Shaun Monson On The Three Stages of Truth

“The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer is credited with saying there are Three Stages of Truth: first, ridicule; second, violent opposition; and third, acceptance. This was certainly true for the abolitionists, who were told that to abolish slavery would threaten the entire economy of the United States. Indeed they were ridiculed and violently opposed long before there was any acceptance. We look back now at human slavery as one of the darkest periods in American history. Women seeking the right to vote, known as the suffragettes, experienced a similar fate. They too were ridiculed, and violently opposed, until finally, after long grief and pain, they were accepted…You could say there is a parallel today with animal activists, who are often ridiculed and violently opposed.”

~ Shaun Monson

Animals, Whom We Have Made Our Slaves

“Those who benefit from the exploitation of others generally employ psychological tactics to justify this exploitation. It’s far easier to feel comfortable about dominating and oppressing others when we convince ourselves that they are somehow radically different and ‘lower’ than us. This was how men justified oppressing women, and how whites justified enslaving blacks. It is also how humans justify exploiting nonhumans. As Charles Darwin noted, ‘Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.’”

~J. Tyler

“One day the absurdity of the almost universal human belief in the slavery of other animals will be palpable. We shall then have discovered our souls and become worthier of sharing this planet with them.”

~-Martin Luther King Jr.

Fellow Prisoners of the Splendour and the Travail

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

~ Henry Beston