Quotes About Animals

Humans and other animals experience love and fear, and form deep emotional bonds with cherished companions. We mourn when a close friend dies, and so do other animals, as Barbara King's poignant book illustrates in compelling detail. How Animals Grieve helps us to connect and to better understand the complex social lives of other animals and of ourselves.

Plants don't think. Animals are guided by the power of instinct over which they themselves have no control. Animals have a certain kind of brain that makes it impossible to learn anything except very simple things. No generation of animals ever learns anything from any previous generation. We act like animals when we fail to use this magnificent piece of equipment.

We're all animals, high school is animals, but some of us are more animal than others. Like in 'Animal Farm,' which I read, all animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others? Here in the real world, all equals are created animal, but some are more animal than others.

Peeping through my keyhold I see within the range of only about 30 percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brian: 'This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.

We are all born as animals and live the life that animals live: we sleep, eat, reproduce, and fight. There is, however, another order of living, which the animals do not know, that of awe before the mystery of being ... that can be the root and branch of the spiritual sense of one’s days. That is the birth - the Virgin Birth - in the heart of a properly human, spiritual life.

I was aware of what animals go through because I had driven animals to slaughter and I'd killed animals. And I was aware that there were certain ethical issues, but they weren't preying on my mind very heavily.

Animals can seem more pure. Without complication, I mean, animals are selfless. What animals do for us, they do out of instinct.

But I've worked where they've had animals before, and animal wranglers, the people who raise animals and train animals for films and television, they're all very, very professional.

It is very funny about money. The thing that differentiates man from animals is money. All animals have the same emotions and the same ways as men. Anybody who has lots of animals around knows that. But the thing no animal can do is count, and the thing no animal can know is money.

We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.

After I recovered from 'Lioness', I wanted to write something about animals because I really like mythical creatures, especially dragons. At 12, I was one of those semi-recluses who did better with animals than people. Out of that, came the character, Daine, who could communicate with animals.

People tend to care about dogs because they generally have more experience with dogs as companions; but other animals are as capable of suffering as dogs are. Few people feel sympathy for rats. Yet rats are intelligent animals, and there can be no doubt that rats are capable of suffering and do suffer from countless painful experiments performed on them. If the army were to stop experiments on dogs and switch to rats instead, we should not be any less concerned.

Love of animals is a universal impulse, a common ground on which all of us may meet. By loving and understanding animals, perhaps we humans shall come to understand each other.

Once people spend time with farm animals in a loving way ... a pig or cow or a little chicken or a turkey, they might find they relate with them the same way they relate with dogs and cats. People don't really think of them that way because they're on the plate. Why should they be food when other animals are pets? I would never eat my doggies.

Some people feel that humans have a right to eat other animals but not to trash the earth. They may choose veganism because a vegan's ecological footprint is light, but once they are not invested in eating animals, they are more likely to be willing to learn the details of what happens to them. That learning will encourage compassionate people to stick with a plant-based diet.

I think the primary gift of the animal is offered to writer and non-writer alike; they teach us about love, or attunement, which is love in action. A lot of people have closer relationships with animals than they do with other humans, because real intimacy requires both parties to consistently lean in, and animals are so good at this. They remain consistently, amazingly attuned to us, even when we fail them, and so we stay present, because we sense we're safe.

People who care about animals tend to care about people. They don't care about animals to the exclusion of people. Caring is not a finite resource and, even more than that, it's like a muscle: the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.

I just love animals, and I'm an advocate for animals rights, and my family has rescued dogs from all over the world. I don't believe in animal testing. If you see me in fur, it's always fake. Sometimes you see me wearing skulls, but those are all from roadkill

I don’t like animals. It’s a strange thing, I don’t like men and I don’t like animals. As for God, he is beginning to disgust me.

For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.

Whales are cultural animals, and we're cultural animals, so although we shouldn't expect whales to do what we do, it doesn't seem unreasonable to hypothesize that we might share some of these things.

I studied a lot of animal behavior and one of the things I find really interesting is the whole idea that animals are sensory based thinkers and I wrote about this in my book, Animals in Translation. That an animal's memory is not in words, they've got to be in pictures - it's very detailed so let's say the animal gets afraid of something - they'll get afraid of something that they're looking at or hearing, the moment the bad thing happens.

The thing about animals that speaks to me so much is that my passion for the animals and against animal abuse is based on the knowledge that these creatures which think and feel can't speak for themselves. I feel it is my responsibility to speak for those who can't speak for themselves.

We're against animal fighting and killing animals for fur.... We want Americans to eat fewer animals

I was very concerned about helping animals improve their situations. But that was out of love. It wasn't political or out of a belief that animals had rights.

People underestimate the power we have to make real change for animals; it's with our vote. Representatives may not care about animals, but they care about our vote and that is our leverage.

Large factory trawlers indiscriminately scrape and haul up everything from the ocean floor, along with everyone unfortunate enough to get caught in the nets. Roughly one-third of what is dragged in is not profitable fish, but other sea animals, including turtles, whales, dolphins, seals, and seabirds. These beings are referred to by the fishing industry as "by-catch." Severely traumatized and wounded, these animals are subsequently thrown back into the ocean, dead or dying.

