Grumpy Vegan

The world of animals in captivity offers us at once a prophetic glimpse and a caricature of the world in which modern man lives out his life. The animal suffers psychologically and his suffering is not unlike that of man himself, since its world is characterized by deterioration of its environment and by its own degradation. The causes are the same in both cases: the increase in the number of individuals occupying a limited amount of space and the necessity for existing in a society in conflict with nature. Just as men occasionally reject society and retreat into a misanthropic solitude which sometimes impels them to murder, so, too, animals in a zoo—baboons, for example—suffer from, and are deformed by, lack of sufficient space for them to lead a harmonious social existence. When captivity has done its work and an animal has become truly dangerous, it then becomes necessary to isolate it in a cage of its own.

Philippe Diolé, French biologist, writing in “The Errant Ark: Man’s Relationship with Animals” (1974).

In no part of the Seventeenth Century could the French be said to have had a foothold in Canada; they held only by the fur of the wild animals which they were exterminating.

Henry David Thoreau, 1817 – 1862, U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist.

Fur Protester: Do you know how many poor animals they had to kill to make that coat?

Margo: Do you know how many rich animals I had to fuck to get this coat?

Blake Edwards (b. 1922), director, screenwriter. Dialogue from Switch (1991).

The elephant, not only the largest but the most intelligent of animals, provides us with an excellent example. It is faithful and tenderly loving to the female of its choice, mating only every third year and then for no more than five days, and so secretly as never to be seen, until, on the sixth day, it appears and goes at once to wash its whole body in the river, unwilling to return to the herd until thus purified. Such good and modest habits are an example to husband and wife.

St. Francis De Sales, 1567 – 1622, French churchman, devotional writer.

I nearly always find, when I ask a vegetarian if he is a socialist, or a socialist if he is a vegetarian, that the answer is in the affirmative.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould, 1879 – 1944, U.S. author.

A vegetarian is not a person who lives on vegetables, any more than a Catholic is a person who lives on cats.

George Bernard Shaw, 1856 – 1950, Anglo-Irish playwright, critic.