Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Knights

Knights is trying to move the wildlife conversation out of the spreadsheet and back into the moral imagination. The opening move, "change our attitudes", signals that he thinks the real battleground is cultural, not just legal: enforcement follows values, and values follow the stories we tell ourselves about what animals are for. By naming wildlife as "commodities", he targets the quiet logic that underwrites trafficking, trophy markets, exotic pets, even certain forms of tourism: if it has a price, it can be rationalized, optimized, and eventually extracted.

The line works because it pivots from economics to ethics in a single beat. "Bought and sold" is blunt, almost transactional on purpose; it evokes markets, auctions, supply chains. Then he counters with "living beings" and "deserve", vocabulary that belongs to rights discourse and care ethics rather than conservation-as-management. The subtext is a critique of a world that reduces complexity into units of trade - not only animals, but habitats, and by extension the communities entangled with them.

As an activist (and, contextually, a figure associated with campaigns against wildlife trade), Knights is also making a strategic rhetorical bet: that respect is a stronger, more durable motivator than fear-based messaging about extinction statistics. "Respect and protection" pairs dignity with policy, implying that laws without reverence become loopholes, and reverence without laws becomes sentiment. It's a call to shift from seeing wildlife as inventory to seeing it as kin - not a poetic flourish, but a demand that reshapes what society will tolerate.