“The jungle, existing exclusively in the present, is certainly subject to time, but remains forever ageless. Any concept of justice would be antithetical to all this. But is there justice in the desert, either? Or in the oceans? And in the depths? Life in the sea must be pure hell, an infinite hell of constant and ever-present danger, so unbearable that in the course of evolution some species – including Homo Sapiens – crawled, fled, onto some clods of firm land, the future continents.”

— Werner Herzog, April 12, 1981 diary entry, published in Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo (2009)

“r is evil, but K is not so great either.”

— Sarah Perry, Every Cradle Is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide (2014)

“All species reproduce in excess, way past the carrying capacity of their niche. In her lifetime a lioness might have 20 cubs; a pigeon, 150 chicks; a mouse, 1,000 kits; a trout, 20,000 fry, a tuna or cod, a million fry or more; an elm tree, several million seeds; and an oyster, perhaps a hundred million spat. If one assumes that the population of each of these species is, from generation to generation, roughly equal, then on the average only one offspring will survive to replace each parent. All the other thousands and millions will die, one way or another.”

— Fred Hapgood, Why Males Exist: An Inquiry into the Evolution of Sex (1979), pp. 44-45

“Thus, from the maggot up to the man, the universal law of the violent destruction of living things is unceasingly fulfilled. The entire Earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be immolated without end, without restraint, without respite, until the consummation of the world, until the extinction of evil, until the death of death.”

— Joseph De Maistre

“We now know that the whole of organic nature on our planet exists only by a relentless war of all against all. Thousands of animals and plants must daily perish in every part of the earth, in order that a few chosen individuals may continue to subsist and to enjoy life. But even the existence of these favoured few is a continual conflict with threatening dangers of every kind. Thousands of hopeful germs perish uselessly every minute. The raging war of interests in human society is only a feeble picture of the unceasing and terrible war of existence which reigns throughout the whole of the living world. The beautiful dream of God’s goodness and wisdom in nature, to which as children we listened so devoutly fifty years ago, no longer finds credit now – at least among educated people who think.”

— Ernst Haeckel, Monism as Connecting Religion and Science

“Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organised, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children!”

— David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

“In a way, Darwin discovered God – a God that failed to match the preconceptions of theology, and so passed unheralded. If Darwin had discovered that life was created by an intelligent agent – a bodiless mind that loves us, and will smite us with lightning if we dare say otherwise – people would have said ‘My gosh! That’s God!’ But instead Darwin discovered a strange alien God – not comfortably ‘ineffable’, but really genuinely different from us. Evolution is not a God, but if it were, it wouldn’t be Jehovah. It would be H. P. Lovecraft’s Azathoth, the blind idiot God burbling chaotically at the center of everything, surrounded by the thin monotonous piping of flutes. Which you might have predicted, if you had really looked at Nature.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, An Alien God

“The insidious lethality of a parasitic wasp, the cruelty of a cat playing with a mouse – these are, after all, just the tip of the iceberg. To ponder natural selection is to be staggered by the amount of suffering and death that can be the price for a single, slight advance in organic design. And it is to realize, moreover, that the purpose of this “advance” – longer, sharper canine teeth in male chimpanzees, say – is often to make other animals suffer or die more surely. Organic design thrives on pain, and pain thrives on organic design.”

— Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are The Way We Are

“I’m always surprised when I see the laws of evolution being used as an argument for the status-quo. You can’t say “we mustn’t change anything because otherwise evolution will stop”. Evolution has come to a certain point at which it has brought about a species intelligent enough, and capable enough (opposable thumb, air-breathing, social…) to change the very principle of evolution. Evolution 1.0 was blind, purposeless. Evolution 1.5, originating some 600 million years ago, created (blindly, purposelessly) foreseeing and purposeful beings – but these still had no grip on evolution as a whole. Now they have started to have such a grip. This is the beginning of evolution 2.0.”

— David Olivier, comment on the Reducing-Wild Animal Suffering Facebook group

“Some writers indeed are so much impressed with the amount of suffering in the world, that they doubt, if we look to all sentient beings, whether there is more of misery or of happiness; whether the world as a whole is a good or bad one. According to my judgment happiness decidedly prevails, though this would be very difficult to prove. If the truth of this conclusion be granted, it harmonizes well with the effects which we might expect from natural selection. If all the individuals of any species were habitually to suffer to an extreme degree, they would neglect to propagate their kind; but we have no reason to believe that this has ever, or at least often occurred. Some other considerations, moreover, lead to the belief that all sentient beings have been formed so as to enjoy, as a general rule, happiness.”

— Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882: with the Original Omissions Restored (1958), p. 88

“One might ask, “Why not just promote broader circles of compassion, without a focus on suffering?” The answer is that more compassion by itself could increase suffering. For example, most people who care about wild animals in a general sense conclude that wildlife habitats should be preserved, in part because these people aren’t focused enough on the suffering that wild animals endure. Likewise, generically caring about future digital sentience might encourage people to create as many happy digital minds as possible, even if this means also increasing the risk of digital suffering due to colonizing space. Placing special emphasis on reducing suffering is crucial for taking the right stance on many of these issues.”

— Brian Tomasik, Reasons to Promote Suffering-Focused Ethics (2015)

“[C]onsider the practical implications of the following two moral principles: 1) we will not allow the creation of a single instance of the worst forms of suffering [for] any amount of happiness, and 2) we will allow one day of such suffering for ten years of the most sublime happiness. What kind of future would we accept with these respective principles? Imagine a future in which we colonize space and maximize the number of sentient beings that the accessible universe can sustain over the entire course of the future, which is probably more than 10^{30}. Given this number of beings, and assuming these beings each live a hundred years, principle 2) above would appear to permit a space colonization that all in all creates more than 10^{28} years of [extreme suffering], provided that the other states of experience are sublimely happy. This is how extreme the difference can be between principles like 1) and 2); between whether we consider suffering irredeemable or not. And notice that even if we altered the exchange rate by orders of magnitude — say, by requiring 10^{15} times more sublime happiness per unit of extreme suffering than we did in principle 2) above — we would still allow an enormous amount of extreme suffering to be created; in the concrete case of requiring 10^{15} times more happiness, we would allow more than 10,000 billion years of [the worst forms of suffering].”

— Magnus Vinding, Effective Altruism (2018)

“The bias against small beings seems closely related to another bias we have, namely the bias to believe what is most convenient. For it would no doubt be much more convenient if small beings such as insects are not sentient. If they are, and if they can feel pain, the world suddenly becomes very complex and messy, and not least full of suffering beyond what we have imagined thus far. Therefore, it seems reasonable to suspect that our reasoning is somewhat motivated to jump to the conclusion that insects are not sentient.”

— Magnus Vinding, Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong, And The Implications of Rejecting It (2015)

“The conscious self is a neurocomputational weapon, invented and optimized in a cognitive arms race.”

— Thomas Metzinger (Effective Altruism Global X: Basel University 2015)

“A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

— Dr. Seuss

“Man and the animals are merely a passage and channel for food, a tomb for other animals, a haven for the dead, giving life by the death of others, a coffer full of corruption.”

— Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks (1508-1518)

“[C]onsider what we would think if we were the tiny ones. Would we be okay with giants squishing us because they couldn’t bother to watch where they were stepping? [S]tuart Russell and Peter Norvig actually raise this point in Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach: “We can’t just give a program a static utility function, because circumstances, and our desired responses to circumstances, change over time. For example, if technology had allowed us to design a super-powerful AI agent in 1800 and endow it with the prevailing morals of the time, it would be fighting today to reestablish slavery and abolish women’s right to vote. On the other hand, if we build an AI agent today and tell it how to evolve its utility function, how can we assure that it won’t read that “Humans think it is moral to kill annoying insects, in part because insect brains are so primitive. But human brains are primitive compared to my powers, so it must be moral for me to kill humans.”””

— Brian Tomasik, Is Brain Size Morally Relevant? (Essays on Reducing Suffering)

“[I]f all sentient beings have equal moral status and insects are sentient, it would seem that we would be obliged to take insects quite seriously indeed. This is highly counterintuitive. Moreover, if all who have moral status have it equally, then we should right now be very invested in the question of whether insects are sentient. If they are, then we are routinely harming trillions of beings with full, equal moral status – a very serious matter. The commonsense reaction that we need not be so concerned with the question of whether insects are sentient suggests that, if they are, their moral status is less than ours, implying that not all who have moral status have it equally.”

— David DeGrazia, Moral Status As a Matter of Degree?

“Insects are far more numerous than NPCs right now, and they’re also far more sophisticated. Many insects have at least 100,000 neurons and exhibit not only reactive and goal-directed behavior like NPCs but also reinforcement learning, selective attention, memory, sleep-like states, cognitive generalization, social behavior, and so on. There are an estimated 10^{19} insects on Earth, compared with around 10^{10} humans or around 10^{11} to 10^{12} birds. Even if you count just raw number of neurons, insects outweigh humans by a few orders of magnitude. While humans may matter a lot more for instrumental reasons related to the trajectory of the far future, in terms of pure morally relevant amount of sentience, insects may dominate on Earth at the moment.”

