Quotes About Animals

Animals are like autistic savants. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that animals might actually be autistic savants. Animals have special talents normal people don't, the same way autistic people have special talents normal people don't; and at least some animals have special forms of genius normal people don't, the same way some autistic savants have special forms of genius. I think most of the time animal genius probably happens for the same reason autistic genius does: a difference in the brain autistic people share with animals.

When humans act like animals, they become the most dangerous of animals to themselves and other humans, and this is because of another critical difference between humans and animals: Whereas animals are usually restrained by the limits of physical appetites, humans have mental appetites that can be far more gross and capacious than physical ones. Only humans squander and hoard, murder and pillage because of notions.

Basically there are two types of animals: animals, and animals that have no brains; they are called plants. They don't need a nervous system because they don't move actively, they don't pull up their roots and run in a forest fire! Anything that moves actively requires a nervous system; otherwise it would come to a quick death.

I have had strange animals as pets all my life. I was shy growing up, and shy people tend to interact better with animals than people. Animals are direct, not duplicitous.

I do not see any reason why animals should be slaughtered to serve as human diet when there are so many substitutes. After all, man can live without meat. It is only some carnivorous animals that have to subsist on flesh. Killing animals for sport, for pleasure, for adventures, and for hides and furs is a phenomenon which is at once disgusting and distressing. There is no justification in indulging in such acts of brutality . . . Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to a man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not to die, so do other creatures.

. . . money . . . is really the difference between men and animals, most of the things men feel, animals feel, and vice versa, but animals do not know about money.

I call animals "guardians of Being," especially animals that live with humans. Because, for many humans, it's through their contact with animals they get in touch with that level of being.

If that hideousness came here, it wouldn't be any more hideous for the animals — they are all bound for a ghastly death anyway. But it would wake up consumers... I openly hope that it comes here. It will bring economic harm only for those who profit from giving people heart attacks and giving animals a concentration camp-like existence. It would be good for animals, good for human health and good for the environment.

We can't change the world for animals without changing our ideas about animals. We have to move from the idea that animals are things, tools, machines, commodities, resources here for our use to the idea that as sentient beings they have their own inherent value and dignity.

The intelligence displayed by many dumb animals approaches so closely to human intelligence that it is a mystery. The animals see and hear and love and fear and suffer. They use their organs far more faithfully than many human beings use theirs. They manifest sympathy and tenderness toward their companions in suffering. Many animals show an affection for those who have charge of them, far superior to the affection shown by some of the human race. They form attachments for man which are not broken without great suffering to them.

So often when you start talking about kindness to animals someone comments that starving and mistreated children should come first. The issue can't be divided like that. It isn't a choice between children and animals. It's our duty to care for both. Kindness is the important thing. Kids and animals are our responsibility.

I don't hold animals superior or even equal to humans. The whole case for behaving decently to animals rests on the fact that we are the superior species. We are the species uniquely capable of imagination, rationality, and moral choice - and that is precisely why we are under an obligation to recognize and respect the rights of animals.

human animals and nonhuman animals can communicate quite well; if we are brought up around animals as children we take this for granted. By the time we are adults we no longer remember.

I have been scientifically studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so-called,) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

In the grand scheme of nature, I believe that it is very natural that animals eat animals, and that humans eat animals. It is only in the last couple of decades that meat-processing factories have come to rise, and I believe we should take time to reflect on that reality.

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.

Women who work with animals hear this all the time: that their love for animals must arise out of a sublimated child-rearing urge. Ana's tired of the stereotype. She likes children just fine, but they're not the standard against which all other accomplishments should be measured. Caring for animals is worthwhile in and of itself, a vocation that need offer no apologies.

I used to turn to nature and animals a lot. And fishing. I spend time still with my Bible and the gospel music, and I still have to feed the animals! But my wife and daughter have brought me a world of perspective when I'm feeling just a little "extra important."

Letting cats and dogs have litters is tantamount to shooting shelter animals in the head since it kills their chances of adoption. Please do the right thing and spay or neuter your animals.

