale. When we put that web in peril, we become agents of calamity.

from the Biodiversity insert in National Geographic,
February, 1999, Vol. 195, No. 2.

Over the past half-billion years, the planet lost perhaps one species per million species each year, including everything from mammals to plants. Today, the annual rate of extinction is 1,000 to 10,000 times faster. If nothing more is done, one-fifth of all the plant and animal species now on earth could be gone or on the road to extinction by 2030. Being distracted and self-absorbed, as is our nature, we have not yet fully understood what we are doing. But future generations, with endless time to reflect, will understand it all and in painful detail. As awareness grows, so will their sense of loss.

-Edward O. Wilson, "What Is Nature Worth?"
The Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2002

I will weep and wail for the mountains
and take up a lament concerning the desert pastures.
They are desolate and untraveled,
and the lowing of cattle is not heard.
The birds of the air have fled
and the animals are gone.

-the prophet Jeremiah (c.628–586 B.C.) from Jeremiah 9:10 NIV Bible

Now, it never seems to occur to these far-seeing teachers that Nature's object in making animals and plants might possibly be first of all the happiness of each one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness of one. Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit -- the cosmos? The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge. From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals. The fearfully good, the orthodox, of this laborious patchwork of modern civilaization cry "Heresy" on every one whose sympathies reach a single hair's breadth beyond the boundary epidermis of our own species. Not content with taking all of earth, they also claim the celestial country as the only ones who possess the kind of souls for which that imponderable empire was planned. This star, our own good earth, made many a successful journey around the heavens ere man was made, and whole kingdoms of creatures enjoyed existence and returned to dust ere man appeared to claim them. After human beings have also played their part in Creation's plan, they too may disappear without any general burning or extraordinary commotion whatever.

-John Muir (1838-1914)

We need not wait for God
The animals do judge
Of air and sea and grass
Accusing with their eyes
Waiting here en masse
They cry out with their blood
The whale caught in surprise
By oilslick’s killing sludge
The cow with poisoned milk
The elephant’s muted roar
At radioactive food
The tiger’s mangey hide
The silkworm’s broken silk
(The animals do judge)
The dead gulls on the shore
Mists of insecticide
Killing all spore and sperm
Eagle and owl have died
And nematode and worm
The snakes drag in the mud
Fallen the lion’s pride
The night moth’s wings are bruised
They cry out with their blood
Cain! Killer! We are named
By beast and bird condemned
By fish and fowl accused
We need not wait for God
The animals do judge

-Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007), The Animals Do Judge, 1978

Immediately upon the fall, the mind of man shrank from its primitive greatness and expandedness, to an exceeding smallness and contractedness… Before, his soul was under the government of the noble principles of divine love, whereby it was enlarged to the comprehensiveness of all his fellow creatures and their welfare… [But] sin, like some powerful astringent, contracted his soul to the very small dimensions of selfishness, and God was forsaken, and man retired within himself, and became totally governed by narrow and selfish principles and feelings.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), Charity and Its Fruits, 1969

For a lesson in how quickly ecosystems fragment across international borders, a report today suggests looking no further than Lake Victoria. Prior to 1970, Lake Victoria, the world's largest tropical lake, had more than 350 species of fish from the cichlid family. Ninety percent of these were unique to the lake. The introduction of Nile perch and tilapia caused a collapse in the lake's biodiversity and deforestation in the three countries that border the lake, Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya. Wood is needed to dry the oily perch, compared with the cichlids, which could be air dried. Forest clearing has increased siltation and eutrophication in the lake, jeopardizing the Nile perch and tilapia fishery - the cause of the problem to begin with.

-Environmental News Service,
"Lake Victoria Battles Biodiversity Breakdown,"
1 December 2000

Since 1988, when the world's seafood supply peaked at 34 pounds a person each year, the combined effects of overfishing and increasing human populations have reduced the amount of fish and shellfish available on Earth to only about 25 pounds a person each year, according to the findings. And this trend is projected to continue rapidly downward to less than 17 pounds a person each year by 2020.

