Livestock Quotes

“Men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“Public grazing provides just one dollar out of every $2,500 of taxable income in the West, or 0.04 percent, and just one out of everything 1,400 jobs, or 0.07 percent. On both public and private lands in the eleven Western states, the livestock industry accounts for less than 0.5 percent of all income.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“The top 10 percent of grazing-permit holders on federal lands own 50 percent of all livestock on those lands; the bottom 50 percent own just 5 percent.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“The largest sources of CO2 from animal agriculture come not from the animals themselves (through respiration and waste), but from the inputs and land-use changes necessary to maintain and feed them, including: burning fossil fuels to produce fertilisers used in feed production; maintaining intensive animal production facilities; growing the associated animal feed; transporting the animal feed; and processing and transporting the animal products. Furthermore, clearing land to graze livestock and grow feed is the largest single cause of deforestation and among the major causes of land degradation and desertification.”
― Jason Hannan, Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial

“The managed grazing of pastured animals is as good for land as factory farming is bad for it.”
― Tamar Adler, An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

“She was giving him a look. It took Eustace a second to figure out what it was. Her off-kilter gaze traveled the length of his body, then lingered pointedly. The gesture was supposed to be seductive but was more like livestock trying to sell itself.”
― Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors

“With traumatized Navajos watching, government agents shot sheep and goats and left them to rot or cremated them after dousing them with gasoline. At one site alone, thirty-five goats were shot and left to rot. One hundred fifty thousand goats and fifty thousand sheep were killed in this manner. Oral history interviews tell of the pressure tactics on the Navajos, including arrests of those who resisted, and express bitterness over the destruction of their livestock.”
― Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

“Urban Americans lost the tactile experience of raising food. They neither heard the squeals, nor smelled he offal, nor saw the blood, nor tasted the rage when predators swallowed a cherished investment.”
― Jon T. Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America

“When Carol arrived at the sanctuary, she had pink spray paint on her back, marking her to be slaughtered. Her muscles were weak from being confined for most of her life to a sow stall, she was given fruit to eat but didn’t know what to do with it, having never seen fruit in her life. But that same day, after a little warming up, she got excited and started running and dancing around the paddock happily. She also had her very first mud bath. Now, a few months on, Carol has settled well into her new sanctuary life. She was introduced to the other pig residents, has established herself within the pecking order, and has seemingly even adopted a son, Iggle Piggle, a younger pig. The two are inseparable and are often found cuddling together. We like to think of Iggle Piggle as the son she never got to keep, having had between 80–120 piglets taken from her in her 4–5 year lifespan.”
― Jason Hannan, Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial

“They stepped into the gloom and peered into the rows of cages. Luxuriant, curly fur covered some rabbits, so thick it weighed the tips of the ears down. Other pens housed pink-eyed albinos, their jaws working furiously on bits of hay poking out of their mouths. Earth's biodiversity never ceased to amaze him.
One of the rabbits was easily the size of a dog. The label on its cage read FLEMISH GIANT. Giant was right. Quentin leaned close to one to snap a photo for his nieces, and the rabbit thumped its back feet on the metal cage. Next to the rabbit, Alisha jumped a mile, her sneakers skidding on the concrete as she danced away.
Not so eager for the bunnies, then. Fine by him.
The next barn housed horses. In one of the stalls, a huge horse regarded them through wise dark eyes, like a sentient Narnian beast. A black mane fell across its face, and feathery white hair fanned out around its hooves.
"A Budweiser horse!"
She laughed, pointing to the placard. "Clydesdale.”
― Chandra Blumberg, Digging Up Love

“Growing up on a far, the children had learned the realities of life and death. The old adage, “Where there’s livestock, there dead stock’ is not a flippant comment from a dispassionate farmer, but a countryman’s acceptance of the way things are, and always will be.”
― David Kennard, The Dogs of Windcutter Down: One Shepherd's Struggle for Survival

“The mongoose took a while to warm to the family, at least enough that he did not as often threaten their life and livestock.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Curious Case of the Talking Mongoose

“The most fertile districts of the habitable globe are now actually cultivated by men for animals, at a delay and waste of aliment absolutely incapable of calculation. It is only the wealthy that can, to any great degree, even now, indulge the unnatural craving for dead flesh, and they pay for the greater licence of privilege, by subjection to supernumerary diseases.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, A vindication of natural diet: Being one in a series of notes to Queen Mab