If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.

Cats are connoisseurs of comfort.

I am never at my best in the early morning, especially a cold morning in the Yorkshire spring with a piercing March wind sweeping down from the fells, finding its way inside my clothing, nipping at my nose and ears.

If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans. I hope to make people realize how totally helpless animals are, how dependent on us, trusting as a child must that we will be kind and take care of their needs ...[they] are an obligation put on us, a responsibility we have no right to neglect, nor to violate by cruelty.

For years I used to bore my wife over lunch with stories about funny incidents.

There was no last animal I treated. When young farm lads started to help me over the gate into a field or a pigpen, to make sure the old fellow wouldn't fall, I started to consider retiring.

I seem to have spent a good part of my life - probably too much – in just standing and staring.