Quotes from Marty Becker

Intimacy with a beloved pet or special animal makes millions of people feel as though they win the lottery every day.

The breadth and depth of what dogs do for our happiness and longevity is pretty remarkable.

These days, training is increasingly about getting a horse to work "with" us instead of "for" us, and that takes knowledge, not just of what a horse can do and be made to do, but how a horse thinks and can learn to trust us.

Like humans, horses have both shallow sleep and a deeper rest period of rest known as rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Horses need about fifteen minutes of REM sleep each day, and they can get that only while lying down.

On the surface, it seems absurd that an animal as big as a horse would be afraid of anything, let alone a fluttering piece of paper. Yet most horses are real scaredy-cats, easily frightened by objects they can't readily identify, especially if these things are moving.

Human eyes are set in the front of our heads. This gives us binocular, stereoscopic vision, which means that our eyes combine the images we see to obtain a three-dimensional effect. This results in excellent depth perception, also shared by other hunters, such as dogs, cats, hawks, and owls. Horses, however, have eyes set on the sides of their heads, providing excellent lateral vision, a trait they share with other prey species, such as sheep, deer, rabbits, ducks, and pigeons.