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What I had learned about human rights proved to be directly relevant to my thinking about animal rights. Whether any animals have rights depends on the true answer to one question: Are any animals subjects-of-a-life? This is the question that needs to be asked about animals because this is the question we need to ask about us.

— Tom Regan Empty Cages (2004)

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More quotes by Tom Regan

The task facing ARAs is daunting: we must empty the cages, not make them larger.

Empty Cages (2004)

I would never have become an animal rights advocate if I had not first been a human rights advocate, especially for those humans (the very young and the very old, for example) who lack the understanding or power to assert their rights for themselves.

Empty Cages (2004)

Then there are those proverbial “bird brains” of the barnyard, chickens, surely the most maligned and abused animal on the face of the earth, and—just as surely—among the brightest, most social birds we'll find anywhere. … Chickens not only are capable of learning, they are also capable of teaching one another. It turns out that chickens are not as dumb as popular mythology makes them out to be.

Empty Cages (2004)

Unless the massive amount of violence done to animals is acknowledged by those who do it, and until meaningful steps are taken to end it, as certain as night follows day, some ARAs [animal rights advocates], somewhere, somehow, will use violence against animal abusers themselves to defend the rights of animals.

The less gifted do not exist to serve the interests of the more gifted. The former are not mere things when compared to the latter, to be used as means to the latter's ends. From the moral point of view, each of us is equal because each of us is equally a somebody, not a something, the subject-of-a-life, not a life without a subject.

Empty Cages (2004)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Tom Regan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.