— Brian Tomasik, This guy thinks killing video game characters is immoral (Dylan Matthews, Vox, April 23, 2014)

“But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice…”

— Charles Darwin, in a letter to Asa Grey (May 22, 1860)

“No, ecologists are particularly liars and vile: they want to preserve species on this earth for mankind’s sake, for man enjoyment and for man to eat them. I don’t. I think differently: species that goes extinct, is a species that stops suffering.”

— Fernando Vallejo

“Why are people trying to conserve species? A “species” can’t feel pain or pleasure. It’s the individual members of a species that matter. Humans shouldn’t put their aesthetic preferences above the vital interests of sentient beings. To an animal, it doesn’t matter whether it belongs to a species that is going extinct or not, the animal just wants to live with as little suffering as possible. If we give more consideration to some animal just because it belongs to an endangered species, that seems blatantly speciesist.”

— Lukas Gloor

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with abolishing zoos altogether, even if that means some species will go extinct. I don’t think non-existence is a problem for animals, if it were different, we’d be ethically obliged to bring as many sentient beings into the world as possible, and that strikes me as rather odd. Those animals that exist now should have a life as nice as possible, that’s what matters most.”

— Lukas Gloor

“And so the endless circle of life comes to an end, meaningless and grim. Why did they live and why did they die? No reason.”

— Futurama (season 7, episode 13 “Naturama”)

“And so the extinction of the Pinta Island tortoise is ensured. 2 million years of evolution snuffed out. For in the end, nature is horrific and teaches us nothing.”

— Futurama (season 7, episode 13 “Naturama”)

“From the point of view of the moralist the animal world is on about the same level as a gladiator’s show. [A]nd since the great game is going on in every corner of the world, thousands of times a minute; since, were our ears sharp enough, we need not descend to the gates of hell to hear [sighs and groans of pain like those heard by Dante].”

— Thomas Henry Huxley, The Struggle for Existence in Human Society: Collected Essays IX (1888)

“Nature is Satan’s church.”

— Lars Von Trier, Antichrist

“What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!”

— Charles Darwin, Letter to J. D. Hooker (July 13, 1856)

One scene of blood, one mighty tomb display!

From Hunger’s arm the shafts of Death are hurl’d,

And one great Slaughter-house the warring world!”

— Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather), The Temple of Nature (1803)

“Existence, for all [sentient Darwinian] life, is a constant struggle to feed – a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh.”

— Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil

“Whichever way man may look upon the earth, he is oppressed with the suffering incident to life. It would almost seem as though the earth had been created with malignity and hatred. If we look at what we are pleased to call the lower animals, we behold a universal carnage. We speak of the seemingly peaceful woods, but we need only look beneath the surface to be horrified by the misery of that underworld. Hidden in the grass and watching for its prey is the crawling snake which swiftly darts upon the toad or mouse and gradually swallows it alive; the hapless animal is crushed by the jaws and covered with slime, to be slowly digested in furnishing a meal. The snake knows nothing about sin or pain inflicted upon another; he automatically grabs insects and mice and frogs to preserve his life. The spider carefully weaves his web to catch the unwary fly, winds him into the fatal net until paralyzed and helpless, then drinks his blood and leaves him an empty shell. The hawk swoops down and snatches a chicken and carries it to its nest to feed its young. The wolf pounces on the lamb and tears it to shreds. The cat watches at the hole of the mouse until the mouse cautiously comes out, then with seeming fiendish glee he plays with it until tired of the game, then crunches it to death in his jaws. The beasts of the jungle roam by day and night to find their prey; the lion is endowed with strength of limb and fang to destroy and devour almost any animal that it can surprise or overtake. There is no place in the woods or air or sea where all life is not a carnage of death in terror and agony. Each animal is a hunter, and in turn is hunted, by day and night. No landscape is so beautiful or day so balmy but the cry of suffering and sacrifice rends the air. When night settles down over the earth the slaughter is not abated. Some creatures see best at night, and the outcry of the dying and terrified is always on the wind. Almost all animals meet death by violence and through the most agonizing pain. With the whole animal creation there is nothing like a peaceful death. Nowhere in nature is there the slightest evidence of kindness, of consideration, or a feeling for the suffering and the weak, except in the narrow circle of brief family life.”

— Clarence Darrow

“Perhaps the Cambrian explosion, where first evolved both nervous systems capable of pain and predation-based animal ecosystems, is the most terrible event in the history of the known Universe.”

