Quotes About Animals

Against the popular misconception, cowboys never did own ranches. They were not much more than the expert, wandering hippies of their day, cossacks of the range who knew animals much better than each other.

I found a stock tank and let the horse drink, then tethered it and lifted the dog over the edge and watched it swim in happy circles. I got pretty wet lifting the dog out of the tank but didn't care -- there is something about doing a favor for a dog that calms you down.

Three hundred yards away, a mule deer that had already browsed its fill and been to water, rested in the shelter of a dry wash. Long-eared jack rabbits went about their various affairs. Gophers ventured a few yards from their dens, then squeaked and scurried back. A heavy-bodied rattlesnake, just emerged from its winter's den, coiled near a clump of cholla cactus and waited for a pack rat to venture from its spiny nest.

No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts. (90)

Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full-blown storm where everything changes. The sky goes through four days in an hour, the trees wail, little animals skitter in the mud and everything gets dark and goes completely wild.

Guilleaume left La Praline with a small bag of florentines in his pocket; before he had turned the corner of avenue des Francs Bourgeois I saw him stoop to offer one to the dog. A pat, a bark, a wagging of the short stubby tail. As I said, some people never have to think about giving.

But I do like the church. I like the smell of polished wood and incense. I like the colored window glass and the statue of Saint Francis. Reynaud says Saint Francis is the patron saint of animals, who left his life to live in the woods. I'd like to do that. I'd build myself a house in a tree, and live on nuts and strawberries. Maman and I never go to church. Once, that might have caused trouble. But Reynaud says we don't have to go. Reynaud says God sees us, and cares for us, wherever we are.

If you ever get bored, just go around reminding children that the cute animals from Ice Age are all extinct now.

THERE IS ONE MORE POINT to be made about animal minds and evolution. Evolution is not a progressive force. Although it was once thought that there was a scale of nature or a Great Chain of Being, with all the forms of life ascending in some orderly, preordained fashion—from jellyfish to fish to birds to dogs and cats to us—this is not the case. We are not the culmination of all these "lesser" beings; they are not lesser and we are not the pinnacle of evolution.

Immanuel Birmelin, an ethologist at the Society of Animal Behavior Research in Germany, explained how patient he'd had to be in order to run a test to see if cats can count: "One of the cats would do the test once in the morning—only!" he recalled. "Another would do it once in the afternoon—only!" It had taken him four years to show that cats can count to four.

animals with more mental flexibility typically possess more complex sensory and nervous systems, suggesting that they are the most likely to have the neural hardware that underlies suffering.

Clearly animals know more than we think, and think a great deal more than we know." Irene Pepperberg

Reasoning required language, Descartes argued, and animal calls were only automatic sounds made in response to external stimuli. One of his followers, the philosopher Nicolas Malebranche, summarized the Descartian view: "[Animals] eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.

We were wrong about why these animals behave as they do, in part, I think, because most of us do not grant animals even the simplest form of thought, or recognize that they do things intentionally.

Clearly, animals know more than we think and think a great deal more than we know.

The human body, again, is the greatest of its kind in the universe, and a human being the greatest being. Man is higher than all the animals and all the angels, so say the Scriptures. None is greater than man, for even the Devas or gods will have to come down again and attain salvation through a human body. For, man alone attains to perfection, and not even the Devas.

Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.

Dog' is 'God' spelled backward; you know that. That's why you're here, to help the nuns do God's work.

Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) and Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (Mariner Books, 2006).

Look, Mom," Maggie Rose said softly. "Lily's doing her job, and Casey's helping!" "You're right," Mom said, just as softly. "I've never seen a wild animal calm down so quickly. Sometimes when animals are frightened, seeing something completely unexpected takes their mind off what's scaring them. Like a bird on a dog's head!

No chickens." "Zebras?" Maggie Rose asked. Mom laughed. "Crocodiles? Anteaters? Giraffes?" Bryan guessed. All the humans in the car were laughing, so I wagged. People don't have tails to let others know they're happy, but laughter is the next best thing.

The little chipmunk was safe! Not that it was paying any attention. It was so busy digging for nuts, it had never once bothered to look up at the sky. That's just one of the many differences between squirrels and dogs: a dog always knows what is going on.

I'd been outsmarted by a man who named his goose Doris and thought it was a duck.

Another cat? I followed Maya into the bedroom. There a third cat, a heavy brown-and-black male, sauntered out from under the bed and sniffed at me. I could smell his fish breath. "And that's Emmet," Maya told me. Stella, Tinkerbell, and Emmet. Why on earth would one woman want three cats?