The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and ‘animals’ is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting...

Animals are the bridge between us and the beauty of all that is natural. They show us what’s missing in our lives, and how to love ourselves more completely and unconditionally. They connect us back to who we are, and to the purpose of why we’re here.

A few alligators are naturally of the vicious type and inclined to resent it when you prod them with a stick. You can find out which ones these are by prodding them.

The stork is voiceless because there is really nothing to say.

If the animals in the area were sick and dying, and if they were dying in small numbers, it might have been very difficult to identify that as an outbreak.

The dogs were really keening now, like Irish widows.

If it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck, it could be a really ugly swan.

The forest has shrunkAnd fear has expanded,The forests have dwindled,There are less animals now, less courage and less lightning,less beautyand the moon lies bare,deflowered by force andthen abandoned.

People never like pollution, it has become very wrong to like pollution at all. But just like there are good and bad things about people, there are good and bad things about pollution. If people were pollution we would get rid of anyone who was different, anyone who was considered an inconvenience… but we’d be...

Contemporary writers use animal-transformation themes to explore issues of gender, sexuality, race, culture, and the process of transformation…just as storytellers have done, all over the world, for many centuries past. One distinct change marks modern retellings, however, reflecting our changed relationship to animals and nature. In a society in which most of us will never...

Taken together, the narratives of how the animals ended up at Lowry Park revealed as much about Homo sapiens as they revealed about the animals themselves. The precise details—how and where each was born, how they were separated from their mothers and taken into custody, all they had witnessed and experienced on their way to...

I stepped to the tank’s edge, leaned in, and concentrated on keeping my eyes open. Which fish would be the shooter? The fish were all facing me, but one in particular seemed to be staring directly at my left eye, like a hunter targeting his prey. Wham! The water hit my pupil with such force...

I could hear an old man in the stall next to ours sucking a hustler’s cock; I thought of animals gathering at a salt lick during the night near a cave: carnivore rubbing shoulders with deer.

They’re animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?

The fluttering of a butterfly’s wings can effect climate changes on the other side of the planet

I hate metaphors. That’s why my favorite book is Moby Dick. No frou-frou symbolism. Just a good, simple tale about a man who hates an animal.

If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what’s unique about language isn’t the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What’s unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten.

I think using animals for food is an ethical thing to do, but we’ve got to do it right. We’ve got to give those animals a decent life and we’ve got to give them a painless death. We owe the animal respect.

Mother Nature is our teacher—reconnecting us with Spirit, waking us up and liberating our hearts. When we can transcend our fear of the creatures of the forest, then we become one with all that is; we enter a unity of existence with our relatives—the animals, the plants and the land that sustains us.

Like us, animals feel love, joy, fear and pain, but they cannot grasp the spoken word. It is our obligation to speak on their behalf ensuring their well-being and lives are respected and protected.

If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience.

It is a fact that plants also have life like animals. But animals are endowed with mind, and nervous systems too while the plants do not possess the same.

How could it ever be to our purpose to rob another living being of his or her purpose?

Since the so-called Age of Enlightenment, our shaky anthropocentric, rationalist egos have been brainwashed to forget what ‘primitive’ cultures once understood: Animals can be manifestations of celestial beings in disguise; they possess supernatural abilities, and they can be our spiritual guides and healers.

We were all born to be peaceful citizens of the world. Take care of your global garden and do not allow evil gardeners try to convince you which flowers are ugly and which should be destroyed. This is God’s universe and he is the master gardener of all. If we were to eliminate all colors...

Valuable and ingenious he might be, thought Jack, fixing him with his glass, but false he was too, and perjured. He had voluntarily sworn to have no truck with vampires, and here, attached to his bosom, spread over it and enfolded by one arm, was a greenish hairy thing, like a mat – a loathsome...

Andy once clipped a magazine article about how black dogs are always the last to be adopted at shelters and, therefore, more likely to be put down. Which is totally Dog Racism, if you ask me.

The trouble with cats is that they’ve got no tact.

Favorite Quotations.I speak my mind because it hurts to bite my tongue.The worth of a book is measured by what you carry away from it. It’s not over till it’s over. Imagination is everything. All life is an experiment. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls the butterfly.

Zoos are becoming facsimiles – or perhaps caricatures – of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.

What they discovered was that not only fish, but spiders and many insects can taste their food by the structures that are most likely to first come in contact with the food. And this in many invertebrate species turns out to be the feet.

I spent my summers at my grandparents’ cabin in Estes Park, literally next door to Rocky Mountain National Park. We had a view of Longs Peak across the valley and the giant rock beaver who, my granddad told me, was forever climbing toward the summit of the mountain. We awoke to mule deer peering in...

The sound of animals howling for their owners and the sight of drowning pets will haunt me the rest of my life.

Ad-37 is the third human adenovirus to increase adiposity in animals, but not all adenoviruses produce obesity.

…there was a difference between killing for nourishment and killing for curiosity or sport.

A quick and brutal fuck from behind usually served as an effective reminder of where you stood in the pack hierarchy.

Many people know that animals around the world are treated badly, yet they turn their minds away. To be vegan means to care deeply about how our choices help or harm animals, how we create peace or suffering in the world. Our choices are powerful. Vegan is love.

We have to speak up on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves.

My blood was boiling, which is not a good thing for a coldblood.Dracula was dead. Rex was dying or dead.Breakfast was dying. And I was caring about it all. Meanwhile, that blasted Gunnar did nothing but sit and stare at his teevee all day. He was the reason we were all here, the reason we...

I love animals, and I was always attracted to the idea of being a zoo veterinarian or a veterinarian with the circus.

Anyone who truly wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places. Instead of fleeing to desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will d better to seek out the company of other animals. A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human...

Short men are happy, for they can pass easily through the door. Tall men are happy, for they can stand erect and pluck oranges with their hands. Again, short men are angry, for they cannot stand erect and pluck oranges with their hands. Again, tall men are angry, for they cannot pass easily through the...

This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It’s not as though the rest of us don’t countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason...

For Nature is accustomed to rehearse with certain large, perhaps baser, and all classes of wild (animals), and to place in the imperfect the rudiments of the perfect animals.

It isn’t true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

We used metal sets (as a background). They would use magnets to move the pieces (clouds, trees, clay animals, etc.) for each shot.

Interest and advocacy groups’ response to the purchasing of older animals has been very limited. Now more than ever, we need stewards from the ranching community and other supporters who care about public lands to step up and purchase these horses.

You wouldn’t believe how many of these drivers have animals and how important it is for them to have them. These guys work so hard. They travel every weekend all year, and they all bring their animals.

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...