-MSNBC.com, "China, U.N. challenged over fish," 28 Nov 2001

Fully 90 percent of each of the world's large ocean species, including cod, halibut, tuna, swordfish and marlin, has disappeared from the world's oceans in recent decades, according to the Canadian analysis -- the first to use historical data dating to the beginning of large-scale fishing, in the 1950s. The new research found that fishing has become so efficient that it typically takes just 15 years to remove 80 percent or more of any species that becomes the focus of a fleet's attention. Some populations have disappeared within just a few years, belying the oceans' reputation as a refuge and resource of nearly infinite proportions.

-Rick Weiss, “Key Ocean Fish Species Ravaged, Study Finds,” Washington Post, 15 May 03

What is the fate of those who set out by design, by ignorance or by selfishness to destroy what God has pledged himself to protect? What will be the outcome of having been on the wrong side of God on an issue of covenant preservation, the fate of the world's endangered species? It is on the basis of God's covenant protection of his creation, with the value he has already imparted to it and with his determination to redeem it, that we believe it matters very much.

-Fred Van Dyke, David Mahan, Joseph Sheldon, & Raymond Brand,
Redeeming Creation, 1996

But ask the animals, and they will teach you,
or the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,
or let the fish of the sea inform you.
Which of all these does not know
that the hand of the Lord has done this?
In his hand is the life of every creature
and the breath of all mankind.

-from Job 12:7-10 from the New International Version of the Bible

A Robin Redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.

-William Blake (1757-1827), 
Poems from the Pickering Manuscript, c. 1803 

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

-William Blake (1757-1827), The Tiger

A dog starv'd at the master's gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A horse misus'd upon the road
Calls to heaven for human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain does tear,
A skylark wounded on the wing,
A cherubim does cease to sing.   

-William Blake (1757-1827), Auguries of Innocence

Que me amat, amet et canem meum.
Who loves me will love my dog also.

-Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153), Sermo Primus

He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.

-Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Lectures on Ethics

Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is--whether its victim is human or animal--we cannot expect things to be much better in this world... We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing we set back the progress of humanity.

-Rachel Carson (1907-1964)

We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have not words.

-Anna Sewell (1820-1878), Black Beauty, 1877

It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.

-Mark Twain a.k.a. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) 
What Is Man?, 1906

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

-Henry Beston (1888-1968),
The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, 1949

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

-George Eliot, pseudonym of Marian Evans, (1819-1880),
Scenes of Clerical Life, 1857

Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.

-Deuteronomy 25:4 from the NIV Bible

The oxen that trod out the grain should not be muzzled in order to allow them to eat while they worked (Deut. 25:4). Baby birds might be taken, but the mother bird must be left to care for the remaining eggs and to produce future young (Deut. 22:6-7).  The whole point in this instruction is that our dominion over the earth and the little creatures that creep upon it is to be a compassionate dominion.  We are not to rape the earth but to care for it—kindly, lovingly, tenderly.          

-Richard Foster, Freedom of Simplicity, 1981

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

-Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

Cruelty to animals is the degrading attitude of paganism.

-Cardinal Arthur Hinsley (1865-1943)

The sweet-eyed, unregarding beasts
Waking and sleeping wear the natural grace.
The innocent order of the stars and tides
An impulse in the blood-stream circulates.
Obedient to one living pulse,
With them, at heart, converse the saints.

-Kathleen Raine, from The Speech of Birds, The Collected Poems 1956

Once we were happy in our own country and we were seldom hungry, for then the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds lived together like relatives, and there was plenty for them and for us. But the Wasichus came, and they have made little islands for us and other little islands for the four-leggeds, and always these islands are becoming smaller, for around them surges the gnawing flood of the Wasichu; and it is dirty with lies and greed.

-Black Elk a.k.a. Ekhaka Sapa (1863-1950),
Black Elk Speaks ed. John Neihardt 1932

Healing the relationship between humans and animals is crucial to restoring the health of the world.

-Susan Chernak McElroy

My brother asked the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth.

-Feodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), 
The Brothers Karamazov, 1880 ch 41

Kindness to all God's creatures is an absolute rock-bottom necessity if peace and righteousness are to prevail.

-Sir Wilfred T. Grenfell (1865-1940)

Where the love of God is verily perfected and the true spirit of government watchfully attended to, a tenderness to all creatures made subject to us will be experienced, and a care felt in us that we do not lessen the sweetness of life in the animal creation which the great Creator intends for them.

-John Woolman (1720-1772), 
The Journal of John Woolman, 1774

O Lord, how manifold are your works!
In wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.  
Yonder is the sea, great and wide,
creeping things innumerable are there,
living things both small and great...
When you send forth your spirit, they are created;
and you renew the face of the ground.

-Psalm 104:24-25, 30 from the NRSV Bible

What: is the jay more precious than the lark because his feathers are more beautiful?

-William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

 

Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.

-Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)

If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.

-Francis of Assisi (1181-1226)

[There] is an unusual amount of cultural confusion on the subject of animals. For at the same time many of us seem eager to extent the circle of our moral consideration to other species, in our factory farms, we’re inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history. One by one science is dismantling our claims to uniqueness as a species, discovering that such things as culture, tool making, language, and even possibly self-consciousness are not, as we used to think, the exclusive properties of Homo sapiens. And yet most of the animals we eat lead lives organized very much in the spirit of Descartes, who famously claimed that animals were mere machines, incapable of thought or feeling. There’s a schizoid quality to our relationships with animals today in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of a pig—an animal equally as intelligent as a dog—that becomes the Christmas ham.

-Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 2006 p 306

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

-Mark Twain a.k.a. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910)
Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar in Following the Equator, 1894

I have never yet happened upon a trace of evidence that seemed to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself. Not that Nature manifests any such thing as selfish isolation. In the making of every animal the presence of every other animal has been recognized. Indeed, every atom in creation may be said to be acquainted with and married to every other, but with universal union there is a division sufficient in degree for the purposes of the most intense individuality; no matter, therefore, what may be the note which any creature forms in the song of existence, it is made first for itself, then more and more remotely for all the world and worlds.

-John Muir (1838-1914), Steep Trails, 1918

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men.

-Alice Walker

The wild animals honor me,
the jackals and the owls,
because I provide water in the desert
and streams in the wasteland,
to give drink to my people, my chosen,
the people I formed for myself
that they may proclaim my praise.

-the prophet Isaiah (c.760-690 B.C.)
in Isaiah 43:20-21 from the NIV Bible

People who blame the Bible for the modern destruction of nature have failed to see its delight in the variety and individuality of creatures and its insistence upon their holiness. But that delight—in, say, the final chapters of Job or the 104th psalm—is far more useful to the cause of conservation than the undifferentiating abstractions of science… Reverence gives standing to creatures, and to our perception of them, just as the law gives standing to a citizen.

-Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle, 2000

A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish..

-G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936),
quoted in Maycock’s The Man Who Was Orthodox, 1936

The Kenya Wildlife Service and conservation organizations have expressed urgent concern about elephant poaching and illegal ivory trade following the seizure in Shanghai, China of a 3.6 ton shipment of ivory from Kenya. The seizure occurred late in August and was revealed only Thursday by Chinese customs officials. It is the largest ivory smuggling bust in China to date. The shipment intercepted at Waigaoqiao Port included 64 packages of smuggled ivory, containing 303 whole tusks and 408 tusks that were cut into smaller pieces. The heaviest piece is more than 10 kilos (22 pounds) and the lightest about one kilo (2.2 pounds).

-Environmental News Service, 
“Tons of Illegal African Ivory Seized in China” 1 Oct 02

One day we will realize that elephants cannot be reduced to the value of their teeth. Elephants are and will always be synonymous with the greatness of Africa.