Throughout the late '80s, me and a handful of friends just like you people here, we started to break windows, we started to slash tires, we started to rescue animals from factory farms and vivisection breeders, and we graduated to breaking into laboratories . As long as we emptied the labs of animals, they were still easily replaced. So that's when the ALF in this country, and my cell, started engaging in arson.

From the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at the time. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought.

They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.

In fact, the underlying principle of the baroque is the idea of transformation, of movement, and animals becoming man, and man becoming animals, and mythology. It was a way to inspire pre-Christian character.

I look to nature because I think the animals are smarter than we are. Animals mate; humans date. There's no dating in the animal kingdom. No dinner, no movie - just a quick sniff, 'Alright, let's go.'

Man is unique in that, unlike animals, he knows he is going to die, and unlike animals he can do something about it.

Amusement touched the corner of his lips. "Animals love me." "Oh, I'm sure they do," Scarlet said, beaming with fake encouragement. She shut the door before muttering, "What farm animals don't love a wolf?

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 aren't even considered victims. They aren't even considered at all. They're nothing. They don't count, they don't matter, they're commodities like TV sets and cellphones. We've actually turned animals into inanimate objects - sandwiches and shoes. It is the greatest magic trick ever performed.

To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime.

It is a frequently cited fact that English has two sets of words for farm animals and their corresponding meats. The living animals are expressed with words of Germanic origin-calf (German 'Kalb'), swine (G. 'Schwein'), and ox (G. 'Ochse')-because the servants who guarded them were the conquered Anglo-Saxons. The names of the meats are of Romance origin-veal (French 'veau'), pork (F. 'porc') and beef (F. 'boeuf')-because those who enjoyed them were the conquering Norman masters.

I have a huge passion for animals and while retirement is a long way off, when I do I would love to do something with animals.

Sometimes they'll make little Play-Doh animals, and when they go to sleep, I'll break the heads off the animals and put them at the foot of their beds for them to discover in the morning. Nothing wrong with sending your kids a little Sicilian message.

Learning about factory farms and their horrendous treatment of animals is what made me become vegetarian in the first place. I also support the education of the public on adopting pets from animal shelters or saving homeless animals off the street in lieu of buying them from pet shops.

Young people understand that you don't have to wear or eat animals. I get that it can be cheaper to use animal products - but using animals really cuts corners.

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 best source of grounding are animals and nature. Animals live more in the moment and don't worry so much! And nature is proof of a greater power than myself. Both put things in perspective, or at least gently move us forward.

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

There is no difference between sitting around the pit watching dogs fight and sitting around a summer barbecue roasting the corpses of tortured animals or enjoying the dairy or eggs from tortured animals.

Living with animals can be a wonderful experience, especially if we choose to learn the valuable lessons animals teach through their natural enthusiasm, grace, resourcefulness, affection and forgiveness.

The surprise of animals... in and out, cats and dogs and a milk goat and chickens and guinea hens, all taken for granted, as if man was intended to live on terms of friendly intercourse with the rest of creation instead of huddling in isolation on the fourteenth floor of an apartment house in a city where animals occurred behind bars in the zoo.

...the program of scientific experimentation that leads you to conclude that animals are imbeciles is profoundly anthropocentric. It values being able to find your way out of a sterile maze, ignoring the fact that if the researcher who designed the maze were to be parachuted into the jungles of Borneo, he or she would be dead of starvation in a week...If I as a human being were told that the standards by which animals are being measured in these experiments are human standards, I would be insulted.

Making lasting gifts for animals in our estate plans is perhaps the single most important thing we can do to ensure animals have the strongest possible voice for their protection.

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.

I've just always loved animals. So I've often thought that if I weren't a writer I'd work for some nonprofit organization that does something positive for animals.

Ageing is very rare. We only see it in humans and laboratory animals and in zoo animals and in our pets. Basically, organisms that are protected from the external world. Once you create that protection, you live long enough to see ageing.

Years of cultural programming have taught us to love some animals while eating others, when in all reality, all animals are sentient beings with the capacity to feel, both physically and emotionally.

It is a sobering thought that animals could do without man, yet man would find it almost impossible to do without animals.

As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country. . .Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wouldn't accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering.