Famous Vegans - Brigid Brophy

Brigid Brophy

Born Brigid Antonia Brophy, Lady Levey. She lived from June 12, 1929 to August 7, 1995. She was an English writer, a feminist, a pacifist, an atheist, openly bisexual and expressed controversial opinions on many issues, including marriage, religious education in school, the Vietnam War, sex and pornography. She was a vocal campaigner for human and animal rights. She was married to Michael Levey and they had one daughter. She died of multiple sclerosis at the age of 66. Click here to see some of the books she has written.

An article that Brigid Brophy wrote for the Sunday Times in 1965 has been credited with helping to spark the Animal Rights movement in England. She had been invited to write a full-page article on a subject of her own choice. She gave it the title "The Rights of Animals", by deliberate extrapolation from the title of Thomas Paine's book "The Rights of Man". Her article included the following quote:

"The relationship of homo sapiens to the other animals is one of unremitting exploitation. We employ their work; we eat and wear them. We exploit them to serve our superstitions: whereas we used to sacrifice them to our gods and tear out their entrails in order to foresee the future, we now sacrifice them to science, and experiment on their entrail in the hope — or on the mere offchance — that we might thereby see a little more clearly into the present."

In 1977, she talked about why she had named the article "The Rights of Animals":

"I invoked The Rights of Man because it is classically associated with two Revolutions, the French and the American, which were the occasions of quite convulsive adjustment to our vision to correct for the distortions introduced by the class barriers of feudalism and empire.

I invoked rights, because rights are a matter of respect and justice, which are constant and can be required of you by force of argument; they are not matters of love, which is capricious and quite involuntary."

Other quotes by Brigid Brophy:

"When I became a vegetarian I don’t think I had knowingly ever met a fellow vegetarian."

"I don't myself believe that, even when we fulfil our minimum obligations not to cause pain, we have the right to kill animals. I know I would not have the right to kill you, however painlessly, just because I liked your flavour, and I am not in a position to judge that your life is worth more to you than the animal's to it."

"I don't hold animals superior or even equal to humans. The whole case for behaving decently to animals rests on the fact that we are the superior species. We are the species uniquely capable of imagination, rationality, and moral choice and that is precisely why we are under an obligation to recognize and respect the rights of animals."

"As it happens, I am fond of most individuals of most animal species I meet, though since I lead a sedentary urban life it’s fairly easy for me to avoid meeting the ones I’m likely not to like. But I trust that my refusal to harm them wantonly is independent of whether I like them or not, just as I trust that your refusal to do the same to me, even if you were sure of getting away with it, is independent of whether you like me – and indeed, of whether you think you would like the flavour of me roasted."

"That I like the flavour of mutton no more entitles me to kill a sheep than a taste for roast leg of human would entitle me to kill you. To argue that we humans are capable of complex, multifarious thought and feeling, whereas the sheep’s experience is probably limited by lowly sheepish perceptions, is no more to the point than if I were to slaughter and eat you on the grounds that I am a sophisticated personality able to enjoy Mozart, formal logic and cannibalism, whereas your imaginative world seems confined to True Romances and tinned spaghetti."

"the high barrier we have put up between the human species and all the rest of the animal species, the barrier to which Richard Ryder presently gave the very useful name of ‘speciesism’, was essentially a class barrier, unjustified by reason and kept in place by the superstition and self-interest of those who were on the privileged side of it."

"we are engaged in the revolutionary enterprise of demolishing a class barrier; many of the normal mechanisms for changing things are denied us, but two are not, namely forming a popular front and raising the political consciousness of the citizens (which in this case means raising consciousness of the fact that animals are individuals and have rights); and in our struggle there are real lives to be saved."

"when I feed the pigeons, I shut my cat out of the room. This is a small infringement of his rights, imposed on him by me by main force. I think it is justified, in the interest of the pigeons’ rights, because if I didn’t he would surely have one of my plump, peanutfed pigeons for his lunch.

If I lunched on a pigeon, I should think myself immoral. If you do so, I must in honesty say I think you immoral. But I don’t think my cat immoral. I think him amoral. The whole dimension of morality doesn’t apply to him, or scarcely applies to him."

"When one talks about untouched jungle, perhaps the answer is simple: the jungle is the amoral world of other animals, and our only moral obligation to it is to keep out."

"The bull-fighter who torments a bull to death and then castrates it of an ear has neither proved nor increased his own virility; he has merely demonstrated that he is a butcher with balletic tendencies."

"The person who kills for fun is announcing that, could he get away with it, he'd kill you for fun. Your...life may be of no consequence to anyone else but is invaluable to you because it's the only one you've got. Exactly the same is true of each individual deer, hare, rabbit, fox, fish, pheasant and butterfly. Humans should enjoy their own lives, not taking others'. "

"Euthanasia is the sole instance in which we behave better to the other animals than to our own species."

"Whenever people say “We mustn’t be sentimental,” you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add “We must be realistic,” they mean they are going to make money out of it."

"the proanimal movement has its front line, as well as its think-tanks and secretariats and supply lines, and that at the front line animal lives are saved and human freedoms are, very bravely, risked."

Quotes are from Brigid Brophy's 1977 article The Darwinist's Dilemma, the 1971 book Animals, Men, and Morals: An Enquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-Humans and Brigid Brophy's article "The Rights of Animals" which appeared in the Sunday Times in 1965.