Quotes About Animals

I love dogs. Like, A LOT. They're my favorite animal. Ever.

I try to write about small things. Paper, animals, a house... love is kind of big. I have written a love song, though. In this film, I sing it to a lamp.

Practice love on animals first; they react better and more sensitively.

I love both puppies and kitties. I could just scrunch up their little faces!

I love the horse from hoof to head. From head to hoof and tail to mane. I love the horse as I have said - From head to hoof and back again.

Hatred of humanity and love of animals make a very bad combination.

We always had dogs,so I understood all the joy and the love animals are capable of giving. It's crazy to me that some people have dogs in thier homes, but they treat them more like furniture.

I love all the shows that encourage people to love, appreciate and help animals. There are more programs about animals than ever, and that pleases me.

I love that quiet time when nobody's up and the animals are all happy to see me.

They were like animals, men. They found too much direct contact threatening

They were like animals, men. They found too much eye contact threatening.

Dogs are blameless, devoid of calculation, neither blessed nor cursed with human motives. They can't really be held responsible for what they do. But we can." --from The Dogs of Bedlam Farm

Because of them, I met all kinds of people. I was herding sheep again, greeting visitors in the barn, sharing images of them with people all over the world. This was a powerful triangle, and I was right in the middle of it. In the following weeks and months I would come to see clearly that these three animals were, in fact, connected to one another, and all three of them were connected to me.

All nature is full of hatred for humans. I don't think man has any friends among plants or animals. I suspect that even dogs and cats, those so-called best friends of man, are only pretending friendship to man in order to spy on his misdeeds, and they would betray him without blinking an eye the first chance they had. They know that Man is the worst of the beasts.

Animals that live in large peaceful societies seem to violate the laws of evolution (such as competition and survival of the fittest), but only until you learn a bit more about evolution.

Human beings all know that they are going to die, and so human cultures go to great lenghts to construct systems of meaning that dignify life and convince people that their lives have more meaning than those of the animals that die all around them. The extensive regulation of sex in many cultures, the attempt to link love to God and then to cut away the sex, is part of an elaborate defense against the gnawing fear of morality.

Animals that fly seem to violate the laws of physics, but only until you learn a bit more about physics.

conservative caring is somewhat different—it is aimed not at animals or at people in other countries but at those who've sacrificed for the group.12 It is not universalist; it is more local, and blended with loyalty.

After just thirty generations the foxes had become so tame that they could be kept as pets.

All social animals need to find ways of keeping the group together, managing disputes, appeasing frayed emotions, helping individuals within the group recover their poise after a bruising encounter. Primates do this by grooming, stroking one another. But this degree of intimacy is possible only in a relatively small group. Humans, by using language as a substitute for embrace, can manage more relationships and thus build larger groups.

Cruelty to animals is wrong, not because animals have rights but because we have duties. The duty not to be cruel is intended to promote virtue, and the primary context of virtue is the relationship between human beings. But virtues are indivisible.

Douglas Mock has assembled the animal behavioural evidence in More than Kin and Less than Kind.6 In the Galapagos Islands young fur seals attack their newborn siblings, seizing them by the throat and tossing them into the air, killing them unless the mother seal intervenes.

Yet Darwin knew that altruism was admired in every human society of which he was aware. Even animals take risks for the sake of the group. The one that emits a cry to warn of the presence of a predator helps the group escape while making its own detection more likely. In the language of today: how could selfish genes come together and produce selfless people?

Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?