— Massimo Sandal

“[T]o anyone who has accepts a modern scientific view of our origins, the problem is insoluble, for evolutionary theory breaks the link between what is natural and what is good. Nature, understood in evolutionary terms, carries no moral value.”

— Peter Singer, A Reply tou Martha Nussbaum (2002)

“In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature’s every day performances. [T]he phrases which ascribe perfection to the course of nature can only be considered as the exaggerations of poetic or devotional feeling, not intended to stand the test of a sober examination. No one, either religious or irreligious, believes that the hurtful agencies of nature, considered as a whole, promote good purposes, in any other way than by inciting human rational creatures to rise up and struggle against them.”

— John Stuart Mill, “On Nature”

“Our job now is to prepare the ground for forthcoming generations to take action where we may be currently unable to act.”

— Oscar Horta, Disvalue in Nature and Intervention (2010)

“Intense suffering is a regular feature of life in the wild that demands, perhaps not quick-fix intervention, but at least long-term research into the welfare of wild animals and technologies that might one day allow humans to improve it.”

— Brian Tomasik, The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering

“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. [T]he universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

— Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Chapter: God’s utility function (1995)

“The blind forces of evolution do not optimize for happiness. The pain endured by a fish afflicted with parasites or a rat swallowed alive by a snake is no more tolerable than the “natural” suffering of humans due to malaria, cancer, or starvation. Both deserve our attention.”

— Brian Tomasik

“[W]hile many animals appear to endure such conditions rather calmly, this doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t suffering. Sick and injured members of a prey species are the easiest to catch, so predators deliberately target these individuals. As a consequence, those prey that appear sick or injured will be the ones killed most often. Thus, evolutionary pressure pushes prey species to avoid drawing attention to their suffering.”

— Brian Tomasik, The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering

“[Wild animals] have to struggle to survive on a daily basis, from finding food and water to another individual to mate with. They don’t have the right to comfort, stability, or good health. [B]y the standards our governments have set, the life of a wild animal is cruelty.”

— Christie Wilcox

“The ways in which creatures in nature die are typically violent: predation, starvation, disease, parasitism, cold. The dying animal in the wild does not understand the vast ocean of misery into which it and billions of other animals are born only to drown. If the wild animal understood the conditions into which it is born, what would it think? It might reasonably prefer to be raised on a farm, where the chances of survival for a year or more would be good, and to escape from the wild, where they are negligible. Either way, the animal will be eaten: few die of old age. The path from birth to slaughter, however, is often longer and less painful in the barnyard than in the woods. Comparisons, sad as they are, must be made to recognize where a great opportunity lies to prevent or mitigate suffering. The misery of animals in nature – which humans can do much to relieve – makes every other form of suffering pale in comparison. Mother Nature is so cruel to her children she makes Frank Perdue look like a saint.”

— Marc Sagoff, Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Bad Marriage, Quick Divorce (1984), p. 303

“Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.”

— Nick Bostrom, In Defense of Posthuman Dignity (2005)

“Nature is neither kind nor unkind. She is neither against suffering nor for it. Nature is not interested in suffering one way or the other unless it affects the survival of DNA. It is easy to imagine a gene that, say, tranquilizes gazelles when they are about to suffer a killing bite. Would such a gene be favored by natural selection?

Not unless the act of tranquilizing a gazelle improved that gene’s chances of being propagated into future generations. It is hard to see why this should be so, and we may therefore guess that gazelles suffer horrible pain and fear when they are pursued to the death – as many of them eventually are. The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.”

— Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Chapter: God’s utility function (1995)

“A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Sufferings of the World

“Many people have a romanticized view of wild animals; they think wild animals are like Spartan warriors who do not feel pain, or, at least, do not feel it to the extent that humans and domesticated animals do. But this is simply untrue. [T]hey endure it not because it’s easy for them but because they have no choice. [A]ll the reasons to believe domesticated animals are conscious also apply to many wild animals.”

— Animal Ethics, Wild Animal Suffering

“We’re Nature’s conscience. One day, we’ll finally make it listen and realise what a monster it’s been all along.”

— Catherine G. Evans

“Not long ago I was sleeping in a cabin in the woods and was awoken in the middle of the night by the sounds of a struggle between two animals. Cries of terror and extreme agony rent the night, intermingled with the sounds of jaws snapping bones and flesh being torn from limbs. One animal was being savagely attacked, killed and then devoured by another. [I]t seems to me that the horror I experienced on that dark night in the woods was a veridical insight. What I experienced was a brief and terrifying glimpse into the ultimately evil dimension of a godless world.”

