Fanatics end by subverting their own argument. For instance, animal rights activists have some point, and many people feel sympathy with them. But animal rights fanatics do not have a point. They are the sort of people who threaten human beings in their effort to ‘defend’ animals.
The only animals I’m not comfortable with are parrots, but I’m learning as I go. I’m getting better and better at ’em. I really am.
The nature of human beings is to eat meat and fruits and vegetables, and therefore we have to kill animals. I don’t have a problem with that. But it’s a sacred moment. It’s a gift of life.
My husband says I like animals more than I like people. I take that as the compliment he means it as.
I love them very much. All animals big and small. You can name an ant for instance.
Animals interest me more than anything else.
I have a passion for animals and spend a lot of my spare time working with various organizations here in Toronto.
It’s been argued that of all the animals humans have domesticated, the horse is the most important to our history. For thousands of years, horses were our most reliable mode of transportation.
Animals praise a good day, a good hunt. They praise rain if they’re thirsty. That’s prayer. They don’t live an unconscious life, they simply have no language to talk about these things. But they are grateful for the good things that come along.
The harming of animals for any reason is shameful, but torturing them for mere vanity is senseless. Slaughtering animals for their fur or harming them for cosmetic purposes is disgusting and not worth the perfect shade of lipstick.
Like most animals, we’re wired to associate height with power.
We shall not be happy unless we live like good animals, unless we enjoy the exercise of the ordinary functions of life: eating, sleeping, loving, walking, running, swimming, riding, sailing.
My mother and dad were big animal lovers, too. I just don’t know how I would have lived without animals around me. I’m fascinated by them – both domestic pets and the wild community. They just are the most interesting things in the world to me, and it’s made such a difference in my lifetime.
I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants.
For me, it always has to be about health. That’s why I’m a vegan. Well, I don’t even do that for my health entirely, I do it for animals.
I laughed when Steven Spielberg said that cloning extinct animals was inevitable. But I’m not laughing anymore, at least about mammoths. This is going to happen. It’s just a matter of working out the details.
I couldn’t imagine a home without animals.
Secondly, the nature of the revolutions which have altered the surface of the earth must have had a more decisive effect on the terrestrial quadrupeds than on the marine animals.
If it is indeed impossible – or at least very difficult – to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.
I remember that. I was talking to him and I said how great it would be if actors had a tail because I have animals and a tail is so expressive. On a cat you can tell everything. You can tell if they’re annoyed. You can tell whether they’re scared.
I’ve been bitten by a python. Not a very big one. I was being silly, saying: ‘Oh, it’s not poisonous…’ Then, wallop! But you have fear around animals.
Stuffed animals are sad and scary; they have humorous and tragic qualities.
I have such a passion because I adore animals so much.
I am a fosterer of animals.
Animals in the wild are lean, and I think we should be too.
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
We have two dogs, Mabel and Wolf, and three cats at home, Charlie, George and Chairman. We have two cats on our farm, Tom and Little Sister, two horses, and two mini horses, Hannah and Tricky. We also have two cows, Holy and Madonna. And those are only the animals we let sleep in our bed.
Working on behalf of companion animals is so important. We start to realize how healing they are.
When I was a kid, I used to imagine animals running under my bed. I told my dad, and he solved the problem quickly. He cut the legs off the bed.
In my movies, there has been little to do in the way of animal rights. I have never worked in a movie with animals. No horse-riding, no trained dogs, lions, bears. A few actors, but what could I do? We had to have them.
As a biologist, I can’t think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.
Sticking wires into the brain is obviously rather crude. It’s hard to do in animals that run around, and there is a physical limit to the number of wires that can be inserted simultaneously.
Horseracing and ranch horses are two different animals. You’re getting race horses out and running and running them. It can be really problematic. A thoroughbred’s very delicate.
What makes us human is that we ask questions. All the animals have interests, instincts and conceptions. All the animals frame for themselves an idea of the world in which they live. But we alone question our surroundings.
Morality, as has often been pointed out, is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals.
Animals play a big part in my life, on tour or at home.
It was wrong to capture wild animals and confine them in captivity for people to go and gawk at them. And that’s basically how zoos got started. But once you do that, and once you have animals that have been bred in captivity, you’re really stuck with them in some sense. You can’t return them to the wild.
As a kid, I loved doing puzzles, solving riddles, and reading mystery books. I also loved animals and always had pets.
I love animals and they’re very easy to look after when they’re dead.
If you’re buying animal products and can go to the farm and actually see how the animals are looked after, yes, that’s an important point. That’s definitely the best way of assuring yourself that the animals are being well treated.
I have no neighbours other than animals and Joshua Trees.
The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law.
When you meet the farmers and go to the farms, you see that they treat their animals like they’re family. It makes a big difference.
When I look back over my life it’s almost as if there was a plan laid out for me – from the little girl who was so passionate about animals who longed to go to Africa and whose family couldn’t afford to put her through college. Everyone laughed at my dreams. I was supposed to be a secretary in Bournemouth.
Some people are uncomfortable with the idea that humans belong to the same class of animals as cats and cows and raccoons. They’re like the people who become successful and then don’t want to be reminded of the old neighborhood.
The greatest form of expression – or, at least, the most common that we have as human beings, what separates us from the animals – is speaking: the ability to communicate.
Art owes its origin to Nature herself… this beautiful creation, the world, supplied the first model, while the original teacher was that divine intelligence which has not only made us superior to the other animals, but like God Himself, if I may venture to say it.
Every literary culture has among its first bearings the ‘blether’ of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.
My mother early on taught us to respect all animals, and I mean all animals – not just cats and dogs but rats and snakes and spiders and fish and wildlife, so I really grew up believing they are just like us and just as deserving of consideration.
Grain that is used to feed animals that end up on our tables as turkeys and hams could have gone to feed starving people.
You shouldn’t say ‘animals’ to distinguish between humans and non-humans. We are all animals.
These are the animals that are the reason why you don’t see old animals in the wild. 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.
Human folk are as a matter of fact eager to find intelligence in animals.
As children, we did not have toys. We invented characters and animals; we invented stories.
In ‘We Were the Mulvaneys,’ animals are almost as important as people. I wanted to show the tenderness in our relationships with cats, dogs, and horses. Especially cats.
Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.
Towns are suffering from all these things, we should unite until we are all satisfied, man cannot be killing each other as if we were animals, as if we had no culture; that is a lack of culture.
In all works on Natural History, we constantly find details of the marvellous adaptation of animals to their food, their habits, and the localities in which they are found.
I don’t have a favorite author; I have favorite books. ‘Moby Dick’ is a favorite book, but Melville was a drunk who beat his wife. ‘Moveable Feast’ by Hemingway, but I would not like him personally. He was a stupid macho person who believed in shooting animals for fun, but that book was incredible!
