Quotes About Animals

Defended over the ages as necessary to human survival, now all of a sudden hunting is necessary to the animals' survival, at least those favored species deigned fit to exist. But think about what he is saying. What a jaded, selfish view of the world and our place within it - a kind of reverse Genesis in which every species shall now be summoned before almighty man to justify their existence or be banished from creation, man the Unmaker of all things.

Since when does love ever diminish as we spread it around? Among humans it usually works the other way. So too in our dealings with the animals we know best.

My brand of conservatism also brings with it a basic realism, accepting that there is a certain amount of suffering in the world beyond our power to avoid or spare, especially in the case of animals.

So too have many other animals served us well over the ages. It was the use of livestock that first freed us from the chase, allowed man to settle and civilize himself, slowly rendering the hunter a useless and ever more ridiculous figures so engaged in what the name itself, game, implies.

The more we understand about life, in general, the more we value the lives of all creatures. -Paul Johnson, British historian

A reading skimming the preceding pages might never know it, but most people like animals and often love them, and indeed we live in a time of great change in attitudes about the care and treatment of animals. Animal protection in this way is like many other great moral and social causes now adopted into custom and law, ideas once viewed as a threat to civilized values but now accepted as the extension of civilized values.

Having granted some protections to some animals, we are constantly confronted with the logic of our own laws, troubled by perfectly rational connections between the random or wanton acts of cruelty" the law forbids and the systematic, institutional cruelties it still permits.

That is the whole idea o mercy, after all, that it is entirely discretionary, entirely undeserved.... There is no such thing as a right to mercy, not for the animals and not even for us.

Our laws concerning animals are a system of inconsistencies, special privileges, and arbitrary dispensations best described as codified caprice.

Having granted some protections to some animals, we are constantly confronted with the logic of our own laws, troubled by perfectly rational connections etween the random or wanton acts of cruelty the law forbids and the systematic, institutional cruelties it still permits.

In a strange way mankind does seem to be growing more sentimental about animals, and also more ruthless. No age has ever been more solicitous to animals, more curious and caring. Yet no age has ever inflicted upon animals such massive punishments with such a complete disregard, as witness scenes to be found on any given day at any modern industrial farm.

Animals are so easily overlooked, their interests to easily brushed aside. Whenever we humans enter their world, from our farms to the local animal shelter to the African savanna, we enter as lords of the earth bearing strange powers of terror and mercy alike.

Those who dismiss love for our fellow creatures as mere sentimentality overlook a good and important part of our humanity.

For all we know it, their pain may sometimes seem more immediate, blunt, arbitrary, and inescapable than ours. Walk through an animal shelter or a slaughterhouse and you wonder if animal suffering might not at times be all the more terrifying and all-encompassing without benefit of the words and concepts that for us, after all, confer not only meaning but consolation. Whatever is going on inside their heads, it doesn't seem mere to them.

no view of men except as sacrificial animals and profiteers-on-sacrifice, as victims and parasites—that it permits no concept of a benevolent co-existence

Humans have far longer memories than do animals and, thus revenge -the social settling of accounts with those who offended them- assumes a wholly new level with them.

It is the blood that feeds the flesh," Ysidro said. "We can—and do, at need—live upon the blood of animals, or blood taken from the living without need of their death. But it is the death that feeds the powers of our minds. Without the kill, we find our abilities fading

There is no 'cat language.' Painful as it is for us to admit, they don't need one!

Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.

animals behaved with purpose, it seemed. Unlike people.

The Pueblo story is that everyone started out underground. People and animals, everything. And then the badger dug a hole and let everybody out. They climbed out the hole and from then on they lived on top of the ground. When they die they go back under. […] 'I always try to think of it that way,' he said, after a minute. "He had a big adventure up here, and then went home.

Oh, man, don't get me started on the subject of childhood brainwash. I hate that. Every fairy story, every Disney movie, every plot with animals in it, the bad guy is always the top carnivore. Wolf, grizzly, anaconda, Tyrannosaurus rex.

They had chickens at one time, including this rooster with the mind of a serial killer that gave me bad dreams.

On the day of the hunt I came to know in the slick center of my bones this one thing: all animals kill to survive, and we are animals.