Philip Wollen

We don’t "own" a "pet". We are "guardians" of "companion animals".

Water, as you know is the new oil. Nations will soon be going to war for it. Underground aquifers that took millions of years to fill are now running dry. It takes 50, 000 liters of precious drinking water to make one kilo of beef.

The most disgusting four letter word in the English language is 'cage'.

The axis of evil does not run through Iraq, Iran or North Korea, it runs through our dining tables. Weapons of mass destruction are our knives and forks.

Peace is not just the absence of war, it is the presence of justice. Justice must be blind to race, color, religion or species. If she’s not blind, she will be a weapon of terror and tonight there is unimaginable terror in those ghastly Guantanamo's we call factory farms or slaughterhouses.

Only 100 billion people have every lived. 7 billion people live today. And yet we torture and kill 2 billion sentient living beings every week! 10,000 entire species are wiped out every year because of the actions of one and we are now facing the sixth mass extinction in cosmological history. If any other organism did this a biologist would would call them a virus. It is a crime against humanity of unimaginable proportions.

Meat kills animals, kills us and is killing our economies.

In their capacity to feel pain and fear, a pig is a dog is a bear is a boy.

If everyone ate a western diet, we would need two planet earths to feed us. We've only got one and she is dying.

I can understand why some theologians believe animals have no souls. To the tortured animal, the only evidence of the existence of God is the absence of the torturer. In their cages, I would have little difficulty concluding that my jailer was living proof that God is deaf, blind, indifferent or dead. Standing in front of a torture chamber I realised the beast was outside the bars and I was two yards away from becoming an atheist.

Horse racing is not an industry. It is a sordid, squalid atrocity. It has no place in civilized society.

Cruelty to an animal is something we learn. Put a child in a room with a toy and a bunny. If she plays with the toy and is cruel to the bunny, I will buy you a new car.

As I travel around the world, I see poor countries who sell their grain to the west while their own children starve in their arms and the west feeds it to livestock so we can eat a steak! Am I the only one who sees this as a crime? Believe me, every morsel of meat we eat is slapping the tear-stained face of a hungry child. When I look into her eyes, do I remain silent? The earth can produce enough food for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.

Act. Don’t react. See a need, fix it first. Worry about the details later. If you wait until you are asked you have just missed a golden opportunity. They are fleeting and rare.