-Dr. Paula Kahumbu, Kenya Wildlife Service, 
 “Tons of Illegal African Ivory Seized in China” 
quoted in Environmental News Service, 1 Oct 02

The Judeo-Christian stewardship ethic makes humans directly accountable to God for preserving biodiversity...An important Judeo-Christian perspective is provided in Chapter 6 of Genesis, which records that God looked with great disfavor on the corruptness and violence of humanity and determined to "destroy all flesh" by means of a great flood. Even so, God instructed Noah (who was a just man) to build an ark and bring to it a pair of every kind of living organism on Earth so that they would not be destroyed by the flood. Thus, the diversity of life has the same value as righteousness in people (and merits preservation more than unjust people do!).

-Gordon H. Orians, zoologist, from
"Thought for the Morrow: Cumulative Threats to the Environment"
in Environment, 1995

There is a historic strain of dominion theology which says, taking its references from the Psalms, that man is made just a little lower than God, and that we are the crown of creation. That interpretation has come at the expense of the one that says when God, in the story of Noah, intervened to save human life against the flood, against the acts of nature, He did not stop with human beings. He made sure that every kind of animal was represented twice on that ark.

-Bill Moyers, “Faith, Hope, and Charity,” Interview by Dave Roberts, 
Grist, 5 Oct 06

The disappearance of living species is not just a blow to orchid growers, butterfly collectors, and beetle buffs. It is an irremediable loss of precious information, the biological equivalent of the burning of the library of Alexandria in 641. It is the destruction of a large part of the book of life before it can be read, the irreplaceable loss of vital clues to biological evolution and our own history. Resources of potentially great practical benefit may be lost. With each daily shrinking of the biosphere, a valuable source of food or a molecule that could have cured malaria, AIDS, or some other scourge may be vanishing forever.

-Christian de Duve, Vital Dust: Life As a Cosmic Imperative, 1996

I think we must ask ourselves if this is really what we want to do to God's creation, to drive it to extinction? Because extinction really is irreversible; species that go extinct are lost forever. This is not like Jurassic Park. We can't bring them back.

-Stuart Pimm, biologist, quoted in "The Sixth Extinction,"
National Geographic, Feb 1999

Before us the creatures fall—some diminished, some wiped completely from the face of the Creators canvas. Before us is the trashed gallery of earth's Maker.

-Calvin DeWitt

Losing a species to extinction
Is like tearing a page
Out of sacred scripture.

-Calvin DeWitt quoted in Ponderings from the Precipice by James Conlon

The world's frogs, toads and other amphibians are vanishing, and the decline began decades before scientists first sounded the alarm in the 1980s, according to the biggest statistical study of the topic. Researchers reported that overall numbers of amphibians dropped 15 percent a year from 1960 to 1966, and continued to decline about 2 percent a year through 1997. "This should put the last nail in the coffin for anyone who doesn't think there are some population declines for amphibians," said Andrew Blaustein, a professor of zoology at Oregon State University.

-Jeff Barnard, "Study Finds Amphibians Declining Worldwide,"
Associated Press, 12 Apr 2000

A global study revealed yesterday that almost a third of amphibians face extinction - and pollution is cited as the biggest cause. The three-year survey, involving 500 scientists from more than 60 countries, has found that a third of the 5,743 known species are threatened with being wiped out and at least 427 are so critically endangered that they could disappear tomorrow. …Dr Stuart said: "This level of decline is ... extraordinary and serious because amphibians represent a very important part of the overall diversity of life. Since most amphibians feel the effects of pollution before many other forms of life, their rapid decline tells us that one of earth's most critical life support systems is breaking down." …Populations of almost half of the known amphibian species are in decline. While 32 per cent of amphibians are threatened with extinction, only 12 per cent of birds and 23 per cent of mammals are in the same position. The latest study estimates that up to 122 species have gone extinct since 1980.

