Animal Ethics

AUGUST 24, 2008

Neither Aquinas nor Kant nor Newman denied, however, that animals could suffer: Descartes and Malebranche thought differently. To suppose that animals could feel would be to suggest that there could be pain and suffering where there has been no sin. For animals did not eat of the Forbidden Tree.

Suffering 40

Suffering Animal Suffering 2004 Vivisection 40

Critter News

OCTOBER 26, 2008

The norm of moderate concern for animals - that animals matter albeit less than humans - permits the (ab)use of animals in vivisection, factory farming, bloodsports and other contexts where animals suffer.

Cruelty 100

Cruelty Animal Rights Movement Factory Farm Factory Farming 100

Animal Person

MARCH 9, 2010

Dunayer devotes a chapter each to the language used in hunting, zoos, "marine parks," vivisection and "animal agriculture." I haven't examined each institutionalized use of animals the way that Dunayer has, with the possible exception of vivisection, and I learned a lot about the details of the language of each industry.

Animal 100

Animal Vivisection Suffering Emotional 100

Animal Person

MARCH 29, 2010

Two-thirds believe that nonhumans have as much "right to live free of suffering" as humans, but vivisection, food-industry enslavement and slaughter, and other practices that cause severe, prolonged suffering are legal (49). Most believe that it's wrong to hunt animals for sport, but sport hunting is legal.

Speciesism 100

Speciesism Endangered Species Vivisection Killing 100

Animal Person

APRIL 26, 2009

Vamsee Juluri, Professor of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco, takes me back to graduate school when he writes of the importance of the stories we tell ourselves in " Use Free Speech to Celebrate Animal Life, Not to Enjoy Their Suffering." Isn't the mere existence of violence and suffering sufficient?

San Francisco 100

San Francisco Cruelty Vivisection Open Rescue 100

Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 3, 2009

From the perspective of the land ethic, the immoral aspect of the factory farm has to do far less with the suffering and killing of nonhuman animals than with the monstrous transformation of living things from an organic to a mechanical mode of being. That immoral something is the transmogrification of organic to mechanical processes. (

Factory Farm 40

Factory Farm Factory Farming Factory Farming 40

Animal Ethics

MAY 25, 2008

And by this they mean not only that it is wrong to enjoy torturing animals—which few moralists would ever have wished explicitly to deny, however little emphasis they might have placed on cruelty to animals in their moral teaching—but that it is wrong to cause them to suffer unnecessarily. Controversies no doubt remain.

Morals 40

Morals 2004 Animal Suffering Vivisection 40