Quotes About Animals

I love animals and feel very strongly that people should not be allowed to buy a pet if they are not able to look after it.

It would seem that marsupials are poor imitations of full-fledged mammals. Their inadequacy gives them a certain appeal.

The truth about an animal is far more exciting and altogether more beautiful than all the myths woven about it.

Dogs. The best work God had ever done.

She'd learned how to disappear in place long ago. She was like one of those animals whose defense mechanism is to blend into the landscape and become invisible. It was her way of dealing with rejection: Say nothing and disappear. Never fight back. If she remained quiet enough, people eventually forgot she was there and left her alone.

Why do human egos seem so threatened by the thought that other animals think and feel? Is it because acknowledging the mind of another makes it harder to abuse them?

do other animals have human emotions? Yes, they do. Do humans have animal emotions? Yes; they're largely the same. Fear, aggression, well-being, anxiety, and pleasure are the emotions of shared brain structures and shared chemistries, originated in shared ancestry.

The largest animal in the ocean and the largest living land animal were no more than a hundred yards apart, and I was convinced that they were communicating! In infrasound, in concert, sharing big brains and long lives, understanding the pain of high investment in a few precious offspring, aware of the importance and the pleasure of complex sociality, these rare and lovely great ladies were commiserating over the back fence of this rocky Cape shore, woman to woman, matriarch to matriarch

At other times the children discerned in the water of the vase a figure which Giuliano recognized as the 'mistress of the game', (a designation used alternately for Diana and Herodias) who 'clothed in black, with a chin to her stomach', appeared before Giuliano himself, saying she was ready to reveal to him 'the properties of herbs and the nature of animals

Our moral values, our emotions, our lives are no less real for being part of nature, for being shared with the animal world, or for being determined by the evolution which our species has undergone over millions of years. Rather, they are more valuable as a result of this: they are real

Equality isn't an idea; it is a practice. We practice it when we don't treat other people or other animals as objects.

We live in a culture that has institutionalized the oppression of animals on at least two levels: in formal structures such as slaughterhouses, meat markets, zoos, laboratories, and circuses, and through our language. That we refer to meat eating rather than to corpse eating is a central example of how our language transmits the dominant culture's approval of this activity.

It is as though the way to create a child's acceptance of animals' deaths is by convincing him or her that sometimes humans must be killed too. "Just" wars justify meat eating.

Through butchering, animals become absent referents. Animals and name and body are made absent as animals for meat to exist. Animals' lives precede and enable the existence of meat. If animals are alive they cannot be meat. Thus a dead body replaces the live animal. Without animals there would be no meat eating, yet they are abent from the act of eating meat because they have been transformed into food (51).

The way in which the story of meat is conceptualized is with constant reference to humans' will: we allow animals their existence and we begin to believe that animals cannot exist without us.

Many efforts on behalf of animals will qualitatively improve humans' living conditions as well, which is likely to be the case.

Why was it so easy for a dumb animal to find peace and happiness in this world, while human beings created wars so they could hack at one another, spending untold hours thinking up new ways to inflict harm?

I look at one of those beautiful creatures [horses] and I only have to catch a certain tilt of a head or the curve of an ear and I honestly could weep for love. And although I know they are not capable of returning my love it doesn't matter; if anything, it just intensifies it. I think that is love.

You finish sending a text and relax your arms and lower your legs and when animals open up like that, they want to fuck.

Here goes my heart again—tick tick tick—and I was so afraid of animals that I forgot about the worst of all predators, the most power-hungry predators on this planet: humans.

The Paleozoic was followed by the Permian extinction, when 95 percent of all life on Earth—plants and animals on both land and sea—died. Just like that. Just when they were beginning to get the hang of it. (To be fair, the period of extinction lasted millions of years, so "just like that" is an exaggeration, but scientists still don't know for sure why it happened.)

A surprising number of owners never touch the horses they own. Some, like Mrs. Benson, are afraid of them.

There are people who like cute, furry things and people who eat cute, furry things -Issy, pag. 53

Okay, little car, you are protesting roads. They are death traps for animals. They are environmentally unsound impervious surfaces that cause runoff. I understand this. But could we protest in the summer?