— Quentin Smith, An Atheological Argument from Evil Natural Laws (1991)

“As long as one poor cockroach feels the pangs of unrequited love, this world is not a moral world.”

— William James

“It’s no mystery why organisms sometimes harm one another. Evolution has no conscience, and if one creature hurts another to benefit itself, such as by eating, parasitizing, intimidating, or cuckolding it, its descendants will come to predominate, complete with those nasty habits. All this is familiar from the vernacular sense of “Darwinian” as a synonym for “ruthless” and from Tennyson’s depiction of nature as red in tooth and claw.”

— Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), Chapter 14: The Many Roots of Our Suffering, p. 242

“Homer, here in St. Cloud’s I have been given the opportunity of playing God – or leaving practically everything up to chance. Men and women of conscience should seize those moments when it’s possible to play God. There won’t be many.”

— Dr. Larch, Cider House Rules

“We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is good. Nothing is more “natural” than being mauled and eaten by a bear.”

— Sam Harris

“The moralistic fallacy is that what is good is found in nature. It lies behind the bad science in nature-documentary voiceovers: lions are mercy-killers of the weak and sick, mice feel no pain when cats eat them, dung beetles recycle dung to benefit the ecosystem and so on.”

— Steven Pinker

“George Williams, the revered evolutionary biologist, describes the natural world as “grossly immoral.” Having no foresight or compassion, natural selection “can honestly be described as a process for maximizing short-sighted selfishness.” On top of all the miseries inflicted by predators and parasites, the members of a species show no pity to their own kind. Infanticide, siblicide, and rape can be observed in many kinds of animals; infidelity is common even in so-called pair-bonded species; cannibalism can be expected in all species that are not strict vegetarians; death from fighting is more common in most animal species than it is in the most violent American cities. Commenting on how biologists used to describe the killing of starving deer by mountain lions as an act of mercy, Williams wrote: “The simple facts are that both predation and starvation are painful prospects for deer, and that the lion’s lot is no more enviable. Perhaps biology would have been able to mature more rapidly in a culture not dominated by Judeo-Christian theology and the Romantic tradition. It might have been well served by the First Holy Truth from [Buddha’s] Sermon at Benares: “Birth is painful, old age is painful, sickness is painful, death is painful…”” As soon as we recognize that there is nothing morally commendable about the products of evolution, we can describe human psychology honestly, without the fear that identifying a “natural” trait is the same as condoning it. As Katharine Hepburn says to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.””

— Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (2002): Chapter 9: The Fear of Imperfectibility, p. 163.

“Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley, Evolution and Ethics: And Other Essays

“Humans are prone to status quo bias. So let’s do a thought-experiment. Imagine we stumble across an advanced civilisation that has abolished predation, disease, famine, and all the horrors of primitive Darwinian life. The descendants of archaic lifeforms flourish unmolested in their wildlife parks – free living but not “wild”. Should we urge scrapping their regime of compassionate stewardship of the living world – and a return to asphyxiation, disembowelling and being eaten alive? Or is a happy biosphere best conserved intact?”

— David Pearce, Quora reply to “Should humans wipe out all carnivorous animals so the succeeding generations of herbivores can live in peace?” (2015)

“Interestingly, it is not even clear that animal liberationists are motivated by ultimate concern about welfare. Consider animals in the wild, as Ng also mentions. Theirs may not be happy lives. Certainly Darwin was sufficiently persuaded by his conception of evolution that no good God could have created the scheme of things he, Darwin, discerned in nature. Perhaps animals much prefer living in domestic conditions. But this seems beside the point to hard-core animal liberationists.”

— Joel Marks, End-state welfarism (Animal Sentience, 2016)

“Many believers in animal rights and the relevance of animal welfare do not critically examine their basic assumptions. [T]ypically these individuals hold two conflicting views. The first view is that animal welfare counts, and that people should treat animals as decently as possible. The second view is a presumption of human non-interference with nature, as much as possible. [T]he two views are less compatible than is commonly supposed. If we care about the welfare and rights of individual animals, we may be led to interfere with nature whenever the costs of doing so are sufficiently low.”

— Tyler Cowen, Policing Nature (2003)

Magnus Vinding: “I think [nature conservation is] really just bizarre. It’s as though nature is being treated as some collector’s object. They seem especially concerned about rare species and about how “we can’t lose them”. So is it for your [own] sake or is it for their sake? It’s very bizarre to me…”

Brian Tomasik: “Yeah, it seems an extension of human’s general tendency to want to preserve rare things. There are also antique collectors and people who care about the first edition or the Mona Lisa, religious artifacts or was this object touched by a saint in the past. So there are a lot of ways in which humans have these special attachments to inanimate or at least non-conscious objects. So what you described in particular is probably an extension of that.”