-Steve Connor, “The polluted planet: Alarm as global study finds one-third of amphibians face extinction,” The U.K.Independent, 15 Oct 04

Hundreds of amphibian species will become extinct unless a global action plan is put into practice very soon, conservationists warn. Campaigners are forming an Amphibian Survival Alliance, to raise $400m and carry through a rescue strategy. More than a third of all amphibian species are said to be in peril. In a policy statement issued in the journal Science, researchers blame a number of factors including habitat loss, climate change and disease. "We have a huge crisis but I'm confident we can produce some real results," said Simon Stuart, from Conservation International (CI). "The questions is: how many species will we lose? Are we going to lose hundreds before we can stabilise the situation or are we going to lose just tens," he told the BBC News website. "Time is absolutely crucial, and to beat time we need human recourses and expertise, and finance.

-BBC News, “Clarion Call to Save Amphibians,” 7 Jul 06

Hyperactive fish, stupid frogs, fearless mice and seagulls that fall over. It sounds like a weird animal circus, but this is no freak show. Animals around the world are increasingly behaving in bizarre ways, and the cause is environmental pollution.  The chemicals to blame are known as endocrine disruptors, and range from heavy metals such as lead to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and additives such as bisphenol A. For decades, biologists have known that these chemicals can alter the behaviour of wild animals. And in recent years it has become clear that pollutants can cause gender-bending effects by altering animals' physiology, particularly their sexual organs. But now two major reviews have revealed that the chemicals are having a much greater impact on animal behaviour than anyone suspected. Low concentrations of these pollutants are changing both the social and mating behaviours of a raft of species.

-Andy Coghlan, “Pollution triggers bizarre behaviour in animals,” 
NewScientist.com, 3 Sep 04

...it is truly time for Western cultures to pay the price for what they covet and value. And, if they covet and value biodiversity for whatever reason - ethical, moral or plain avarice - it is essential that Western cultures wake up to the devastating genetic losses occurring day by day in the rainforests and elsewhere. When the species and their genes are lost, with them go the solutions to our questions.

-Chris Howes, The Spice of Life: Biodiversity and the Extinction Crisis, 1997

If you come across your enemy’s ox or donkey wandering off, be sure to take it back to him. If you see the donkey of someone who hates you fallen down under its load, do not leave it there; be sure you help him with it.

-Exodus 23:4-5 from the NIV Bible

 

Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest, so that your ox and your donkey may have relief, and your homeborn slave and the resident alien may be refreshed.

-Exodus 23:12 from the NRSV Bible

Since an animal's natural life is a gift from God, it follows that God's right is violated when the natural life of his creatures is perverted. Those who, in contrast, opt for the welfarist approach to intensive farming are inevitably involved in speculating how far such and such may or may not suffer in what are plainly unnatural conditions. But unless animals are judged to have some right to their natural life, from what standpoint can we judge abnormalities, mutilations or adjustments? Confining a de-beaked hen in a battery cage is more than a moral crime; it is a living sign of our failure to recognize the blessing of God in creation.

-Rev. Dr. Andrew Linzey, Christianity and the Rights of Animals, 1988

The ranch was being turned into a machine for feeding livestock. We had leveled thousands of acres for alfalfa, and we kept leveling more; the swamps were drained, and the thronging flocks of hundreds of thousands of waterbirds were diminishing year by year… Up on the hill above the old buckaroo camp we built an industrial plant called the feed mill, a space-age collection of steel buildings which housed an interlinked system of rollers and grinders and blowers and chain drives and augers and hundred horsepower electric motors, a huge grain storage bunker, and endless lots for fattening cattle. Each year we shipped around five thousand fat animals to be butchered. The feed mill was designed to chop hay and roll grains and mix in additives from molasses to growth inducing chemicals like stilbestrol. It was a howling, stinking place where the work proceeded at the pace of the machinery… In spring we cleaned the manure from the lots with D-7 Cats and scrapers. It was our dream that had led us to these processes.

-William Kittredge, Hole in the Sky 1992

O my people, listen as I speak.
Here are my charges against you, O Israel:
I am God, your God!
I have no complaint about your sacrifices
or the burnt offerings you constantly bring to my altar.
But I want no more bulls from your barns;
I want no more goats from your pens.
For all the animals of the forest are mine,
and I own the cattle on a thousand hills.
Every bird of the mountains
and all the animals of the field belong to me.
If I were hungry, I would not mention it to you,
for all the world is mine and everything in it.
I don't need the bulls you sacrifice;
I don't need the blood of goats.
What I want instead is your true thanks to God;
I want you to fulfill your vows to the Most High.

