I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.

I wonder where they got those tokens,
Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?

Myself moving forward then and now and forever,
Gathering and showing more always and with velocity,
Infinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among them,
Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers,
Picking out here one that I love, and now go with him on brotherly terms.

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

I am not an animal activist. I am an animal. If I look around me carefully enough, I see that whatever is done to one of any species of animal, is done at the same time and by corollary to some member of my species. It cannot be more plain than that! I do not espouse exclusive, human rights in any form. I espouse the Rights of Sentience. If you do not, all species, at this juncture of history, are doomed.