— transcribed from Magnus Vinding and Brian Tomasik on insects and wild-animal suffering

“Suffering is suffering, and deprivation of happiness is deprivation of happiness, regardless of the being who is suffering or the source of the suffering. This is the main antispeciesist claim, and it can be applied not only when we consider the interests of humans versus those of nonhumans, but also when we consider the interests of different nonhuman animals.

Opposition to speciesism doesn’t only mean rejecting human disregard for other animals. Speciesism is the discrimination against those who don’t belong to a certain species. So we can be speciesist if we discriminate against some nonhuman animals to favor others, such as accepting worse treatment of pigs than dogs. Antispeciesism thus implies that we must reject the favoring of some nonhuman animals over others for unjustified reasons. This includes rejecting the favoring of domesticated animals over those living in the wild.”

— Animal Ethics, Wild Animal Suffering

“The ethic of species conservation is indeed a bizarre one. It is a view that holds the conservation of populations of certain kinds of beings to be more important than the well-being of the individuals in these populations. It essentially amounts to the reduction of non-human individuals to being mere means to the end of keeping some kind of status quo in nature. There are two obvious problems with this view, the first being that there is no such thing as a status quo in nature in the first place. The “natural state” of nature that we are asked to conserve was never a “conservational” one in the first place, and least of all at the level of species, since 99.9 percent of all species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct. Different species of life have arisen and disappeared constantly. This has been the natural state of things for the entire history of life, which implies that, ironically, our effort to conserve nature — which usually means nature as it is right now, or perhaps a few decades or centuries ago — is in some sense a most unnatural one.

The second and even bigger problem with the ethic of species conservation is that it is starkly unethical and speciesist, which should be obvious if we again shift our focus to humans. For in the case of humans, we would never be tempted to spend resources to try to conserve certain kinds of people — e.g. a certain race of humans — as doing so clearly would amount to a failure to see other humans as ends in themselves, and a failure to understand the core aim of ethics. For what matters is sentient individuals and their well-being, not the preservation of certain kinds of individuals. This is all plain common ethical sense when it comes to humans, of course, yet when it comes to non-human beings, we have turned a profoundly speciesist ethic into unquestioned, and almost universally praised, (im)moral dogma, an ethic that overlooks individuals, and which takes the worst kind of instrumental view of non-human animals.

Thus, the rejection of speciesism clearly requires that we abandon the ethic of species conservation and realize that it is no more defensible to strive to conserve species of non-human kind than it is to conserve human races — that conservation of kinds of individuals, whether human or non-human, simply is not the aim of any sane ethical stance. And it is indeed bizarre that we seem to show deep concern for the existence of some beings, for instance orangutans and panda bears, just because they belong to a threatened species, while we at the same time directly support the exploitation and suffering of other beings, such as chickens and fish, just because they belong to another species. Our speciesism could hardly be clearer. A speciesism that the ethic of species conservation not only fails to question, but which it actively reinforces and perpetuates.”

— Magnus Vinding, Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong and the Implications of Rejecting It (2015)

“When our interests or the interests of those we care for will be hurt, we do not recognize a moral obligation to “let nature take its course,” but when we do not want to be bothered with an obligation, “that’s just the way the world works” provides a handy excuse.”

— Stephen Sapontzis, Predation (1984), p. 29

“If we already lived in a cruelty-free world, the notion of re-introducing suffering, exploitation and creatures eating each other would seem not so much frightful as unimaginable – no more seriously conceivable than reverting to surgery without anaesthesia today.”

— David Pearce, Reprogramming Predators

“Humans already massively “interfere” with nature in countless ways ranging from uncontrolled habitat-destruction to captive breeding programs for big cats to “rewilding”.”

— David Pearce, The Radical Plan To Phase Out Earth’s Predatory Species (io9, Jul 30, 2014)

“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.”

— Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Chapter: God’s utility function (1995)

“A strong duty to relieve suffering that does not discriminate between species would require radical changes in the ways that we relate to other animals. It would, for example, require an end to the practice of factory farming, in which billions of animals are annually subjected to extreme suffering in order to supply humans with meat and other products at the lowest possible cost. It would also raise difficult questions about the practice of experimenting on animals to obtain medical benefits for humans. These cases, much discussed in the literature on animal ethics, involve suffering that is inflicted by human beings. But a species-blind duty to relieve suffering would also make it a prima facie requirement to save animals from suffering brought upon them by natural conditions and other animals. That seems right to me.”

