Quotes from Ted Kerasote

How many abused souls—dogs and humans alike—have remained in an unloving place because staying was far less terrifying than leaving?

The Snow Leopard's Tale is a mystical pilgrimage into that wild country where animal passion and the human heart begin to walk the very same trail. Whether one has been in the business of adventuring, as Thomas McIntyre has, or has enjoyed such adventures from the safety of one's armchair, The Snow Leopard's Tale is a haunting, beautifully written, and thought-provoking tale, as all great parables are.

And so what do dogs want? They want what they want when they want it. Just like us.

Nobody needs to control or be controlled by cues and signals all the time; living creatures are not a bunch of machines.

hallmarks of the syndrome—a powerful individual's coercing a captive into submission, and even the demonstration of affection—have now been identified in cases of dependent children, battered wives, prostitutes, prisoners of war, and victims of hijackings.

as your dog becomes more self-actualized, he may hold up the mirror for you, and the face you see can be humbling.

Ralph was tall, affable, and handsome—Christopher Reeve as Superman—and Scout was frumpy, opinionated, and a little overweight, the canine version of Gertrude Stein.

Dogs: A New Understanding of Canine Origin,

Without any reinforcement—except that of seeing his peers hunt—he had learned every detail of flushing and retrieving and hadn't been spooked in the least by the report of the gun.

At a certain point you need to acknowledge that your partner knows more about what makes him or her happy than you do. Stepping back, you let that partner be.

never paralyzed by the need to judge and to compare. They don't dwell on the fact that today's walk isn't as nice as yesterday's, or this forest isn't as interesting as the one they were in last week.

They love being wherever they are. The reason, and it is a great lesson, is no doubt that they are perfectly content to be who they are, without torturing themselves with alternatives: They love being dogs.

Unlike me, he didn't then segue into an endless series of whys—why, if we remain so close, if we can converse so intimately, can you not be with me?

Then, having had a good cry about my being gone, he'd collect himself and get on with his life, proceeding south into the village, with head and tail erect.

whereas the first llama had previously become annoyed, stomping his feet, he now became infuriated. He turned and spit into the second llama's face.

humans began to erect fences to protect their property from the wild. Some of these fences were actual ones, like corrals, and some were symbolic, like the Jewish faith's sanctioning human dominion over all of Earth's creatures, and, later, the Christian faith's decreeing that humans had souls but animals didn't.

on a night after which Number 40 gave a particularly ferocious mauling to Wolf 42, the tide turned for this aggressive leader. The badly mauled wolf, along with several other subordinate wolves, ganged up on the matriarch and killed her. Wolf 42 then stepped into the role of alpha female, but with one crucial difference: Her personality was the antithesis of her predecessor's.

welcomed the low-ranking Wolf 106 and her pups into the pack's den. Under Wolf 42's leadership, Wolf 106 blossomed. She became the finest hunter in the Druid Pack and eventually the leader of her own pack, the Geode Creek Pack, where she, too, instituted a benevolent reign.

As Kevin Behan writes in his book Natural Dog Training, "To Master a dog, we must be decisive and control everything that the dog learns so the dog will have no opportunity but to learn what we want him to.

she didn't want to take care of a husband in his old age, and the new man was younger than I. Just as important, he played better for the folks back home.

Dogs have no favorite walks, only people do, writes Masson, adding that dogs love all walks.

She advises micro-managing every detail of a dog's life down to training it to eliminate on command. Why do we need to oversee dogs in this fashion? Because, she answers, they have "little, smoothish lemon brains," not at all like the "convoluted, melon brains" that allow humans to think.

at scars that never felt a wound.

three commonsense checks that a dog owner can use to differentiate between pain that is inflicted beneficially and that which turns into cruelty. Punishment, says Lindsay, that is unpredictable, uncontrollable, and inescapable is abuse.