Quotes About Animal

Suicide, the dog continued, is the most heroic act, which no animal save for man dares to commit or could ever contemplate.

Thus the behavioral ecologist wants to measure four major costs for any animal or species: the costs of design, foraging, reproduction, and hazard avoidance.

The desire to minimize human uniqueness has prompted exaggerated claims about animal tool use, about their range and mode of communication and their sense of each other, about their putative beliefs and other modes of thought. However, the monuments of collective endeavour seen in the animal kingdom – for example the heaps created by termites – are the result not of conscious deliberation but of dovetailing automaticities.

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

I've always been interested in animal behavior, and I keep reading about it because it's so surprising all the time - so many things are happening around us that we neglect to look at. Part of the passion I have for biology is based on this wonderment.

The buffalo is a surprisingly stupid animal.

It was something he had never quite understood about himself. He had seen thousands of men die in nearly ten years of war and could look on it at times with a near-total detachment, but an animal suffering - be it a horse or needra injured in battle, or the stag now dying - moved him deeply.

His body was massive, easily thirty feet tall, and shaped like a man's, though the legs had a decidedly animal shape, like a goat's or horse's, with a stifle and hock, rather than with hip and knee.

Les arbres poussaient en silence et le règne animal limitait sa présence à des actes obscurs et muets.

Rowf's rump slid suddenly forward as smoothly as a turd from a healthy anus.

He was a heavy breather. You could hear him puffing and blowing into the mike up there like some large and sweaty animal. I don't like that, never have. My father is like that on the telephone. A lot of heavy breathing in your ear, so you can almost smell the scotch and Pall Malls on his breath. It always seems unsanitary and somehow homosexual.

Putting these three things together we arrive at our own 'central theorem' of the extended phenotype: An animal's behaviour tends to maximize the survival of the genes 'for' that behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it.

For example, if (as Dawkins argues) deceit is fundamental in animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray—by the subtle signs of self-knowledge—the deception being practiced.

A herp is simply the kind of animal studied by a herpetologist, and that is a pretty lame way to define an animal. The only other name that comes close is the biblical 'creeping thing

being a true clone, the aphids are no more 'social' than the cells of your body. There is a single animal feeding on the plant. It just happens to have its body divided up into physically separate aphids, some of which play a specialized defensive role just like white blood corpuscles in the human body.

It is precisely because our own human senses are not capable of doing what bats do that we find it hard to believe. Because we can only understand it at a level of artificial instrumentation, and mathematical calculations on paper, we find it hard to imagine a little animal doing it in its head.

His eyes rolled in their sockets like a panicked horse's.

In the heavy air of a morning that foretells a blazing afternoon, these absurdist dreams hover, like the musk of an animal that passed the house before dawn. Lethargy, she thinks.

de sus acreedores, su madre no tuvo más remedio que vender algunas tierras. ¡Quinientos francos en guantes! ¿El oso blanco con guantes blancos? Qué va, qué va; más bien el loro enguantado.

The man finally pulled himself from the water onto the pier again. Dazzled, she watched water run in clean rivulets down the muscles of his back and buttocks. He shook himself like a great cheerful animal, diamond droplets flying from him, exhaled a satisfied-sounding, Ahhhh! and then strode off the pier and vanished from her sight.

Often, the human animal dresses terror in rage, and expresses both in a way unlike either.

Nature is like a wild animal that you have trained to work for you. So long as you are vigilant and walk warily with thought and care, so long will it give you its aid; but look away for an instant, be heedless or forgetful, and it has you by the throat.

You can train any animal into any behavior on cue if it's a natural behavior to begin with. Racism, sexism, speciesism—all natural human behaviors. They can be triggered any time by any unscrupulous yahoo with a pulpit. A child could do it.

intended as a dig at my father, the enterprise being another of science's excesses, like cloning or whisking up a bunch of genes to make your own animal. Antagonism in my family comes