— Jamie Mayerfeld, Suffering and Moral Responsibility (2002), p. 117

“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

— Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Chapter: God’s utility function (1995)

“The practical reality is that existing cost-benefit analyses of animal welfare policies are speciesist: they only explicitly consider the benefits and costs of the policy to people.”

— Jayson Lusk, Bailey Norwood, Animal Welfare Economics (2011), p. 468

“Getting rid of predation isn’t a matter of moralising. A python who kills a small human child isn’t morally blameworthy. Nor is a lion who hunts and kills a terrified zebra. In both cases, the victim suffers horribly. But the predator lacks the empathetic and mind-reading skills needed to understand the implications of what s/he is doing. Some humans still display a similar deficit. From the perspective of the victim, the moral status or (lack of) guilty intent of a human or nonhuman predator is irrelevant. Either way, to stand by and watch the snake asphyxiate a child would be almost as morally abhorrent as to kill the child yourself. So why turn this principle on its head with beings of comparable sentience to human infants and toddlers? With power comes complicity.”

— David Pearce, The Radical Plan To Phase Out Earth’s Predatory Species (io9, Jul 30, 2014)

“Many humans look at nature from an aesthetic perspective and think in terms of biodiversity and the health of ecosystems, but forget that the animals that inhabit these ecosystems are individuals and have their own needs. Disease, starvation, predation, ostracism, and sexual frustration are endemic in so-called healthy ecosystems. The great taboo in the animal rights movement is that most suffering is due to natural causes. Any proposal for remedying this situation is bound to sound utopian, but my dream is that one day the sun will rise on Earth and all sentient creatures will greet the new day with joy.”

— Nick Bostrom, Golden (2004)

“It is often assumed that wild animals live in a kind of natural paradise and that it is only the appearance and intervention of human agencies that bring about suffering. This essentially Rousseauian view is at odds with the wealth of information derived from field studies of animal populations. Scarcity of food and water, predation, disease and intraspecific aggression are some of the factors which have been identified as normal parts of a wild environment which cause suffering in wild animals on a regular basis.”

— UCLA Office for the Protection of Research Subjects, UCLA Animal Care and Use Training Manual.

“All animals are somebody – someone with a life of their own. Behind those eyes is a story, the story of their life in their world as they experience it.”

— Tom Regan

“It seems to me that many theories of the universe may be dismissed at once, not as too good, but as too cosy, to be true. One feels sure that they could have arisen only among people living a peculiarly sheltered life at a peculiarly favourable period of the world’s history. No theory need be seriously considered unless it recognises that the world has always been for most [humans] and all animals other than domestic pets a scene of desperate struggle in which great evils are suffered and inflicted.”

— C. D. Broad

“Predators dictate that their prey should live in fear and die in agony. Do you think predators are “superior” to prey. If not, they don’t have that right you’re talking about either, and it will be the lesser rights violation to intervene. [W]hichever decision we will make, it will have the impact of telling the animals how they should live. We’ll either positively affirm that prey animals should have to suffer from predation until the end of the world, even though we could change that, or we’ll choose the other option. Both will be a judgement with significant consequences on the lives of non-human animals.”

— Lukas Gloor

“Carnivorous predators keep populations of herbivores in check. Plasmodium-carrying species of the Anopheles mosquito keep human populations in check. In each case, a valuable ecological role is achieved at the price of immense suffering and the loss of hundreds of millions of lives.”

— David Pearce, The Radical Plan To Phase Out Earth’s Predatory Species (io9, Jul 30, 2014)

“[T]he term ‘nonhuman’ grates on me, since it lumps millions of species together by an absence, as if they were missing something. Poor things, they are nonhuman! When students embrace this jargon in their writing, I cannot resist sarcastic corrections in the margin saying that for completeness’s sake, they should add that the animals they are talking about are also nonpenguin, nonhyena, and a whole lot more.”

— Frans de Waal, “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“[I]t would be speciesist to accord greater weight to the interests of an individual just because it’s the last one of a certain species group. It doesn’t matter how many groups there are in the world. Groups are not conscious beings, they don’t have interests. Individuals do. [W]hat’s relevant is that all individuals that do exist now and that will exist in the future be able to live good lives. We cannot change what happened in the past. We can and should learn from it.”

