#animal

How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul. ↗

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

#communication #frances-hodgson-burnett #language #little-princess #soul

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. ↗

— Temple Grandin

#language #communication

What sets humans apart from animals is that we have to walk around saying how smart we are, and animals just live their lives. ↗

— Chanctetinyea J.J. Ouellette

#communication #intelligence #pseudo-intelligence #wisdom #communication

Bad is that often wildlife trafficking is described as a “victimless” crime. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of the trafficked items come from murdered animals; Rhinoceros Horn, Ivory and Tiger skins; and hundreds of thousands of birds and animals die in transit in the most horrible circumstances imaginable. Just because they cannot communicate with us does not mean they are not victims. They feel, fear and die, just like humans. ↗

— Christopher Gérard

#animals #communication

Last year I built a Courage Machine, but I thought it might be noisy and was too afraid to turn it on. So I coated it with glue, covered it with cat hair, mounted it on my wall, and started claiming it was an exotic animal I killed on a Safari in Africa. I'd like to believe people believe me, on account of it being so strange that it has to be true. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#africa #cat-hair #courage #exotic-animal #fear

If ever you feel like an animal among men, be a lion. ↗

— Criss Jami

#authority #beast #boldness #conquering #courage

Every great day has a story and a song! ↗

— Faith Reese Martin

#courage #fantasy #friendship #historical-fiction #lost-colony

A friend once asked me why it was that stories about animals and their heroism...are so compelling. ...we love them because they're the closest thing we have to material evidence of an objective moral order--or, to put it another way, they're the closest thing we have to proof of the existence of God. They seem to prove that the things that matter to and move us the most--things like love, courage, loyalty, altruism--aren't just ideas we made up from nothing. To see them demonstrated in other animals proves they're real things, that they exist in the world independently of what humans invent and tell each other in the form of myth or fable. ↗

— Gwen Cooper

#courage

Didn't people consider what could happen if armies of farm animals united in revolt? ↗

— J.D. Robb

#farm-animals #humor #revolt #death

In the end, it is our defiance that redeems us. If wolves had a religion – if there was a religion of the wolf – that it is what it would tell us. ↗

— Mark Rowlands

#defiance #heart #inspiring #learning #philosophy