I see myself as the God who will protect all of the animals that have no other way of voicing themselves. I am God, I see that, and I accept who I have become with open arms. All along I had no idea that those who will come to protect the animals and restore the balance won't be a God on a cloud, but us, this being, the being that I am!

The humanity and the humility, which are very different than the biological species homo sapiens. Humanity versus homo sapiens - very different things. We are biological creatures, we are animals, no doubt, but when you talk about "humando," you're talking about that particular kind of animals who are aware of their impending extinction, who have the capacity to be sensitive to catastrophe and disaster and calamity and profound crisis.

The problem is that humans have victimized animals to such a degree that they are not even considered victims. They are not even considered at all. They are nothing. They don't count; they don't matter; they're commodities like TV sets and cell phones. We have actually turned animals into inanimate objects - sandwiches and shoes.

It is important that our relationship with farm animals is reciprocal. We owe animals a decent life and a painless death. I have observed that the people who are completely out of touch with nature are the most afraid of death.

Ecology more important than saving animals from slavery??? Humans suffer the raping of the earth but animals suffer DOUBLY: the raping of the earth PLUS their own raping by humans. They are innocent/they are not the ones who raped the earth/they enrich it for us all from the tiniest microscopic beings to the largest ones.

You don't see sick animals in the wild. You don't see lame animals in the wild, and its all because of the predator: the lion, the tiger, the leopard, all the cats.

We’re built to deal with death, disease, failure, struggle, heartbreak, problems. It’s what separates us from the animals and why we envy and love animals so much. We’re aware of it all and have to process it. The way we each handle being human is where all the good stories, jokes, art, wisdom, revelations, and bullshit come from.

The newspapers do little better. Their coverage of nonhuman animals is dominated by "human interest" events like the birth of a baby gorilla at the zoo, or by threats to endangered species; but developments in farming techniques that deprive millions of animals of freedom of movement go unreported.

Casein [the main protein found in dairy], in fact, is the most 'relevant' chemical carcinogen ever identified; its cancer-producin g effects occur in animals at consumption levels close to normal-striking ly unlike cancer-causing environmental chemicals that are fed to lab animals at a few hundred or even a few thousand times their normal levels of consumption.

It is not just that animals make the world more scenic or picturesque. The lives of animals are woven into our very being - closer than our own breathing - and our soul will suffer when they are gone.

I love animals, but I don't really like riding animals. Like, I don't love being on a horse - it's just not my thing.

My ethics are basically around animals. I cannot do animals in distress. I was able to shut myself off with humans, and in a strange way, if you go through violence, you come out stronger at the other end than what you went in.

Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object – we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering.

Grace is in a great measure a natural gift; elegance implies cultivation; or something of more artificial character. A rustic, uneducated girl may be graceful, but an elegant woman must be accomplished and well trained. It is the same with things as with persons; we talk of a graceful tree, but of an elegant house or other building. Animals may be graceful, but they cannot be elegant. The movements of a kitten or a young fawn are full of grace; but to call them "elegant" animals would be absurd.

I lay there knowing something eerie ties us to the world of animals. Sometimes the animals pull you backward into it. You share hunger and fear with them like salt in blood.

For centuries poets, some poets, have tried to give a voice to the animals, and readers, some readers, have felt empathy and sorrow. If animals did have voices, and they could speak with the tongues of angels-at the very least with the tongues of angels-they would be unable to save themselves from us. What good would language do? Their mysterious otherness has not saved them, nor have their beautiful songs and coats and skins and shells and eyes.

The 31th of May, I perceived in the same water more of those Animals, as also some that were somewhat bigger. And I imagine, that [ten hundred thousand] of these little Creatures do not equal an ordinary grain of Sand in bigness: And comparing them with a Cheese-mite (which may be seen to move with the naked eye) I make the proportion of one of these small Water-creatures to a Cheese-mite, to be like that of a Bee to a Horse: For, the circumference of one of these little Animals in water, is not so big as the thickness of a hair in a Cheese-mite.

Animals have their tragic and their comic side, and resemble us in many ways. They, too, have their distinctions and individualities. Many people believe that there is a huge gap separating them from the animals, but it is only really a step in the Wheel of Life, for we are all children of the One. To understand a fellow creature, we must regard him as a brother.

Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways.

Stand still, close your eyes and listen; in the silence you can hear the cries of pain and low moans of anguish of animals waiting to die... do everything you can even if today it is just one small thing. There are no excuses for inaction, despair, egotism, or petulance that matter to the animals.

We consider the animals to be lower, and to me, that makes no sense at all. If you look at a tree or a mushroom or a squirrel, it's perfectly in tune with itself. It has no problem being exactly what it is, and it does what it's meant to do without any complaints or problems. Because we create all these problems in being, we think we're somehow higher than the animals. But it's we humans who have a difficult time even caring for our children, or anything.