— Adriano Mannino

“[I]f humans were obligate carnivores, we should get rid of their carnivorous genes too. It would be immoral not to do so because by staying carnivorous (or by having a carnivorous instead of a herbivorous child) one would cause the suffering and death of hundreds of non-human animals so that one single human animal can live. That cannot be right.”

— Adriano Mannino

“[W]e, [antispeciesist consequentialists], see you as violating rights if you don’t even want to try to do something about all the suffering that animals have to endure in nature. If animals have a right to live without the interference of human predators, then why don’t they have a right to live without the interference of non-human predators too? Non-human hunters often let their victims suffer more than human hunters. So why are you only concerned with human predators? That’s speciesism. If we try to end predation (and starvation and disease, which is even more important) in nature, that will result in a smaller total number of rights violations and will therefore be the lesser evil.”

— Adriano Mannino

“[A]ntispeciesist advocacy looks very promising because it encompasses all nonhuman animals and implies great obligations toward them, and also because people may be especially receptive to such advocacy. More than that, antispeciesism is also likely to remain relevant for a long time, which makes it seem uniquely robust when we consider things from a very long-term perspective.”

— Magnus Vinding (2016), Animal advocates should focus on antispeciesism, not veganism

“Antispeciesism addresses all the ways in which we discriminate against nonhuman animals, not just select sites of that discrimination, like circuses or food farms. Unlike more common approaches to animal advocacy, it demands that we take all forms of suffering endured by nonhuman animals into consideration.”

— Magnus Vinding (2016), Animal advocates should focus on antispeciesism, not veganism

“[E]ven veganism is not as broad as antispeciesism, since it says nothing about the vast majority of sentient beings on the planet: animals who live in nature. Wild animals also suffer, and should not be granted less consideration simply because their suffering is not our fault.”

— Magnus Vinding (2016), Animal advocates should focus on antispeciesism, not veganism

“Antispeciesism implies veganism – i.e. that we “exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose” – but unlike veganism it also requires us to give serious consideration to nonhuman animals who are harmed in nature. Antispeciesism implies that we should help wild animals in need, just as we should help humans suffering from starvation or disease that we didn’t cause. Unfortunately, nonhuman animals are often harmed in nature, and often do succumb to starvation and thirst. Fortunately, there is much we can do to work for a future with fewer harms to them.”

— Magnus Vinding (2016), Animal advocates should focus on antispeciesism, not veganism

“Compared to veganism, antispeciesism is also much harder to confuse with environmentalism, supporters of which often recommend overtly speciesist interventions such as the mass killing of beings in the name of “healthy ecosystems” and biodiversity.”

— Magnus Vinding (2016), Animal advocates should focus on antispeciesism, not veganism

“When thinking about how to build a better tomorrow, we should also consider the following tomorrows, and if we have a virtually vegan world a century from now due to the incentives mentioned above, the world will likely still be speciesist in many other respects. So in addition to the appeal antispeciesist advocacy has for the nonhuman animals whom humans are actively harming now, the explicitly antispeciesist approach is important for the sake of nonhuman animals in the future, including those whom we may not be hurting, but have the ability to help.”

— Magnus Vinding (2016), Animal advocates should focus on antispeciesism, not veganism

“A final point in favor of antispeciesist advocacy over vegan advocacy is that the message of the former is clearly ethico-political in nature, and therefore does not risk being confused with an amoral consumerist preference or fad, as veganism often is.”

— Magnus Vinding (2016), Animal advocates should focus on antispeciesism, not veganism

“A few centuries from now, if involuntary suffering still exists in the world, the explanation for its persistence won’t be that we’ve run out of computational resources to phase out its biological signature, but rather that rational agents – for reasons unknown – will have chosen to preserve it.”

— David Pearce, The Radical Plan To Phase Out Earth’s Predatory Species (io9, Jul 30, 2014)

“What right have humans to impose our values on members of another race or species? The charge is seductive but misplaced. There is no anthropomorphism here, no imposition of human values on alien minds. Human and nonhuman animals are alike in an ethically critical respect. The pleasure-pain axis is universal to sentient life. No sentient being wants to be harmed – to be asphyxiated, dismembered, or eaten alive. The wishes of a terrified toddler or a fleeing zebra to flourish unmolested are not open to doubt even in the absence of the verbal capacity to say so.”

— David Pearce, The Radical Plan To Phase Out Earth’s Predatory Species (io9, Jul 30, 2014)

“How can we help nonhuman animals as much as possible? A good answer to this question could spare billions from suffering and death, while a bad one could condemn as many to that fate. So it’s worth taking our time to find good answers.”

— Magnus Vinding (2016), Animal advocates should focus on antispeciesism, not veganism