-Psalm 50:7-14 from the NLT Bible

Gratitude is the grammar of a grace that fosters respectful care for God’s creatures… Grace begets gratitude, and gratitude care.

-Steven Bouma-Prediger, 
For the Beauty of the Earth: A Christian Vision for Creation Care, 2001  

 

Humanity cannot afford to acknowledge all of the blood that it spills and the destruction it inflicts on the world in its effort to perpetuate itself. Desacralization is a process that allows us to sever any relationship we might feel to other living things. By draining the aliveness out of things, we can pretend that our control and manipulation are of little consequence. Man the trapper becomes man the taxidermist, disemboweling nature of its spontaneity and movement, and stuffing it with a leaden inanimateness.

-Jeremy Rifkin, Algeny, 1983

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as well as that of his fellowman, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.

-Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), Out of My Life and Thought, 1998  

People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.

-Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991)

Wherefore, if meat causeth my brother to stumble, I will eat no flesh for evermore, that I cause not my brother to stumble.

-the Apostle Paul (c.A.D. 5-67), 1 Corinthians 8:13
from the ASV Bible

I cannot see the short, white curls
Upon the forehead of an Ox,
But what I see them dripping with
That poor thing’s blood, and hear the ax;
When I see calves and lambs, I see
Them led to death; I see no bird
Or rabbit cross the open field
But what a sudden shot is heard;
A shout that tells me men aim true,
For death or wound, doth chill me through.

-W.H. Davies (1871-1940), The Dumb World

The farmer would point out to the vegan that even she has a “serious clash of interests” with other animals.  The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer’s tractor wheel crushes woodchucks in their burrows and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky; after harvest whatever animals that would eat our crops we exterminate.  Killing animals is probably unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat.  If America were suddenly to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, it isn’t at all clear that the total number of animals killed each year would necessarily decline, since to feed everyone animal pasture and rangeland would have to give way to more intensively cultivated row crops.

-Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 2006

American meat production has never before been so centralized: thirteen large packing houses now slaughter most of the beef consumed in the United States. The meat packing system that arose to supply the nation’s fast food chains—an industry molded to serve their needs, to provide massive amounts of uniform ground beef so that all of McDonald’s hamburgers would taste the same—has proved to be an extremely efficient system for spreading disease. Although E. coli O157:H7 has received a good deal of public attention over the past two decades scientists have discovered more than a dozen other new foodborne pathogens, including Campylobacter jejuni, Cryptosporidium parvum, Cyclospora cayetanensis, Listeria monocytogenes, and Norwalk-like viruses. The CDC estimates that more than three-quarters of the food related illnesses and deaths in the United States are caused by infectious agents that have not been identified.

-Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, 2002

Far from their natural habitat, the cattle in feedlots become more prone to all sorts of illnesses. And what they are being fed often contributes to the spread of disease. The rise in grain prices has encouraged the feeding of less expensive materials to cattle, especially substances with a high protein content that accelerate growth. About 75 per cent of the cattle in the United States were routinely fed livestock wastes—the rendered remains of dead sheep and dead cattle—until August of 1997. They were also fed millions of dead cats and dead dogs every year, purchased from animal shelters. The FDA banned such practices after evidence from Great Britain suggested that they were responsible for a widespread outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as “mad cow disease.” Nevertheless, current FDA regulations allow dead pigs and dead horses to be rendered into cattle feed, along with dead poultry. The regulations not only allow cattle to be fed dead poultry, they allow poultry to be fed dead cattle. Americans who spent more than six months in the United Kingdom during the 1980s are now forbidden to donate blood, in order to prevent the spread of BSE’s human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. But cattle blood is still put into the feed given to American cattle. Steven P. Bjerklie, a former editor of the trade journal Meat & Poultry, is appalled by what goes into cattle feed these days. “Goddamn it, these cattle are ruminants,” Bjerklie says. “They’re designed to eat grass and, maybe, grain. I mean they have four stomachs for a reason—to eat products that have a high cellulose content. They are not designed to eat other animals.”                 

-Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, 2002

But be sure you do not eat the blood, because the blood is the life, and you must not eat the life with the meat.  You must not eat the blood; pour it out on the ground like water.  Do not eat it, so that it may go well with you and your children after you, because you are doing what is right in the eyes of the Lord.         

-Deuteronomy 12:23-25 NIV Bible

Ladies and gentlemen, I do think we sometimes need to be remind ourselves that our own species has become immensely more powerful than any that has ever existed on earth. We have transformed the face of the land and spread our pollution far and wide, but surely we have, somehow, to find the space and maintain the conditions in which a wide variety of other species can flourish and evolve. I happen to believe that technology should be the servant of mankind and not the master...Yet can we really go on behaving in such a cavalier way and still call ourselves civilized and responsible human beings?

-HRH Charles Prince of Wales, from a speech given December, 1995
quoted in Chris Howes' The Spice of Life, 1997

there is no fidelity, no tenderness,
no knowledge of God in the country,
only perjury and lies, slaughter, theft,
adultery and violence, murder after murder.
This is why the country is in mourning, and all who live in it pine away,
even the wild animals and the birds of heaven;
the fish of the sea themselves are perishing.

-the prophet Hosea (8th century B.C.)
in Hosea 4:1-3, the Jerusalem Bible

We talk of wild animals, but the wildest animal is man.

-G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) "The Tower," Tremendous Trifles, 1909

The ships grew bigger. They eventually reached 8,000 tons, towing nets with openings 3,500-feet in circumference. In an hour they can haul up as much as 200 tons of fish, twice as much as a typical 16th century ship would have caught in an entire season. Re-crewed and supplied by ocean-going tenders, the ships could pursue fish anywhere in the world for months on end without ever visiting a port or even sighting land. Plying international waters, they were outside the jurisdiction of the nations off which they fished. By the 1970s the Soviet Union had 400 factory trawlers on the high seas. Japan had 125, Spain, 75, West Germany, 50, France and Britain, 40, and dozens more were operated by East Bloc nations. They plied the Georges Banks of New England, the hake stocks of South Africa, Alaskan and Baring Sea Pollock, Antarctic krill and, most of all, the northern cod off Newfoundland and Labrador. They were strip-mining the sea.

-Colin Woodard, A Run on the Banks: How "Factory Fishing" Decimated Newfoundland Cod,
E-Magazine March-April 2001

Coral reefs are under assault. They are rapidly being degraded by human activities. They are over-fished, bombed and poisoned. They are smothered by sediment, and choked by algae growing on nutrient-rich sewage and fertilizer run-off. They are damaged by irresponsible tourism and are being severely stressed by the warming of the world's oceans. Each of these pressures is bad enough in itself, but together, the cocktail is proving lethal.

- Klaus Toepfer, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme
quoted in "Coral reefs 'much rarer than thought'" BBC News, 11 Sept 2001

Apprehend God in all things,
for God is in all things.
Every single creature is full of God
and is a book about God.
Every creature is a word of God.
If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature -
even a caterpillar -
I would never have to prepare a sermon.
So full of God is every creature.

-Meister Eckhart (c.1260-1327)

Behold…on the first night of Christ's life God honored the animal creation. You cannot get into that Bethlehem barn without going past the camels, the mules, the dogs and the oxen. The animals of that stable heard the first cry of the infant Lord. Some of the old painters represent the oxen and camels kneeling that night before the newborn babe. And well might they kneel. Have you ever thought that Christ came, among other things, to alleviate the sufferings of animal creation? Was it not appropriate that He should, during the first few days and nights of His life on earth, be surrounded by the dumb beasts whose moans and plaints have for ages been a prayer to God for the arresting of their tortures and the righting of their wrongs?

-Dr. DeWitt Talmage,
quoted by Winkie Pratney in Healing the Land, 1993

Nature is a good mother, and sees well to the clothing of her many bairns--birds with smoothly imbricated feathers, beetles with shining jackets, and bears with shaggy furs. In the tropical south, where the sun warms like a fire, they are allowed to go thinly clad; but in the snowy northland she takes care to clothe warmly. The squirrel has socks and mittens, and a tail broad enough for a blanket; the grouse is densely feathered down to the ends of his toes; and the wild sheep, besides his undergarment of fine wool, has a thick overcoat of hair that sheds off both the snow and the rain. Other provisions and adaptations in the dresses of animals, relating less to climate than to the more mechanical circumstances of life, are made with the same consummate skill that characterizes all the love work of Nature. Land, water, and air, jagged rocks, muddy ground, sand beds, forests, underbrush, grassy plains, etc., are considered in all their possible combinations while the clothing of her beautiful wildlings is preparing. No matter what the circumstances of their lives may be, she never allows them to go dirty or ragged. The mole, living always in the dark and in the dirt, is yet as clean as the otter or the wave-washed seal; and our wild sheep, wading in snow, roaming through bushes, and leaping among jagged storm-beaten cliffs, wears a dress so exquisitely adapted to its mountain life that it is always found as unruffled and stainless as a bird.

-John Muir (1838-1914), Steep Trails, 1918

Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.

-Jesus quoted in the gospel of Matthew 6:26
from the NIV Bible

I believe that pity is a law like justice, and that kindness is a duty like uprightness. That which is weak has a right to the kindness and pity of that which is strong.

In the relations of man with the animals, with the flowers, with all the objects of creation, there is a great ethic, scarcely perceived as yet, which will at length break through into the light, and which will be the corollary and the complement to humans ethics.

Are there not here unsounded depths for the thinker? Is one to think oneself mad because one has the sentiment of universal pity in one's heart?

-Victor Hugo (1802-1885) from En Voyage, Alpes et Pyrenees, 1867

If you come across a bird's nest beside the road, either in a tree or on the ground, and the mother is sitting on the young or on the eggs, do not take the mother with the young. You may take the young, but be sure to let the mother go, so that it may go well with you and you may have a long life.

-Deuteronomy 22:6-7 from the NIV Bible

I care not for a man's religion whose dog or cat are not the better for it.

-Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham.

-Anna Sewell (1820-1878), Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse, 1877

I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.

-Mark Twain a.k.a. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910)
from Letters from the Earth, c. 1907 *

A righteous man cares for the needs of his animal,
but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel.

-Proverbs 12:10 from the NIV Bible

Separated from any direct knowledge of the natural world by unnatural environments, drained of any confidence in common sense by a fruitless search for "scientific answers" to their deepest questions and buffeted as they have been by successive waves of technologically induced change, modern humans have come to view members of not yet domesticated species (from bacteria to mammals) as highly unpredictable, as likely to get out of hand unless kept in check by science. Yet in nature these species control each other and, as noted earlier, life-sustaining activities that are truly essential go forward on the earth without the help of - indeed, despite - the clumsy interference of the human species. Nature's flexibility and reliability is the only thing that has enabled humans to fool around so carelessly for so long without having yet pulled their ecosystem down in ruins around them.

-Joan Dye Gussow, Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce & Agriculture, 1991

And what is a heart of mercy?
The kindling of the heart for all creation,
for men, for birds, animals, demons, and all creatures.
In bringing them to mind,
in beholding them the eyes are filled with tears
out of a great and powerful compassion that embraces the heart.
And the heart softens,
and it cannot bear to hear or see any kind of harm,
or even the least sorrow, experienced by a creature.
And therefore even for those who cause one harm,
it offers prayer every hour,
that they may be preserved and purified.
It is awakened in the heart without measure insofar as one becomes like God.

-Isaac of Syria (c. 700 A.D.)

Man, even now, can do wonders to animals: my cat and dog live together in my house and seem to like it. It may have been one of man's functions to restore peace to the animal world, and if he had not joined the enemy he might have succeeded in doing so to an extent now hardly imaginable.